Look at the present state of the country! The old Union breaking up daily, its columns falling in every direction — four Southern States already out of it, and all the others busily and openly preparing to follow.
Original passage & context
"Look at the present state of the country! The old Union breaking up daily, its columns falling in every direction—four Southern States already out of it, and all the others busily and openly preparing to follow—"
Garrison counts the cascade in real time — 'four Southern States already out': South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, as of January 18, with Georgia, Louisiana and Texas still to come. To the man who had publicly burned the Constitution as 'a covenant with death,' the Union's collapse was not the catastrophe the compromise-seekers feared. Text from the archive.org scan; the issue OCR is rough (column-interleaved) but this contiguous run was string-verified.