A howl of indignation and hurt feelings rose from each of the fifteen claims in the declaration, each a single sentence long. All attributed the state’s action to the Union’s enduring “hostility” to slavery. The declaration depicted this hostility as a corporeal villain, an “it” having a multitude of destructive powers. “It advocates negro equality, socially and politically, and promotes insurrection and incendiarism in our midst,” one claim asserted. The next: “It has enlisted its press, its pulpit and the schools against us, until the whole popular mind of the North is excited and inflamed
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