Editorials: The Presidential Canvass-The Real Peril to the Union; Mr. Douglas on Slave Property; The Disunion Bugaboo (7/25/1860)

The political contest is assuming a curious shape. The shattered condition of the Democratic Party has destroyed everything like an organized opposition to the Republicans, based upon principle, and converted the whole campaign into a desperate struggle not to get into power themselves, but to keep their opponents out. The highest ambition of the motley Anti-Republican host just now, is to play the dog in the manger. Not a solitary man among them believes that either DOUGLAS, BELL or BRECKINRIDGE can possibly be elected President by the people. Everybody surrenders this expectation. But they all have a lingering hope that, by uniting their forces, they may possibly prevent any election at all; and the great aim of each faction just now is, not to vindicate its own position, -- not to justify its own principles and policy, -- but to hit upon some expedient by which they can slur over their differences and unite their votes, so as to defeat the election of a President.

Free Republic University, Department of History presents U.S. History, 1855-1860: Seminar and Discussion Forum
Bleeding Kansas, Dred Scott, Lincoln-Douglas, Harper’s Ferry, the election of 1860, secession – all the events leading up to the Civil War, as seen through news reports of the time and later historical accounts

First session: November 21, 2015. Last date to add: Sometime in the future.
Reading: Self-assigned. Recommendations made and welcomed.

Posting history, in reverse order

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Link to previous New York Times thread

Daily Intelligencer, Wheeling, Va. [W. VA.], July 25, 1860, Column 3. Italics as in the newspaper, paragraph breaks mine for readability.

An Arnold-Burr Document! -- The celebrated letter of Mr. Yancey, the principal engineer of the bolting movement, to Mr. Slaughter, of Alabama, is worth keeping before the people, at this juncture:

Montgomery, June 15.

Dear Sir: -- Your kind favor of the 13th is received, I hardly agree with you that a general movement can be made that will clear out the Augean stable. If the Democracy were overthrown, it would result in giving place to a greater and hungrier swarm of flies.

The remedy of the South is not in such a process; it is in a diligent organization of her true men for prompt resistance to the next aggression. It must come in the nature of things. No national party can save us; no sectional party can ever do it: but if we could do as our fathers did, organize committees of safety all over the cotton States, and it is only in them that we can hope for an effective movement -- we shall fire the Southern heart, instruct the Southern mind, give courage to each other, and at the proper moment, by one organized, concerted action, we can precipitate the cotton States into a revolution.

The idea has been shadowed forth in the South by Mr. Ruffin, and has been taken up and recommended in the Advertiser (the Montgomery organ of Mr. Yancey) under the name of "The League of United Southerners, who, keeping up their old party relations on all other questions, will hold the Southern issues paramount, and will influence parties, Legislatures and statesmen. I have no time to enlarge, but to suggest merely.

[Signed] W. L. Yancey. To Jas. S. Slaughter.

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