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The "Irrepressible Conflict" -- Fruits of the Lincoln-Seward Doctrine.
Springfield, Illinois, State Register [Democratic]
(20 October 1859)
The telegraphic dispatches yesterday morning startled the public
with an account of one of the most monstrous villainies
ever attempted in this country. It was no less than an
effort on the part of a party of abolitionists
and negroes to take possession of one of the national arsenals,
at Harper's Ferry, with the military stores
and the public money there deposited. Under the lead of
the most infamous of the Kansas crew of
black republican marauders, Ossawatomie Brown,
the insurgents, to the number of five or six hundred, attacked and
took possession of the whole town of Harper's Ferry,
including the government buildings and stores, stopped the mails,
imprisoned peaceable citizens, and, before they were dislodged,
numbers were killed and wounded on both sides.
It was scarcely credible, when the first dispatch was received
yesterday, that the object of the ruffians could be other than
plunder, but late dispatches, including those we publish this
morning, show, conclusively, that the movement was a most
extensive one, having for its object the uprising of the negroes
throughout the south, a servile war, and its
consequences - murder, rapine and robbery.
The leader chosen was just the man to initiate the work.
Bankrupt in fortune and character, an outlaw and an outcast,
he was just the man to commence the work which ultra Abolitionism,
through its diligent Parkers and
Garrisons, hope to reach the millenium of their traitorous
designs. Their open-mouthed treason, which culminates in precisely
such outrages as that at Harper's Ferry,
is but the logical sequence of the teachings of Wm. >H. Seward
and Abraham Lincoln -- the one boldly proclaiming an
"irrepressible conflict" between certain states of the Union,
because of their local institutions, and the other declaring from
stump and hustings, the country round, that the Union
cannot continue as the fathers made it - part slave and part free
states. When such men, by specious demagogism, in the name of
freedom and liberty, daily labor to weaken the bonds of our glorious
governmental fabric, the work of sages and patriots, themselves
the holders of black men as slaves, is it to be wondered at that
ignorant, unprincipled and reckless camp followers of the party
for which these leaders speak, attempt, practically, to illustrate
the doctrines which they preach, and in advocacy of which they
seek to obtain control of the national government.
Brown, though a blood-stained ruffian, is a
bold man. As a black republican he practices
what his leaders preach. As it is urged by statesmen (save the mark!)
of his party that there is an "irrepressible conflict," he wants it
in tangible, material, shape. He believes in blows, not words,
and the Harper's Ferry villainy is the first in his
line of performance.
Who is so blind as not to see the inevitable tendency of
black republican teaching? Now we have a bloody,
glaring, ghastly fact before us. The "conflict" by blows has
commenced. The proofs of an extensive and ramified organization is
disclosed, the object of which is to stir the southern slaves to
bathe their hands in the blood of the whites of the
south. Traitorous scoundrels, with
white faces, but black hearts, lead them, and the country is
stunned with their deeds of infamy, treason and blood.
Such is the ripening of the black republican harvest.
Can an intelligent people doubt that to such ends the maudlin
philanthropy, the hypocritical cant, the blatant demagogism,
of black republicanism, tends? "By their fruits
shall ye know them." Disunion and bloody anarchy.
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