Disunion Feed

"While we can see no cause for present alarm, none can blind their eyes to the audacity of the attempt, or fail to regard it as a pregnant sign of the times--a prelude to what must and will recur again and again, as the progress of sectional hate and Black Republican success advances to their consummation."

The South's leading fire-eater organ (the Rhetts' paper), one day after the raid's suppression: not an isolated crime but a prelude proving coexistence with the North untenable.

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

"Believing that the way to Universal Emancipation lies not through insurrection, civil war and bloodshed, but through peace, discussion, and the quiet diffusion of sentiments of humanity and justice, we deeply regret this outbreak; but remembering that, if their fault was grievous, grievously have they answered it, we will not, by one reproachful word, disturb the bloody shrouds wherein John Brown and his compatriots are sleeping. They dared and died for what they felt to be the right, though in a manner which seems to us fatally wrong."

Greeley's famous sympathetic-but-distancing first word — 'fatally wrong' yet not one reproachful word against the dead — the split posture the Democratic press attacked from both sides. Cross-checked against the LoC page scan (sn83030213, Oct 19, p. 4).

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