Disunion Feed

"Ten thousand troops, completely armed with diabolical enginery, deliberately and in cold blood prepared for months past, with all the skill that could be commanded, confronting about three score half starved but brave soldiers under the heroic Anderson. What remarkable chivalry is here! [...] The gallant little garrison may be starved out, they may see the walls of Sumpter reduced to dust by the iron balls and shells of infernal machines [...] but this will be but the first scene of the first act of a drama, which bids fair to become immortal."

The same news, read the opposite way from se-051: an unprovoked attack on a starving garrison, and the beginning rather than the end of the matter. The source spells the fort "Sumpter" throughout — a common period variant, left as printed. Three passages joined with [...].

Read it in the original — Newark Daily Advertiser, Apr 13, 1861 ↗

"Not by one word or look can we detect any change in the demeanor of these negro servants. Lawrence sits at our door, sleepy and respectful, and profoundly indifferent. So are they all, but they carry it too far. You could not tell that they even heard the awful roar going on in the bay, though it has been dinning in their ears night and day. People talk before them as if they were chairs and tables. They make no sign. Are they stolidly stupid? or wiser than we are; silent and strong, biding their time?"

The day after the guns opened, an enslaver in Charleston looks at the people she holds and cannot read them — and half-guesses why. Every question in this feed since 1856 is in that last sentence, asked by someone who will not answer it. "Negro" is the source's word and period usage. One contiguous passage, no splice. Same 1905-edition caveat as se-049: revised in the 1880s from the 1861 journals.

Read it in the original — Diary entry, Apr 13, 1861 ↗