Summary

The Whig editor pointed out the danger of the Democratic party in Virginia's constant badgering of the Whigs on the issue of which party was "sound" on slavery. The result, the editor suggested, of such politicization of the slavery issue was John Brown's raid--the mistaken belief in the North that some Virginians might buckle under pressure and abandon slavery. The Whig editor considered the Democrats to blame for John Brown's mistaken views and for distorting the unanimity of mind on the protection of slavery.

EXCERPT:

"On the contrary, the last steps of [John Brown's] career upon the soil of our State, as the avowed leader of a crusade against slavery and slaveholders, even to bloodshed and death, is of itself sufficient to establish the fact that he had been watching the course of affairs in the State of Virginia with special and peculiar interest....To those who are familiar with the political history of the State it is scarcely necessary to say that from them he heard, probably for the first time, of a difference of sentiment among the people of Virginia on the subject of negro slavery."

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."