The Nebraska Bill Passed!Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Gazette [Whig](23 May 1854)
The deed is done! The astonishing perfidy
to the Free States of this Union has been
consummated, by the aid of forty-four traitors to the
rights, interests and honor of the North. The
Missouri Compromise, that sacred compact which
has been considered as binding as the Constitution
for thirty-four years, has been repealed. --
Slavery is now free to take up its march to all
the territory west of Missouri, Iowa, and Minnesota,
extending to the Rocky Mountains. The
black flag of oppression is unfurled in triumph
over a territory as large as all the Free States
put together, which has hitherto been considered
as sacred to freedom as Pennsylvania or Massachusetts.
The act has come upon the country
so suddenly, so unexpectedly, that we can scarcely
realize the extent of the enormity. It is
scarcely five months since the infernal project
was broached, by that Arch Traitor Douglass,
and now the deed is done! This is said to be a
government of the people, and yet here is a deed
of extraordinary perfidy and injustice enacted,
without the wish or desire of the people, and in
face of their most solemn protest. Not a petition
has been offered in its favor, while thousands
have been sent in against it. The infamous act
has been forced upon the country by
the power of an oligarchy, in despite of its protests,
and in defiance of its express will. Was
ever such tyranny enacted by the Representatives
of a free people?
But are the people powerless? Have they no
remedy? Thank God, they have the means of
redress in their own hands. All that is wanting
is the spirit and patriotism to use the power they
possess. Let the cry of repeal be sounded. Let
freemen flock to Nebraska and Kansas, and swear
on the altars of freedom, that it never shall be
cursed with slavery. Let the North come to the
unalterable resolve that no man shall be sent to
Congress who will not pledge himself to vote
against the admission of another slave State. --
Let us proclaim to the South that its faithless
conduct has relieved us from all obligation to
Compromises; that we scout and spurn them, as
the shallow artifice of petty tyrants, who only
observe them so long as may suit their own
pleasure and designs, and that from henceforth we
declare an unflinching, irreconcilable war with
slavery, in all its conditions and aspects, as the sole
cause of the injustice and humiliations we are
called upon to suffer!
Let us do this, and Southern slaveholders will
live to curse the day that they stooped to use
such plaint tools as Pierce, Douglass &
Co.
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