The Sky is Falling

While doing some archival research for one of my professors (gathering contemporary newspaper reactions to the Dred Scott case), I came across a marvelous editorial in the April 16, 1857 edition of the Washington Union, which was an organ of the Buchanan administration. Some choice extracts:

Men seem determined to sound the profoundest depths of things in heaven, on the earth, and in the waters under the earth. But in this process many of them have adopted very questionable rules. What was heretofore considered settled, or taken for granted, as rules and principles of human action, are utterly discarded and thrown aside...

Mormonism, abolitionism, free-soilism, spiritual rappings, women's rights, socialism, free-loveism and know-nothingism, have sprung up from this corrupt state of political profligacy and religious infidelity, and are now, by their combined efforts, madly bent on ruling or ruining the country. No true patriot, no sober-minded Christian, no good man, no peace-loving orderly citizen, can look upon this state of things without a sentiment of the deepest anxiety, and a feeling of the most profound disgust.

There you have it.