Chicago Daily Tribune, December 13, 1860

The people of the North have not been in the habit of calculating the value of the Union. Love for the Republic as represented in the confederacy of all the States, has been, and is to-day, a sentiment which all the men of the North rightfully claim to share. They do not ask themselves, Is this confederation profitable in a pecuniary sense? Is the maintenance of this partnership the best thing that we can do? Have we not hopes of profit and gratification elsewhere that we may pursue? Does not our continuance in this Union make us in part responsible for the guilt and sin of human slavery; and is it not our duty to withdraw and leave the institution to its fate? No discussion of these things in the North has been permitted, save by an inconsiderable faction. The Union sentiment has overridden everything else. The Union as our fathers made it—the representative of our national pride and power; the Union as the hope of the friends of free institutions and self-government the world over; the Union as a compact to which we have agreed, and which public policy and common justice will not permit us to dissever—this Union has been the watchword of all political parties, and, in some way or another, the hope of all patriots. The devotion to it has been idolatrous. The desire to preserve it intact, and hand it down to them who should come after us, has many times stifled the voice of justice, over-ridden the dictates of humanity and nullified the beneficent purposes for which it was originally formed. During all the years in which returning despotism, or, as Mr. Lincoln has it, "re-appearing tyranny" has been making its stealthy advances, sapping one after another the guarantys of personal freedom, and, one after another, the principles upon which all rational liberty rests; in which the purpose if not frame work of our government has been radically changed from a Democracy, the protector and benefactor of the many, to an Oligarchy, the insolent guardian of the interests of the few—during all this time, in all the political changes and the vicissitudes of parties, there has been no murmur against the Union. Men have seen and watched the approach of the dangers, but have hoped that, whatever might occur, the Union would remain untouched. No party in' the moment of triumph has had the hardihood, if it had the desire, to assail it; no one smarting under the stings of defeat has dared to attempt the recompense of its losses by assailing it. It has been the symbol of political faith which nothing but treason has questioned.

The inquiry has been started—How long under the provocations which daily come upon the North from half a dozen States of the South, will this devotion last? How long shall the people of these infected places remain in an attitude of antagonism to the fundamental idea upon which the government is built—The majority shall rule; how long shall we be compelled to note the daily violations of the Constitution as well as of common decency and common sense in the treatment of Northern men in the South; how long shall these manifold lynchings, hangings, maimings, whippings and tarring-and-featherings of white men for suspected political opinions, continue in the Cotton States; how many more men will be barrelled up alive and rolled into the Mississippi River, for having voted for Lincoln; how many more, as guiltless as babes of all just cause of offence, must be maltreated in their persons and injured in their estates, because they happen to be of Northern faith; how long will a mob with demoniac passions usurp the functions of legislatures, judges, executioners, and keep up a reign of terror in the South; how long must the mails be closed against Northern letters and papers, or, the mails being open, how long will the system of post-office espionage, which no European despotism dare practice, be in operation, before this devotion to the Union will be overcome and an irrepressible desire for separation take its place? We are ready to answer now. Unless citizens of this Republic can be citizens everywhere within its limits, and be protected fully and cheerfully in the rights which belong to them as free men, and which are guaranteed in the Constitution; unless this wholly barbarous business of beating, burning, hanging, drowning American citizens who are innocent of offences known to the laws; unless, in a word, the men of the North are placed on an equality in the States with men of the South, and unless they, in pursuit of peaceful, laudable and legal purposes, can enjoy the immunity from violence which is granted to the pro-slavery brawlers and fanatics who visit us, and unless it be definitely agreed that, in the maintenance of public order, the majority, expressing its will and doing its acts in obedience to the forms and spirit of the fundamental law, are to govern, this Union is not worth preserving; and the sooner the semi-barbarians who are now within it, betake themselves to other political associations and other forms of government, be the consequences to us and them what they may, the better will the interests of all parties be served! We demand justice in the Union; and failing to obtain it, would ignominiously expel the States which deny it, and afterward persuade them into decency as a foreign power.

This is strong language; but it will square exactly with the sentiments which full three-fourths of the Northern people entertain. They want, furthermore, all the questions involved in this matter to be settled now, and in such a way that no like abuses and outrages will occur again; and they will submit to no compromise, no adjustment, that does not cover and protect the rights of white men in the South to their lives, their liberty, and their property, against not only mobs but that mob-law which has the form of legislative enactment. We listen to no suggestions of peace until this thing is done, and the honor of the North is restored. We should be cowards to ask and traitors to accept less. Let no one say that the demand is unnecessary and the threat one that the free States will not back up by deeds. The times require just this plain talk; because, within the month past, depending upon the forbearance of the North and her unwillingness to disturb or jeopardize existing relations, for the protection of her sons, the business of lynching, always too brisk, has become so common and so wide spread, and is pursued with such evident malice and intention to wound and insult, that it can be submitted to no more. We take up no paper printed in the Cotton States in which accounts of these pro-slavery auto-da-fes are not found; we see no traveller from that region, who, if a Northern man, does not return with a sense of thankfulness that his life has been spared; we see no letters that do not refer to scenes which make strong men clinch their hands and set their teeth in a burning rage, that such things should be on American soil. Talk of the escape of negroes and Northern disregard of law! Since election day, the number of white men who have suffered death or punishment hardly less severe, or expulsion or degradation of some sort, at the hands of slave-holding mobs, far exceeds the aggregate of all the slaves that have been rescued from the hands of the officers of the law since the government was founded. Talk of Northern insults to the South! We talk of injuries more irreparable than those which words inflict—of atrocities which make our government, and the Union a sham, and which, as the indispensable prerequisite to anything else, must be suppressed!