WRITINGS OF 5AM HOUSTON, 1860
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papers and in their resolutions, that if Mr. Lincoln is elected the Union is to be dissolved. Here is a constitutional party that intends to violate the Constitution because a man is constitu- tionally elected President. Here is a constitutional party that proclaims it treasonable for a man to uphold the Constitution. If the people constitutionally elect a President, is the minority to resist him? Do they intend to carry that principle into their new Southern Confederacy? If they do, we can readily conceive how long it will last. They deem it patriotism now to overturn the Government. Let them succeed, and in that class of patriots they will be able to outrival Mexico. But who are the teachers of this new fangled Southern con- stitutional Democracy? Are they not men like Yancey and Wigfall, who have been always regarded as beyond the pale of national Democracy? Transplants from the South Carolina nursery of disunion. Whenever and wherever the spirit of nullification and disunion has shown itself, they and their co- adjutors have been found zealously at work. They have peen defeated time and again; but like men who have a purpose, they have not ceased their efforts. No sacrifice of pride or dignity has been deemed too great if it assisted in the great purpose of disunion. What if they assailed the Compromise of 1850. They indorsed it in the platform of 1852. From nonintervention they turn to intervention! From the peculiar advocates of State Rights, denying the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court, they become the advocates of the Supreme Court as an arbiter, and shout for the Dred Scott decision. Anything but disunion! They can as readily dissolve the Union upon one issue as another. At the Nashville Convention they determined to dissolve it unless the Missouri Compromise line was extended to the Pacific. In 1854 they deemed the existence of this line a cause of separation, and demanded its repeal. The admission of Kansas was the next ultimatum, and now it is the election of Mr. Lincoln. Should they fail, it will then be the adoption of the Slave Code and the repeal of the laws making the Slave Trade piracy. These men of convenient politics intend to hang the peaceable and law-loving citizens of the country if they take office under Lincoln. You are to have no postmasters, no mails, no protection from the United States army, no officers of the Government in your midst, for fear of these Southern constitutional Democrats. One of them, Col. Wigfall, your illustrious Senator, said upon the northern line of Virginia some time since, that if Lincoln
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