In the following article the Baltimore Clipper tells some truths which should be seriously considered :
In the Presidential canvass all parties in the Southern border States proclaimed themselves for the Union without qualification. The Union party men stood upon their platform of the Union, the Constitution and the laws; the democrats ridiculed this platform, and asserted that they too were in favor of the Union, the Constitution and the enforcement of the laws, and declared themselves as good Union men as any others. By a solemn vote in the United States Senate the Southern men almost without exception had declared that protection to slavery in the territories was not needed, and the whole population, at least of the border States of the South, went into the canvass and through it upon this hypothesis and with this declaration.
The election has resulted exactly as the disunion faction of the Democratic party desired it should. The Republican candidate is elected and in a few days will be inaugurated. It is unquestionably true, that with his administration the Republican party will cease to exist as a political organization, and that parties will hereafter be arranged as the Union and Disunion party, but all this does not alter the position of the border States of the South. Pending the canvass they professed entire satisfaction with the Union, the Constitution, and the laws. They saw in them then nothing to justify or even to suggest disunion or to require a resort to secession as a remedy for wrongs endured. No new wrongs were alleged. All that could be complained of had been endured during all the four years of the infamous administration of Buchanan, and could by no possibility become any worse or more aggravated under that of Abraham Lincoln. The Democrats of the South knew full well that they could not elect a Democratic President, and that the only possible chance of defeating Lincoln was the election of Bell; but they fought against Bell with a malignily and ferocity unparalleled in political warfare. They secured the election of the Republican candidate and immediately turned “dirt eaters,” swallowed their own solemn declarations, began to curse the Union, and got a stampede of the Southern States that bad never suffered one fortieth—no, not one hundredth–part as much from the Northern abolition fanaticism as the States that then stood and now stand as the bulwark of the safety of the Union and the Constitution.
The Southern Democrats who were wont to win Presidential elections by proclaiming themselves Union-savers, turned all of a sudden Union-breakers; South Carolina took the lead, and State after State followed. The time has come at last for the people to pause and ask themselves what it all means. They are in no more danger of Northern aggressions upon Southern rights now than they were when James Buchanan was elected. For twelve months immediately antecedent to the Presidential election, they proclaimed their devoted allegiance to the Union, and their satisfaction with the existing guaranties of protection to Southern rights in it. Now we find them, under the whip and spur of the secessionists, threatening that if additional guaranties are not accorded they will do what; join the rebels and divide the Union upon the slave line. This is exactly what the Abolitionists have for years been trying to achieve. The madness of our Southern men is pushing them on to do for abolitiondom what it could never otherwise accomplish, and the Southern Confederacy men, those who have seized upon the present occasion only as a pretext to carry out their long cherished plan to gratify their personal ambition by the erection of a Southern Republic, are laughing in their sleeves at the credulity of the Border States, which allow themselves so easily to be frightened from their consistency and propriety, and to make threats of disunion unless they are assured of obtaining what a few months ago they said was totally unnecessary.
The Border States have been played upon long enough by these ambitious seceders. They will be accorded full justice by the people of the North, and their duty to themselves requires that they should now begin to exact justice from the Southern States that threaten to imperil all their great interests by a senseless revolution, intended only to destroy the most glorious confederacy ever established, and all for the gratification of a parcel of broken down, rule-or-ruin democratic politicians, who are unwilling that the power and patronage of the federal government should be taken from them. Let the men of the Border States think, let them ponder upon these facts, and in all that they do let them at least preserve consistency of conduct.
Daily Nashville Patriot, Nashville, TN