Sept. 15. There has been a very sharp debate in the Senate, in which the Southern men have rode and overrode Mr. Winthrop, and hunted up all the ugly things they could say about Massachusetts, and pitched them at him. I do not think Mr. Winthrop has sustained himself very well. He ought to have carried the war into Africa, or at least to have repelled the intruders from his own territory. When we speak of the South as they are, the first thing they do is to ransack our old history; and whatever they can find either against the law of toleration as we now consider it, or the duties of humanity as a higher civilization exemplifies and expounds them, they bring forward. They have never yet been properly answered. If some such man as Sumner was in the seat, he would turn the tables upon them.
The South are more rampant than ever. They feel their triumph. Two or three times within the last week, the "Union," the Southern Democratic organ here, has declared, that, if such or such a thing is done, the Union will totter to its centre. Her interminable cry will now be, if she cannot have her own way, that the Union is tumbling to pieces. We are to have this idea of dissolution as the supplement for all argument, and the arsenal of all weapons. There is a momentary lull; but the presidency-seekers will soon open a deadly fire upon each other.
SOURCE: Mary Tyler Peabody Mann, Life of Horace Mann, p. 330
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