April 2, 1861; The Harrisburg Telegraph, Pennsylvania
“There is scarcely an individual or an interest in any community throughout what is left of the Union and that portion which has placed itself in belligerent attitude to the prestige and power of the government, but what feels and is affected by the awful crisis which has prostrated the energies and divided the sympathies of the American people. As well feel it now, and as we are now arrested in our development and progress, the whole civilised world must sooner or later come within the influences of the raid which now seeks to plunge this hemisphere into civil war of the most unrelenting and bloody consequences. Those who have provoked the strife are those who seek to transfer its responsibility to the people, because they have, in the exercise of their rights and judgments, elevated to power men of tried moral worth and patriotic incentives. The triumph of the Republican party is made the excuse for the treason at the South by the men at the North who have lost an ally in every Southern traitor – while the leaders of the revolution themselves boldly declare that the election of Abraham Lincoln has nothing to do with their usurpation or their felonies. They claim the right of revolution and they have exercised such a right. On this claim they rest the justification of their acts, and by their success they illustrate either their own promises and power, or the instability and inefficiency of the Constitution and laws of the land. Since 1833 the secession movement of the South has been gaining strength with every successive triumph of the Democratic Party, until it has culminated in the success of its leaders so far as they have been able to entrench themselves behind their defiance of the legitimate government of the country. The idea that the treason of Jeff Davis was induced by present causes is as foolish as the assertion that South Carolina went out of the Union to vindicate a right or redress any real wrong. The actual motive of both was revenge. The true cause of the secession movements, the disappointment of those who have instigated it, in maintaining their positions in power, and covering up the corruptions which have disgraced their rule from the hour they gained possession of the government. The enormity of these corruptions has to often startled the nation to be repeated by us – and as there is a God to punish the crimes and the excesses of nations as well as men, we need to be surprised that he has suffered the American people to go astray in their pursuits of peace and prosperity. The corruption of our government has indeed become unparalleled in history or experience. From secret fraud to open bribery, we have arrived at the dreadful vortex of disunion, in which are concealed civil war, social extinction and national extermination.
This crisis was bequeathed to the administration of Abraham Lincoln by that which has preceded him. It is now made the pretext for the most vile attacks on the Republican party. The Democratic press first seek to excuse secession by inventing plans for its defence, and then demand that Mr. Lincoln should at once bring the troubles to a termination. They point to the felony of Twiggs and the perjury of Wigfall not as crimes, but as the evidences of unpopularity of the Republican party and the inability of a Republican administration to maintain and vindicate the laws. With such arguments, the workingmen of the North are sought to be seduced from their adherence to principle, and again induced to support the old measures and corrupt men of the Democratic party. If it asserted that the laws are be enforced, at once the cry of coercion is proclaimed – and when humanity would seem to dictate the evacuation of a fort, a howl is raised that the government is being forced from its position, and that `the Republican party has been compelled to back down.’ Let us not mistake these counter attitudes and variable declarations of the Democratic press of the whole country. They not only illustrate the inconsistency of those engaged in them, but it will shortly be proved by the action of these very men that they were as much accessories before the denoument of treason, as they have been aiders and abettors since it has achieved a sort of defiant success. This must be so, because the laws cannot much longer remain unvindicated and we as a government expect to preserve our position before the nations of the world. And when the blow is struck for the right, and the administration of Abraham Lincoln wields the power conferred upon it by the Constitution for the preservation of the Union, the opposition with which it will be compelled to contend will not alone be the secessionists at the South, but the hordes of removed Democratic officials and traitors at the North, who, with the loss of office, have sacrificed all love of country, and are now sworn and ready to increase the strength of slavery at the South, as well as destroy every vestige of civil and religious liberty at the North. If this is not to be the result of the present crisis, in case secession should succeed and revolution be acknowledged as the common right of those who choose to object to both statue and common law, then we have mistaken the objects of the Democratic press and the tendencies of Democratic leaders for the last four years.”