New Orleans Daily True Delta, October 4, 1860

The Breckinridgers are about these times very strong on the fusion swindle. They think it peculiarly hard that, holding, as they mainly do, the democratic organization of the several Southern states in their hands, there should be any such disagreement as would lead to their being dispossessed, and accordingly we find in Virginia, Tennessee and even in Louisiana wires being judiciously placed to secure the bolters and disorganisers from the fate that is sure to overtake them. In the fore front of the councilors of the scheme are, of course, the old party hack journals that have lived a life of lazy ignorance upon the democracy for the last quarter of a century; overlaying its principles and keeping in the background and upon the lowest seats every one not sunk in the lowest political meanness and corruption, and permanently and especially warring upon every young, active, talented and fairly aspiring man who would not submit to the degradation of upholding them and their cliques. We have seen how it has been here in Louisiana, and the practice which has prevailed here is a fair representation of what has prevailed in every other southern state, and indeed for that matter, in every state in the Union. In New England there was the combination of Caleb Cushing, Butler and the rotten Boston Post confederation which, contemptible in everything but their knowledge of how to dwarf a great party into manageable proportions for their own purposes, have well nigh eliminated democracy from the Yankee states, and what they have accomplished for it in the eastern section, the Buchanans, the Van Burens, the Sehells, the Croswells, the Bradys, the O'Connors, the Butterworths, the Caggers, the Biglers, and a host of equal and lesser schemers, have done for it in the middle states. In the west the Brights, the Fitches, the Pettits, the Rices, the Gwins, and the enormous corps of jobbers subordinate to them, but cooperating and dividing with them in the contract system, have brought things to a similar pass as in the other sections, and consequently we can well understand how desperately they are put to it to accomplish the defeat of the Douglas, who will terminate their peculations and jobbery, and at the same time, if possible, keep up such an organization in the states they are endeavoring to seduce and debauch as will leave them in continued control. This is the whole secret of the propositions to fuse, which they are trying to humbug some soft-headed Douglas men into acceptance of; but the political scoundrelism which sanctions such compacts in other sections cannot succeed in the south, and it glads our heart to see how the true men of Tennessee regard it. Led on by the Appeal of Memphis and the Evening Democrat, of the uncompromising Carrol, of Nashville, the truly national democracy repel the insidious appeals of the Nashville clique backed by Senator Johnson, who, in his blind and precipitate clutchings at the presidency, seems to have lost sight of that good, sound common sense which he must have had when he left the workshop of the honest mechanic to become a leading and unwelcome politician among the Yancey aristocrats. Nicholson is dictating his role to him, and his present adhesion to the instructions of that old placeman and astute politician is just as certain to lay him politically cold as if old death with his scythe had touched his physical vitality. This the plebian Johnson, as the Yanceyites used to regard him before the dazzle of the presidency made the ex-governor forget the democracy and go over to the enemy, ought to know, just as he ought to remember, also, that no man ever betrayed the people and was forgiven.

The course of the true democracy in this contest, and the subsequent ones which will originate in it, is plain. They ought to make no combinations with the avowed enemies of the national integrity, north or south, east or west, because there can never be an honorable compromise of principle; nor can the loyal and disloyal, any more than oil and water, harmoniously meet and mingle. The momentary loss of party supremacy in the individual states is of vastly inferior importance to the maintenance intact of great principles of government; and should the nation be destined to such a calamity as the defeat of Douglas and the election of Lincoln, as the Yanceyites desire, the adherents of the democratic constitutional candidate can bear up against the defeat, and re-organize under more fortunate auspices. The result will, at all events, demonstrate the absurdity of galvanizing into momentary life extinct factions, and thus compel all to unite in one national organization in harmony with the great mass of the people everywhere, and in accordance with their well-understood ideas of republican government. The sloughing off of the unsound adhesions to democracy may work momentary mischief, but the mischief will be permanent and incurable if the national democracy, under an absurd supposition that party compactness by a diseased cohesion is preferable to a rigid adherence to principle, consent to any compromise or fusion with those between whom and themselves there is now an impassable gulf. If the Yanceyites desire to keep the democratic party united and healthy, let them retire their dummy candidate from the presumptuous position they have drawn him into accepting; otherwise, we are sure, no reliable national man will ever consent to a fusion or to such a combination as will return to the senate of the United States the Slidells, Fitzpatricks, Iversons, Brights, Fitches, Greens, Gwins, Rices, Lanes and Biglers, who are now hanging by the eyelids before the people.