Disunion Feed

"There is this difference between the Northern and Southern States, which illustrates the exact nature of the quarrel between the two sections: That, while the Southern States, in the Union, would have interposed no objection to the secession of any Northern State, the Northern States, on the other hand, are thrown into a perfect paroxysm of rage at the mere whisper of an intention to secede, on the part of any State of the South. [...] They know that the South is the main prop and support of the Federal system. They know that it is Southern productions that constitute the surplus wealth of the nation, and enables us to import so largely from foreign countries."

New Orleans's fire-eater daily makes the Deep-South PRESS case for the cascade on economic rather than constitutional grounds: the North rages at Southern secession because it needs the section it professes to despise — the South is "the main prop and support of the Federal system." The mirror image of Greeley's "letting them go in peace" (ch1 se-002): the Crescent claims the South would gladly let the North secede. Two paragraphs joined with [...]. The "barbaric" line it rebuts midway is Sumner's, from the Senate (the caning event). This is the one in-window Deep-South newspaper editorial available for the cascade — the Southern side of these weeks is otherwise carried here by convention and declaration voices. Fetched from the AHA "Sixteen Months to Sumter" archive.

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

"The people of Georgia having dissolved their political connection with the Government of the United States of America, present to their confederates and the world the causes which have led to the separation. For the last ten years we have had numerous and serious causes of complaint against our non-slave-holding confederate States with reference to the subject of African slavery. [...] because by their declared principles and policy they have outlawed $3,000,000,000 of our property in the common territories of the Union."

Georgia — the largest cotton state, where Alexander Stephens had pleaded against secession only weeks before — leaves and puts a figure on it: three billion dollars of human 'property' the Republicans would bar from the territories. Like Mississippi's and Texas's, the grievance is named without evasion: African slavery. Non-contiguous sentences joined with [...]; verified against the Yale Avalon Project.

Read it in the original — Georgia Declaration of Causes, Jan 29, 1861 ↗