Springfield Daily Illinois State Journal, April 3, 1861

We are grieved to announce that the disunion ticket has achieved a signal triumph at the St. Louis charter election. That city, which heretofore has borne off the palm for its uncompromising devotion to the Union and the principles of the Republican party, now trails the Star Spangled Banner in the dust, and proclaims to the world its sympathy and fellowship with the traitors of the cotton States. Only the opportunity is wanting to make the disloyalty and treasonable schemes of St. Louis plain and manifest to all. We shall not be surprised at the present progress of events, if Missouri, in less than six months, is clean out of the Union, and joined to the cotton Confederacy of Jeff Davis. Matters seem rapidly tending to this conclusion. Not because the State of Missouri has any just complaint to make at the treatment she has received at the hands of the General Government. Not because she has been injured or wronged in the least, by the action of the Federal authorities, or by any of her sister States. In all her gabble about “conditions” to her longer stay in the Union, nothing of this has been suggested. Indeed, that State, so far from having suffered wrongs, is indebted to the Federal Government for all she is and all she possesses. And St. Louis, which now votes in favor of a disunion ticket, owes a full share of her present greatness to the trade she has so freely enjoyed with the people of the free States of Illinois and Iowa. But a mania, a madness has seized upon the Southern mind, and we see whole States, for the mere matter of mistaken pride and a bad spirit which refuses to acquiesce in the will of the majority, busily engaged in destroying the common inheritance of our fathers, and blotting out the hallowed memories which cluster around us as a great nation. We had supposed there was yet leaven enough remaining in the border slave States to preserve the country from the calamity which Jeff. Davis and his fellow traitors have been threatening. We had indulged in the hope that there was in the Southern heart a stern and unflinching patriotism, which would yet make itself understood and felt all through the disaffected States. But it seems we were mistaken. The election at St. Louis, where we had most reason to place implicit confidence, proves that there is no longer the least love in any of the Southern States for the Union, and that the mad counsels of secession and revolt now have full and uninterrupted sway all through the South. Be it so. If the authority of the Government is to be thus spit upon and outraged, and no move is to be made to vindicate the supremacy of the Constitution and the laws; if even those who call themselves Union men at the South are to turn traitors and rise up in arms, should the Administration take a single step towards preserving the integrity of that Union,—as much as we regret the alternative, the sooner we cut loose from the disaffected States, the better it may be for all parties and for the nation. Our self-respect and honor will thus remain uninjured and unsullied; and the disgrace of destroying the best Government upon the earth will fall, where it belongs, alone upon the people of the Southern States. The material or political interests of the North, we are sure, will not be injured by the sad and wholly unjustifiable separation. The South, we are equally certain, will not be better off or happier, however much bad men may now persuade them to believe otherwise.