Here is yet another article from the May 3, 1862 Covington Journal. This particular edition had several stories about abolitionism that caught my attention and that that I think are worth sharing, including this collection of editorials from around the state.
The Covington Journal was published in Covington, Kentucky, on the opposite side of the Ohio River from Cincinnati, and it is evident that issues regarding slavery and abolition were very important to the publisher, and was becoming more so as the war and such legislation and talk progressed. With the war started, this issue is much more common on this paper's pages than others such as states rights. (And even when it mention state's rights, it often is in regard to slavery and abolition.) That's at least how this one border state newspaper viewed the war and its issues.
Abolition Legislation
Voice of the Kentucky Union Press
[From the Frankfort Commonwealth]
As the question of emancipation and colonization by the General Government becomes to be understood, their impracticability becomes more and more manifest, and the whole matter will at last, from the absolute impossibility of doing any thing else with it, have to be left where the Constitution placed it- that is, to the States themselves, who alone have the rightful control of it.
And, moreover, these abolitionists themselves should remember that they too are subject to all the pains and penalties with which they propose to visit secession. Garrison and Phillips and Sumner are this day as guilty as Davis, Yancey and Toombs, and when the conservative voice of the nation speaks with its power, the terms abolitionist and secessionist will be held as synonymes of disloyalty and hostility to the American Union, and they both will feel the weight of the censure that an outraged and idignant people will heap upon them.
[From the Henderson Weekly Union]
We think the time of Congress could be much better spent, at this time, than in the discussion of slavery issues. If that body shall longer continue in session, and give out many more signs of Abolitionism, the whole ground of contest will have to be fought over again. The army is passing South through blood, and at enormous expense, it is true, yet a vast amount of disloyal sentiment is left behind, and the stock is increasing at a fearful ration in this quarter, owing to the gross folly and wickedness of the treasonable Abolitionist of the North and North-west. When the leading Republicans disclaim abolition motives and sympathy with the Abolitionists, and yet set in perfect harmony with them, the loyal men of the South distrust, very naturally, their sincerity.
The time is now at hand when the whole energies of the friends of the Union and the Constitution should be blended in the common cause - when men should decide upon the naked question of Union of dissolution. The Abolitionists of the North and Secessionists of the South both pull the same string, and declared for dissolution. The tendency of the action of both is to Abolitionism. The object of each is disunion.
[From the Lexington Observer]
The Thirty sixth Congress of the United States initiated a civil war by turning an indifferent ear to the appeal of the Border States for a "compromise" on the slavery question. The Thirty-seventh Congress of the United States has committed a similarly vital error in abolishing, by a two-thirds vote, the institution of slavery in the District of Columbia. without first leaving the question to a ballot of the citizens. Let history, says a contemporary, in recording the fact, impartially place the responsibility where it belongs. Let the political majority and the political principles which have effected these changes distinctly enjoy, in the future annals of our country, all the credit that may be attached to them.
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