Summary

This article makes an economic argument for maintaining slavery that directly links the profits enjoyed by Northerners to the South's system of labor. Voting Republican, therefore, the editors suggest, is a symbolic slap in the face of the very system that enables Northern businesses to thrive.

EXCERPT:

"Pittsburgh, we say, puts herself upon a sectional platform, sides with an exclusively sectional, geographical party for the sole purpose of opposing slavery. Yet Pittsburgh is in part supported by slavery, as the numerous plows, chains, bells, pumps, engines, and coal, which she sends down to New Orleans to be bought by slaveholders, and paid for by the money which slaveholders make by slave labor, and which in goodly quantities are now in New Orleans and Louisiana and other parts of the South, most conclusively prove."

Full-text web version of newspaper

"In the first half of 1860 Democratic editors in Franklin County emphasized slavery's compatibility with the Northern economy and society and Northern complicity in the South's institution."