Disunion Triumphant In St. Louis—The Prospect Ahead
Springfield
Daily Illinois State Journal, April 3, 1861)
We are grieved to announce that the disunion ticket has achieved a signal
triumph at the St. Louis charter election. That city, which heretofore has
borne off the palm for its uncompromising devotion to the Union and the principles
of the Republican party, now trails the Star Spangled Banner in the dust,
and proclaims to the world its sympathy and fellowship with the traitors of
the cotton States. Only the opportunity is wanting to make the disloyalty
and treasonable schemes of St. Louis plain and manifest to all. We shall not
be surprised at the present progress of events, if Missouri, in less than
six months, is clean out of the Union, and joined to the cotton Confederacy
of Jeff Davis. Matters seem rapidly tending to this conclusion. Not because
the State of Missouri has any just complaint to make at the treatment she
has received at the hands of the General Government. Not because she has been
injured or wronged in the least, by the action of the Federal authorities,
or by any of her sister States. In all her gabble about “conditions”
to her longer stay in the Union, nothing of this has been suggested. Indeed,
that State, so far from having suffered wrongs, is indebted to the Federal
Government for all she is and all she possesses. And St. Louis, which now
votes in favor of a disunion ticket, owes a full share of her present greatness
to the trade she has so freely enjoyed with the people of the free States
of Illinois and Iowa. But a mania, a madness has seized upon the Southern
mind, and we see whole States, for the mere matter of mistaken pride and a
bad spirit which refuses to acquiesce in the will of the majority, busily
engaged in destroying the common inheritance of our fathers, and blotting
out the hallowed memories which cluster around us as a great nation. We had
supposed there was yet leaven enough remaining in the border slave States
to preserve the country from the calamity which Jeff. Davis and his fellow
traitors have been threatening. We had indulged in the hope that there was
in the Southern heart a stern and unflinching patriotism, which would yet
make itself understood and felt all through the disaffected States. But it
seems we were mistaken. The election at St. Louis, where we had most reason
to place implicit confidence, proves that there is no longer the least love
in any of the Southern States for the Union, and that the mad counsels of
secession and revolt now have full and uninterrupted sway all through the
South. Be it so. If the authority of the Government is to be thus spit upon
and outraged, and no move is to be made to vindicate the supremacy of the
Constitution and the laws; if even those who call themselves Union men at
the South are to turn traitors and rise up in arms, should the Administration
take a single step towards preserving the integrity of that Union,—as
much as we regret the alternative, the sooner we cut loose from the disaffected
States, the better it may be for all parties and for the nation. Our self-respect
and honor will thus remain uninjured and unsullied; and the disgrace of destroying
the best Government upon the earth will fall, where it belongs, alone upon
the people of the Southern States. The material or political interests of
the North, we are sure, will not be injured by the sad and wholly unjustifiable
separation. The South, we are equally certain, will not be better off or happier,
however much bad men may now persuade them to believe otherwise.
