Secession Era Editorials Project

Don't Like Their Own Medicine.

Cincinnati, Ohio, Enquirer [Democratic]

(29 October 1859)

During the Kansas Troubles of 1855,1856 and 1857 the Republicans insisted that the Democratic party of the Union was responsible for every excess and every outrage that was committed in that Territory by excited and infuriated pro-slavery men. The "Kansas outrages" were their real political staple, and by it they came near electing a President in 1856. The Democrats contended that they had nothing to do with them, and were not responsible in any sense. But the Republicans insisted that the act of every pro-slavery man was the act of the Democratic party. Now, when an Abolitionist, who has graduated in the Kansas school, organizes a band for the fomenting of a slave insurrection in the South, and makes a murderous attack upon Harper's Ferry, and when it has been proven that he was backed up and sustained by money and arms obtained from Abolitionists and Republicans of the North, the latter think it very unjust that the whole organization should be held responsible for the conduct of BROWN's band, which was imbued with their ideas, and which was seeking to carry them out. They don't like to have the same responsibility forced upon them that they put upon the Democrats about Kansas.