Disunion Feed

"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 ↗

"There is but one way to get along with the question, and that is to exclude both the Wilmot proviso and the Missouri compromise from all territorial bills. [...] We trust there will be found majorities in both houses of Congress who will promptly, and without debate, vote down all propositions, as connected with these territorial bills, relating to slavery."

Printed the same day as the Tribune card beside it, and the contrast is the point: a Northern Democratic paper treats the coming bill as a routine piece of territorial housekeeping, and its proposed remedy is silence — vote the slavery question down without debate. The Missouri Compromise is named here as one of two things to be excluded, not as a settlement to be defended.

Read it in the original — Furman Secession Era Editorials transcription ↗

"An overt attempt is set on foot in Mr. Douglas's Nebraska bill to override the Missouri Compromise. [...] This plain and unequivocal declaration that neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall ever exist in our North-west Territories is unceremoniously hustled aside by Mr. Douglas, who makes the Compromise measures of 1850 the scape-goat for his sin in doing it."

Same day as the Detroit Free Press card. The Tribune has already read the bill closely enough to quote the eighth section of the Missouri act back at Douglas, and to identify the mechanism — that the Compromise of 1850 is being used as the instrument of repeal. The word "overt" is doing work: the paper is claiming this is not an accident of drafting.

Read it in the original — Furman Secession Era Editorials transcription ↗