Disunion Feed

"We are decidedly in favor of a united South. [...] No single State could possibly long maintain an independent existence without grinding her citizens to the earth by a weight of intolerable taxation. [...] The Southern States which secede must come together under a confederated government. Hence the question of co-operation and concert of action among the several slaveholding commonwealths scarcely admits of discussion. None oppose it, at the proper time and in the proper manner."

The immediatist answer to the cooperationists (who urged the South move only in concert, not by separate-state secession): concede that a united South is essential — but as a Confederacy built AFTER secession, not as a brake on it. Reframes "wait for a convention" (cf. chapter 1's Nashville, se-007) into a post-secession Montgomery convention. Via the AHA "Sixteen Months."

Read it in the original — New Orleans Bee, Dec 24, 1860 ↗

"While maintaining, what is undeniable, that no power to coerce a State is delegated by the constitution to either the President or to Congress, it has as strenuously asserted that individual delinquents may, if expedient, be reached and punished by the strong arm of the central government, through its federal courts. The attempt to coerce a State by military force would, as declared by Mr. Madison, be an act of war—a virtual recognition of its separate independence, and tantamount to a dissolution of the Union. Such an act of folly will never be committed by Mr. Buchanan."

The Herald (Bennett), the North's largest Democratic daily, states the coercion doctrine that governed the paralyzed final weeks of the Buchanan administration: the Constitution grants no power to force a State back, and the attempt would be war. Two days later a Pennsylvania Republican paper reprinted a Baltimore letter telling Buchanan that abandoning the Charleston forts made him one of the rebels (se-017). Via the AHA "Sixteen Months."

Read it in the original — New York Herald, Dec 24, 1860 ↗