NEWS OF 150 YEARS AGO
September/October 1860
From The Missouri Democrat, Friday, October 5, 1860.
Union or Disunion.
The Bulletin complains that we are stigmatising [sic] some of the leading Democrats of the South as secessionists. We are glad to learn from our contemporary that it considers the epithet secessionist a stigma. This shows the right spirit; it is politic too, for no party in this State which commits itself in any degree to disunion can hold its ground. Yet the Bulletin is not as explicit as we could wish. It tells us that the election of Lincoln would be the commencement of a crisis fatal to our national peace. What we want to know is,–will the Breckinridge Democracy of Missouri participate in the threatened or predicted disturbances of the national peace if Lincoln is elected? Will the Bulletin advocate Disunion in that event? We do not think it will, but yet it would be satisfactory to have the avowal from itself. Few will confound the Breckinridge Democracy of Missouri with the Democracy of the Cotton States, for in any contigency our interests would impose a policy on the State very different from that which the Gulf States might adopt. But evil communications, they say, corrupt good manners, and a censorious world judges people by the company they keep. Therefore, with the view of showing to the whole nation that every party in Missouri is loyal to the Union, and not for the purpose of embarrassing our contemporary, do we propound the foregoing question. We anticipate an emphatic answer in the negative.
