Southern Elections It is getting to be impossible for the slaveholding cities to hold an election without a riot. At the Baltimore election, ballots were supplanted by dirks, revolvers, and paving stones. At the Louisville election, houses were sacked and voters shot. In St. Louis, on election day, the police had repeatedly to use force to quell disorder. In New Orleans, an election day, armed gangs chased each other up and down the streets. To-day, the Washington papers are telling how the President had to call out the marines to quell an election riot there.
Such scenes, contrasted with the quiet of Northern polling days, hardly sustain the Virginia doctrine, that while free society is anarchical and turbulent, slavery is the mainstay of order and of law. Albany Evening Journal.
(Liberator, June 26, 1857, pg4)