The Southern States are uneasy at the prospect of [Abraham] Lincoln's election today. The ultra South threatens disunion, and it n...ow looks as if South Carolina and possibly two or three others would go out of the Union. Will they? And if so, what is to be the result? Will other slave States gradually be drawn after them, or will the conservative States draw back into the Union or hold in the Union the ultra States? I think the latter. But at all events, I feel as if the time had come to test this question. If the threats are meant, then it is time the Union was dissolved or the traitors crushed out. I hope Lincoln goes in.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Disunion and civil war are at hand; and yet I fear disunion and war less than compromise. We can recover from them. The free State...s alone, if we must go on alone, will make a glorious nation. Twenty millions in the temperate zone, stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific, full of vigor, industry, inventive genius, educated, and moral; increasing by immigration rapidly, and, above all, free--all free--will form a confederacy of twenty States scarcely inferior in real power to the unfortunate Union of thirty-three States which we had on the first of November.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »