It is time for all citizens of Cecil to “awake, arouse, or be forever fallen.” The bayonet of the usurper of Liberty, of Law, and of Right is at your breast. Already the manacles of the tyranny are clanking in your ears. Then fly to arms, and repel the black, and serried legions of South Carolina, that are almost upon you. The minions of that wild, audacious, and fanatical Despotism, have taken Baltimore and tearing down the Stars and Stripes, hoisted their black Secession flags in that mob ridden city; and now, under that secretly organized despotism the reign of terror extends from the Rio Grande to the metropolis of our State. Shall it cross the Susquehanna, and march with bloodstained footsteps over your smiling hills and plains of Cecil, to meet its opposing wave on the Pennsylvania line, to be hurled back and overwhelmed, ’mid scenes of fire and blood upon your soil, with burning farm-houses, insulted women and butchered citizens? No, but, yet, while your hands are free, seize arms and go forth to battle for liberty and life, against the arch enemy of your rights, calling upon your neighbors and the Government of the United States to assist you.— During the last few days, your Railroad bridges have been burned, your mails cut off, the metropolis of Maryland placed under mob law, and all the business of your State entirely prostrated and ruined.
What fruits can Secession bear but anarchy, succeeded by a military despotism and interminable revolutions. The curses of Mexico and South America? Is any man stupid enough to believe for a single moment, that the leaders of this Secession movement which like a deadly Upas tree, taints the very atmosphere of Liberty—mean to attempt a Republican government if they could succeed in their Infernal work? Would not the right of Secession left free to each State, destroy all concert of action, and cause separation at the very first breath of discord? No. The Secession leaders are not fools, but tyrants and knaves ; who, inflated with pomp and pride, arrogance and aristocracy, derived, from, and built upon the political power which they possess, by virtue of their large possessions in negroes, seek by appeals to your prejudices, to rob you of your liberties, and then hold you as their vassels, at the bayonet’s point.
What interest have we in common with them, that we should give our property and lives to build up a rotten aristocracy, that will spurn us, and spit upon us, and spoil and trample us in the dust, after we have submitted to be their worse than slaves.
But this iniquity cannot be. It must go down, and that speedily.
The Cecil Whig, Elkton, MD
The Cecil Whig
While Maryland was a slave state, public opinion was divided on the issue of secession, much like that in the other border slave states. The Cecil Whig was a strongly pro-Union voice in Maryland during the Civil War period.