>>17940576
From the 1830s on, abolitionists argued for secession of the North from the Union. The American Anti-Slavery Society passed the following resolution: "That the Abolitionists of this country should make it one of the primary objects of this agitation to dissolve the American Union." This was also the view of the Douglass Monthly, printed by Frederick Douglass. Abolitionist Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune, wrote on February 23, 1861, after the Confederacy was formed:
"We have repeatedly said ... that the great principle embodied by Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence, that governments derive their powers from the consent of the American Republicanism governed is sound and just; and that... if the cotton States, or the gulf States only, choose to form an independent nation, they have a clear moral right to do so. Whenever it shall be clear that the great body of Southern people have become conclusively alienated from the Union; and anxious to escape from it, we will do our best to forward their views.”
(Quoted in Albert Taylor Bledsoe, Was Davis a Traitor, or Was Secession a Constitutional Right Previous to the War of 1861? (North Charleston: Fletcher & Fletcher, 1995; originally published in 1866), 149)
