Summary

The Whig editor quoted extensively from a letter from Rev. Dr. Breckinridge of Kentucky to his nephew Vice-President John Breckinridge on the state of the nation. The Whig position on the sectional crisis was clearly embedded in this editorial: the border was the key to effecting future national interests, war and bloodshed were a real possibility because of agitation of extremists on both sides, enforcement of the laws was required to resolve the crisis, and "soil and climate" would determine and settle the boundaries of slavery in the territories.

EXCERPT:

"It may be confidently asserted that posterity will hold these border states, on both sides, responsible for the fate of the nation, if they permit the country to be ruined, and themselves thrown into a position of endless mutual hostility, along a common frontier of fifteen hundred miles."

"With the exception of a few extreme men at the South, the people of this section are not "slavery propagandists"--they have no desire to carry slavery into any Territory now free, and it is not their interest to do so."

Full-text web version of newspaper

"Augusta's Whig Party emphasized that slavery was safer within the Union than without and that in the 1860 election slavery had become needlessly politicized. The Augusta Whigs moved to develop a new party around Constitutional Unionism."