Disunion Feed

"At a single blow it shatters and destroys the platform of the Republican party. It annihilates the issue which was made paramount in the recent Presidential election, and takes away from the Democratic party all the advantages of its advocacy of popular sovereignty in the Territories. It leaves both of these great parties all abroad, without a single plank of their late platforms upon which to rest."

George D. Prentice's Journal was the leading Whig-then-American paper of the border South, and the only voice in this feed to see at once that the decision wrecked both parties rather than one. It was right: the Democratic split it predicts arrived in 1860 and put Lincoln in the White House.

Read it in the original — Louisville Journal, Mar 16, 1857 ↗

"Politically, the entire North lies prostrate at the foot-stool of slavery. [...] all efforts of the States to resist his power are declared politically null and void by the Supreme-Court of the United States. Will Massachusetts, will the North submit? [...] The Union formed in 1787 is dissolved. The South has done it. Would that the North had possessed manhood enough to have done the glorious deed! But it is done, thank God! no matter whether by Border Ruffians, Bully Brooks, or Chief Justice Taney."

Ten days after the ruling, a letter to Garrison's paper under the heading "Will the North Submit?" "His power" is slavery's: Wright reads the decision as voiding every State's defence against it. Like Garrison, whose paper printed "No Union with Slaveholders" at the head of its editorial page, Wright wanted the free States out of the Union; he names the decision beside the Kansas border raiders and Preston Brooks, who caned Senator Sumner in 1856, as one more blow that ended it. Text from the archive.org scan; the issue OCR is rough, but these runs were string-verified, and "Supreme-Court" is spelled as in that copy.

Read it in the original — The Liberator, Mar 27, 1857 ↗