Pomeroy weekly telegraph. [volume] (Pomeroy, Meigs County, Ohio) 1860-1866, 1861-01-25


country is justly alarmed. The unity
of the Government is denied. Doctrines
subversiye of its existence are boldly
advocated and made the basis of State
action. Under the pretended right Of :
State to secede from The Confederacy at
its pleasure, in peac, or war, constitu-
tional liberty is imperilled, revolution is
meditated, and treason is justified.
We may well pause to inquire, why
these discontents, these hostile demon
strations against the Federal Govern
meut
Ambitious men in Republics who End
their aims thwarted By the regular and
peaceful workings Of government, always
seek pretexts to disturb its easy progress,
however prosperous. Party, sectional,
personal pref udices, the growth of diver
sities in local institutions, habits, and
pursuits, are seized upon by such men TO
create hostilities between the various
classes of country, strongly united by
common interests, but whose union gives
them grandeur too imposing to be
grasped by malcontents who, without
merit to reach the highest authority ii
great Commonwealth, would reduce it
to fragments to become masters in part.
Such conspira tors never disclose the So
cret motives Of their discomfort, but fab.
ricate pretenses for dissatisfaction among
the masses they would move, by appeals
to their pride, their jealousy, their envy,
quickened by narrow, mistaken. yet
honest patriotism for the locality Of its
birth, which, from peculiarity in domes-
tic institutions, has lost the vantage
ground of superior political influence
once held in the confederacy. The vast
disproportionate increase Of political
power Of the free States over that of the
slave States, especially of those where
the wealth flows from an industry and
species of agriculture which expels the
white race, and accumuIates another ia
tai to all progress, has created pre-
lponderance in the Northern, Western
and middle States which has secured to
them the permanent control of the Gov
ernment.
During the first forty-eight years Of
the Republic, it had its impulse, for the
most part, from the heart beating in its
central region. Except the two from
Massachusetts, all its Presidents may be
said to have been Virginia Presidents,
for Jackson and Van Buren were chosen
through her influence During the ad-
lninistration Of the elder Adams, her star
dominated over the Congressional coun-
ellis in the person of Vice President Jef-
ferson. During that of the second, it
rose again in both branches of Congress
through the prestige impaired to her
candidate, Jackson, by the commanding
eloquence of her Senators and Repre-
sentatives.
Throughout the almost half century
of Republican rule, under the auspices
of Virginia, the Free States were not
merely content, but with the exception
of a paroxysm growing out of the COM
mercial difficulties contrived by Great
Britain, dissipated by the war she pro,
voked, and the momentary panic quieted
by the Missouri Compromise, gave it
that Jealous support which rendered
this era so happy and prosperous to the
whole country. Slavery, the anomaly
in our institutions, was looked upon
throughout this period as distressing
excrescence, the result Of yoke we had
worn in our infancy, and which the
strength of our Constitution would iu
time throw of.
1t was not nntil the premiership of
Mr.. Calhoun, which opened the designs
of slavery propagandism, that serious
alarm arose among the friends of Re-
publican government, that the power
of sectional interest founded on sla-
very, was meditating the means of con-
testing its supremacy over the CONT
nent. The Free States accorded to the
South all the territory in which slavery
previously existed, to open up and
drain off. the sources Of its malaria BY
the African labor it possessed. They
trusted that as the Anglo Saxon race Of
| freemen multiplied and overfowed from
the North and middle regions, the infe-
rior race would recede further South.
and make this whole continent the
abode Of freedom. But the demand
that acquisitions Of free territory should
be consigned to slavery; that California
should be rejected from the Union be.
cause she came with a free Republican
constitution ia her hand, unveiled the
deceptiaa practised in the pledge, given
| by leading advocates Of the annexation
OF Texas, that it would open the way for
the withdrawal of slavery from the tempe.
rate zono on its march to mingle with
the freed blacks in the tropics Of Cen.
tral America. The Compromise Of
1850, providing for the admission of
four additional Slave States from Texas,
consscrated that portion added from the
New Mexican conquest east of the Rio
Grande and North of the Missouri Com
promise line to freedom although
claimed by Texas-and left all the rest
the Territory acquired, to the construct
ion of the Mexican law which had abol-
ished slavery at one time existing there.
| This was the second hard won pacifca-
ton by which Mr.. Clay hoped to lay
! forever the spectre of Disunion, found.
ing it on the principle ofthe Ordinapce
of 1857, which had resigned to Slavery
all the Territory which properly appst-
tanned to the domain of the Slave Statesj
ireserving that belonging to the United
States for settlement by freemen exclu.
sively. The leading. parties in their
Presidential platforms, in which they
submitted their claims for the sanction
of the popular vote at the immediately
ensuing election, ratified this settlement
of 1850, adding new sanction to the
Missouri Compromise. But both these
compacts betwsen the States for the set
tlenent of the great sectional issues
we're nulli6ed by the Kansas Nebraska
bill. This brought on the civil war in
Kansas, waged to defeat the right Of
the people to exclude slavery from the