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In short we want to know if there [are] any legal, available means of redress; we want to see some evidence that there is good grit enough somewhere to carry on the contest with energy; and then it will be in point to talk about raising money.
(Note: The Ripon Weekly Times a Republican paper. Ripon was a birthplace of the modern Republican Party. And 1860 was a presidential election year, the election which would see four candidates vie for the presidency with slavery as the foremost issue. Abraham Lincoln would win election in November.)
As the Booth affair settled into a fight for the rights of Northern states to protect its borders from intruders seeking to keep people enslaved, an election would loom to form a coalition of Southern states to secede from the union. Their reason? To preserve states' rights, a right they themselves sought to deny to their northern neighbors.
