Summary

This editorial railed against the idea that the Republican party was the proper inheritor of Thomas Jefferson's Republican-Democratic party's principles. The Democratic editors could hardly believe such assertions and defended Jefferson as a slaveholder who fought against sectionalized parties and resisted the Missouri Compromise. Jefferson, they argued, put no limitations on the growth of slavery. The editors asserted that Jefferson's "firebell in the night" was not slavery itself but sectionalized parties.

EXCERPT:

"While Jefferson was thus a deadly opponent to just such slavery agitation as Doolittle is engaged in, it is as much a fact as it is that he wrote the Declaration of Independence, that he was in favor of allowing slavery to diffuse itself over any territory where the people desired it."

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."