Here is my third and final post on local reaction to the Kansas-Nebraska Act, as the Cincinnati Enquirer critiques the opinions of two newspapers with which it did not agree. This is from May 25, 1854.
THE GROANS OF THE WOUNDED - THE HOWLS OF ABOLITION WHIGGERY
"It is amusing to read the abolition Whig organs just at the present time, on account of their terrible howling over the passage of the Nebraska Bill in the House of Representatives. We expected that all the adherents of political "niggerdom" would give a shriek of impotent rage, and are not disappointed in the result. Here the groans of the Gazette, (i.e. the Cincinnati Gazette), which exclaims:
"The deed is done. The House of Representatives has repealed the Missouri Compromise. The work of the fathers is repudiated by the sons. The South again triumphs, through the treachery and meanness of the North. We have not words to express our contempt for the mean men which the North has sent to represent them in the U.S.Congress. They have sold us for less than a mess of pottage - for less than thirty pounds of silver.”
****
“The North has always been betrayed by the North, enough of our Representatives and Senators have always been bought up or frightened to permit the South to do as they pleased; to annex Territory, to dragoon Congress, to nominate Presidents, to rule the country. The only fair division of power the North ever obtained, was the Missouri Compromise, and that after thirty years of acquiescence she has been swindled out of, and swindled too by Northern votes, bought up by a Northern President, by the bribes and gewgaws of office.”
The "only fair division of power" which the Gazette speaks of, was more fiercely denounced at the time of its passage at the North, than is the Nebraska Bill at the present day.
But the above ebullition of abolition wrath and indignation, senseless and untrue as it is, is mild and logical compared to what the other more ultra organ, the Commercial (also of Cincinnati) says on the same subject. The following extract which we take from that paper, reads like the ravings of a lunatic just out of bedlam.
“The Nebraska Bill has passed, and it is demonstrated to the people of the United States that a chief magistrate, without character, with only modest talents, without personal influence, or that individual force which tried statesmanship confers - with, in fact, nothing but the power to purchase and the ability to bribe, can invent a scheme, engraft it upon his party as a principle, and in the form of a measure carry it through the national legislature, in spite of the plighted faith of the Government, and the common sense of the people. In other words, the government of this Union is that of one man, none the less absolute because his tools are traitors instead of slaves, and all the more dangerous because it hides the ugliness of the despot under the decent cloak of republicanism. The thing is done, and the people know how it was done. Resistance, if it has been of no other avail, has served to unmask the machinery, and to show to all observers the intense corruption, venality and subserviency, which, under constitutional frame, and in the name of a Congress, burrows and rankles at the seat of government. In the name of Heaven, what bulwark of human liberty is next to be mined and demolished.”
It is useless to comment upon the infamous libels upon our people, their Chief Magistrate and Government, contained in the above, for they are so outrageous and vile as to render it unnecessary. That creature is to be pitied who can coolly and deliberately sit down and pen untruths at once so villainous and absurd, in relation to our political institutions. A stranger in our country, unacquainted with the character of the measure so fiercely denounced, would suppose that some terrible outrage upon liberty and justice had been perpetrated by the House of Representatives, and would little suppose that instead of such being the case, a law only had been passed, organizing territories, and giving the people who are to settle them the right which all other American States have, that of regulating their own local and domestic concerns themselves. That measure, and that only, is what has called forth the passionate invective in the Gazette, and the lying untruths in the Commercial.
No comments:
Post a Comment