Disunion Feed

"Your abandonment of the Federal forts on the coast of South Carolina, to the mercy of a Charleston mob, and your persistence in that policy, place you in the category of the rebels against the just and lawful authority of the United States, of whose Executive power, you are the sworn defender."

A letter to the sitting President, which the archive credits to the Baltimore Patriot, reprinted in Chambersburg by the Franklin Repository, A.K. McClure's Republican paper (se-002): leaving the Charleston forts to a mob puts Buchanan himself among the rebels against the authority he is sworn to defend. The opposite of the Herald's no-coercion doctrine (se-015). The Valley of the Shadow archive marks the piece "Origin of Article: Baltimore Patriot"; it does not record who wrote the letter or when the Patriot ran it, so the date shown is the Repository's. The archive transcribes this sentence of the letter and links to newspaper page images.

Read it in the original — Franklin Repository, December 26, 1860 ↗

Next post: William Lloyd Garrison, Dec 28, 1860 →

"Fortunately for us, the precipitation of South Carolina has produced a pause in our movements [...] The one cause of their disturbance is, that their "peculiar institution" of negro slavery is growing less and less secure, and that they see more and more reason to believe that they can neither extend it nor perpetuate it! Is this a reason for us to be alarmed? Is it not, on the contrary, the best news, with one exception, that could possibly come to our ears?"

Garrison — who had long wanted the free North out of "the Union with slaveholders" — reads South Carolina's exit as vindication, not alarm: the slaveholders panic because slavery "is growing less and less secure," which is "the best news, with one exception, that could possibly come to our ears." Written against a conservative Boston address urging Massachusetts to make concessions to save the Union. "Negro" is the period term, not a redaction. Text from the archive.org scan of the issue; its OCR is rough (column-interleaved) but each quoted sentence was string-verified.

Read it in the original — The Liberator, Dec 28, 1860 ↗