Went with George Anthon and Walter Cutting to the opera. Heard three acts of Martha in the Cutting box. Patti and Brignoli did fairly. House full, but strangers mostly. Music is pretty, but not very strong.
Last night’s Republican turnout is the town talk. Everyone speaks of the good order and the earnest aspect of the “Wide-Awakes,” and likens this to the “Tippecanoe and Tyler too” gatherings of 1840. Certainly, all the vigor and enthusiasm of this campaign are thus far confined to the Republicans. Their adversaries are disorganized, divided, and discouraged. In this state, there is a fusion (worse confounded) of the Union Party (Bell and Everett) with the Squatter Sovereignty Democrats (Douglas and Johnson), and a sort of feebly coherent composite electoral ticket. . . . They are trying to coalesce with the Breckinridge people so as to include in one ticket all the anti-Lincoln elements. But that seems as yet beyond the powers of political synthesis.
So we have three parties in this state, videlicet:
1. “Honest Abe” Lincoln’s party.
2. The Fusionists, whose ticket is twenty-five Douglas and Johnson, and ten Bell and Everett, and who are engineered by Washington Hunt and the New York Express and patronized as well-meaning people, but soon to fail, by die New York Herald.
3. Breckinridge and Lane’s party, consisting mainly of federal office-holders.
4. No. 4, "Sham” Houston’s party, has dissolved, that hero having magnanimously withdrawn.
I don’t know clearly on which side to count myself in. I’ve a leaning toward the Republicans. But I shall be sorry to see Seward and Thurlow Weed with their tail of profligate lobby men promoted from Albany to Washington. I do not like the tone of the Republican papers and party in regard to the John Brown business of last fall, and I do not think rail-splitting in early life a guarantee of fitness for the presidency.
I could vote for Bell and Mr. Orator Everett. But I can’t support them in their partnership with Douglas, the little giant, for I hold the little giant to be a mere demagogue. As to Breckinridge, the ultra Southern candidate, I renounce and abhor him and his party. He represents the most cruel, blind, unreasoning, cowardly, absolute despotism that now disgraces the earth, Garibaldi having probably squelched poor little Neapolitan Bomba before this date. Freedom of speech and of thought is extinct south of the Potomac. Life and property are as insecure there as in Paris in 1793 or in the Kingdom of Dahomey. Witness the atrocities daily perpetrated, for example, in Texas, where white men are being hanged and niggers burned by terrified Vigilance Committees, self-appointed and irresponsible, on the strength of legends about “one hundred bottles of strychnine” to be used by some nigger toxicologist to “poison the wells” of a whole county. These grisly antics of insane Southern mobs and the idiotic sanguinary babblings of Southern editors and orators tempt me to become a disunion man. Alliance with com-munities so lawless—more than semi-barbarous—seems degrading to the comparatively civilized North.
SOURCE: Allan Nevins and Milton Halset Thomas, Editors, Diary of George Templeton Strong, Vol. 3, pp. 41-2
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