Record Data
Transcription
Political.
ADDRESS OF THE K.N. STATE COUNCIL OF KENTUCKY.
The Know-Nothing State Council of Kentucky issues an address to the people of the State, reviewing the Election, and declaring that the defeat of the American Party is not a verdict against American principles, for these were not in issue in the contest. Yet the Electi.
Yet the Election teaches this lesson, namely:
The results of the recent contest must surely teach the conservative men of the Union that the continued agitation of the Slavery question as the paramount political issue can produce no benefit to any State or to any section, but that it will only serve to entail serious and increasing evils upon the South and that it is pregnant with great and imminent danger to the permanence of the union of the States. This agitation, barren as it is of all good results and fruitful only of evil—this agitation, against which the voices of the wise and patriotic founders of our Government were raised in solemn warning, is now the sole reliance for success of the Democratic Party. For years it has hunted down its opponents at the South with the cry of “abolition,” “abolition,” while its own Northern adherents were the loudest shriekers in the front rank of Anti-Slavery fanaticism. In the recent canvass the Democratic Party adroitly constituted the Slavery question the main issue to divide its opponents and to distract the attention of the people from the real principles of Americanism, and, while in the Free-Soil States it claimed to be the purest and most zealous Free-Soil party, in the South it calumniated the Americans as Abolitionists, and pretended an ultra affection for the institution of Slavery. Yet it is a fact that, whilst this slander has been promulgated by the Democratic Party in this State, the great mass of slaveholders in Kentucky are comprised in the American Party.
We can see, then, in the continued agitation of the Slavery question only a fruitful source of evil.