Disunion Feed

"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.

Read it in the original — The Liberator, Jan 18, 1861 ↗

Next post: Wendell Phillips, Jan 20, 1861 →

"in one night the whole fabric will tumble to pieces. Disunion is abolition! That is all the value disunion has for me. I care little for forms of government, or extent of territory; whether ten States or thirty make up the Union. No foreign State dare touch us, united or disunited. [...] The music of disunion to me is, that at its touch, the slave breaks into voice, shouting his jubilee."

As the Deep South leaves, Phillips tells four thousand people in Boston's Music Hall that this is deliverance: disunion IS abolition, because slavery leans on Northern bayonets and the fugitive-slave law to survive — cut the South loose and it falls. The exact inverse of the fear driving the Northern compromise (se-022). The first of two Music Hall discourses in the pamphlet (this one Jan 20; the second, Feb 17, is out of this window). Verified against the archive.org scan; [...] joins passages within the one discourse.

Read it in the original — "Disunion," Music Hall, Jan 20, 1861 ↗