The wickedness of the Lincoln conspiracy against the public liberty exceeds anything in history. The mere fact of substituting force for law was a crime of monsterous magnitude. This he did by violating his oath and trampling under foot all the safeguards which had been erected for the protection of life and property. Had he confined the operation of his, system of force to the people of the North, who had become lost to all sense of freedom and rather enjoyed the burden of fetters, mankind might have looked on the spectable with indifference mingled with scorn. But when he transcends his own bailiwick and sought to impose his chains on a free people, he enacted not only the part of the tyrant, but was forced to resort to all the base expedients which have characterized the most odious despotisms that have ever existed. His career in Maryland, in searching houses, seizing papers, disarming and arresting and imprisioning citizens, to reduce that proud people to subjugation to his hated rule, is known to the whole world. To extend his sway in Kentucky and Missouri, he is, at this moment, diligently employed in the infamous and murderous task of fomenting civil war among the people of those States. His emissaries are actively engaged in distributing arms among them, that they may butcher one another. This is cold-blooded and deliberate murder on a grand scale of which the annals of the world furnish no parallel. A chief magistrate of a (professed) free Government, deliberately, maliciously and systematically plotting and stimulating a bloody strife, in which one half of a community shall butcher the other! We can only conceive of a fiend from hell capable df such malignity. And yet it is the daily and constant occupation of Lincoln and Seward and over the success of which, in prospective, they gloat with the rapture of devils.
We censure ourselves for sometimes giving way to the apprehension that it is possible for so much wickedness to escape unpunished.—It cannot be. There must be retribution in store for these monsters. Outraged justice, oppressed humanity, infuriated by divine vengence, will rise up to overwhelm and, crush them.
To estimate the enormity of their crime, we must consider the evil they have done. They found this country the freest and most prosperous on the face of the earth—and animated by the benign principle that peace is preferable to force. They have converted prosperity into wretchedness, and substituted for law and peace, violence and murder. They have extinguished freedom and organized despotism and assassination. — Rich. Whig
Western Sentinel, Winston-Salem, NC