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Fireeaters....

Preston S. Brooks, at a (1856) festival made by his constituents, and intended as a compliment for his attempted assassination of Senator Sumner, said : " We have the issue upon us now ; and how are we to meet it? I tell you, fellow citizens, from the bottom of my heart, the only mode which I think available for meeting it, is just to tear the Constitution of the United States, trample it under foot, and form a Southern Confederacy, every State of which will be a slaveholding State. (Loud and prolonged cheers.) I believe it, as I stand in the face of my Maker ; I believe it, on my responsibility to you as your honored representative, that the only hope of the South is in the South, and that the only available means of making that hope effective, is to cut asunder the bonds that tie us together, and take our separate position among the family of nations. These are my opinions. They have always been my opinions. I have been a disunionist from the time I could think"

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"I have been a disunionist from the time I could think"

Mr. Brooks was born in 1819. His statement, although meant to stir the 1856 crowd his was speaking to, is a life long disnouncement of Unionism. Is there more to this line of thinking?

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David Upton

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