Some Northern reactions to secession

Georgia Sixth

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Just read this over the weekend and want to share it. From "The Civil War: An American Illiad", a book that attempts to tell the story of the war using the actual words of participants and observers of the time.

This excerpt is from the reaction of the northern states to South Carolina's move to secede:

Influential Northern journals had foreseen the secession of South Carolina, and were in sympathy with it. Three days after Lincoln's election, Horace Greeley's New York Tribune had declared that it held with Jefferson to the inalienable right of countries to allow or abolish governments that had become oppressive. It then went on:

"If the Cotton States shall decide that they can do better out of the Union, we insist on letting them go in peace. The right to secede may be a revolutionary right, but it exists, nevertheless."

On December 17, Greeley enlarged on this statement.

"If the Declaration of Independence justified the secession of three millions of colonists in 1776, we do not see why it should not justify the secession of five millions of southerners in 1861."

The independent New York Herald agreed.

"Each State is organized as a complete government, possessing the right to break the tie of the Confederation. Coercion, if it were possible, is out of the question."

The Albany Argus, organ of Thurlow Weed, a prominent Republican editor and politician, leaned still further toward the Southern point of view.

"We sympathize with the South. Their rights have been invaded to the extreme limit possible within the forms of the Constitution; their feelings have been insulted, their interests and honor assailed by almost every form of invective. We think that all the instincts of manhood rightfully impelled them to resort to a separation from the Union. We wish them Godspeed in the adoption of such a remedy."
 
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