[December 23, 1860.]
Dear Friend:
Yours of 20th is at hand. I will see the persons you have
named and be ready to report as soon as I have returned home. Stone, I have no
doubt, will be an acquisition of great value, but we shall want an editor of
equal ability. Some persons here say that we must have $10,000 pledged to
secure success, and my present plan is to pay a manager and editor each a
moderate salary and one-half the profits, the other half to go to the guaranty
fund, or be used in extending the paper. To succeed we must play a bold game.
Andrew appears as well as usual. We are having a right good time. You will see
all the Washington gossip in the papers before this reaches you, and I shall
only give the impression it has made on me, which is that if any Republican
members vote for concession or compromise they are politically dead. If a
majority of the party vote for it, the party is dead. I have to-day seen a
number of leading men and all their talk was a resolution for the impeachment
of the President.
We are told Lincoln says no friend of his will propose
either dissolution or concession. Wilson says: “They meet us with long faces,
and we laugh at them and tell them to go.” In the Senate Committee of Thirteen,
all the Republicans voted against the compromises; which, as there would be no
compromise without them, was understood to be fatal. When they came to the
Fugitive Slave Law, Wade told them that, as they were going out of the Union,
there was no need of voting on that, for it would then die of itself. If this
goes on much further I think we may expect the immediate abolition of slavery,
even if it requires an ocean of blood. If war with the Cotton States comes, I
am sure of it.
Yours faithfully,
George L. Stearns.
SOURCE: Preston Stearns, The Life and Public
Services of George Luther Stearns, p. 237-8
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