Disunion Feed

"If any one can read the speeches which Mr. Lincoln has made on his recent trip to Washington City without a feeling of intense disgust, we envy him not his disposition. [...] Instead of rising to the dignity of a President, he has fallen to the level of a stump orator, addressing, for temporary effect, a miscellaneous assemblage of the populace. [...] Compare the Indianapolis speech of Lincoln with the inaugural address of President Davis, and how great the contrast! [...] In nothing is the difference between Northern and Southern sentiment and morality better illustrated than in these two addresses."

The Deep-South fire-eater press reading the two presidents side by side, three days after Davis's inaugural — it explicitly asks the reader to "compare the Indianapolis speech of Lincoln with the inaugural address of President Davis" (se-035). Lincoln is not yet in office; he is on the inaugural train, and the Crescent's charge is that he is undignified and does not understand state sovereignty. Non-contiguous sentences from the one editorial joined with [...].

Read it in the original — Daily Crescent, Feb 21, 1861 ↗

"The Cotton States having now formally seceded, and set up a separate and Independent Government for themselves, the idea of Reconstruction is beginning to be the rallying cry of many at the North who have done their utmost in cheering on the rebels and traitors in their work of demolishing the present Government. [...] We are, therefore, now in danger of having an open palpable Covenant with Death, and Agreement with Hell. [...] The Union has fallen apart, and must be again cemented with the slave's blood!"

Douglass takes the Montgomery government as an accomplished fact and turns to the danger he thinks larger: that the North will buy the South back by writing slavery deeper into the Constitution. "A Covenant with Death and an Agreement with Hell" is Garrison's formula for the existing Constitution (from Isaiah 28); Douglass's point is that reconstruction would make it explicit. Written before the inaugural — the March issue predates March 4, so there is no in-window Douglass response to Lincoln's speech; his came in the April issue, outside this chapter. Non-contiguous passages from the one editorial joined with [...]. OCR fixes: "Cove-nant" line-wrap rejoined; "Axreement with Fell" read as "Agreement with Hell" (Garrison's standing formula, so the reading is secure); "bas" read as "has."

Read it in the original — Douglass' Monthly, Mar 1861 ↗