A key to the disunion conspiracy

The reader will learn from the following pages that the fratricidal contest into which our country has been led is not a thing of chance, but of deliberate design, and that it has been gradually preparing for almost thirty years. The dark plotters of South Carolina and Virginia, who in 1832 and 1833 were defeated in their nullification and disunion schemes by the fidelity and decision of Jackson, though abashed and discomfited, did not relinquish their purpose, notwithstanding they changed their plans. It was in pursuit of aims, purely Southern and sectional, that the Mexican province of Texas was overrun and conquered by American adventurers in 1835 and 1836; that Texas was annexed in 1845; and that the war with Mexico was inaugurated. It was to subserve Southern, and eventually Disunion, purposes that the Missouri Compromise was repealed, and all the evil enginery Lecomptonism put into operation. It was to further the accursed cause of national disruption that just such a Cabinet as that of Buchanan was gathered up, whereby the army might be dispersed, the navy scattered, and the national treasury plundered and bankrupted so that Secession might march unmolested over the prostrate form of our noble Government. The one purpose of disunion has been for the greater part of the time the animating principle of State rights' policy, since Calhoun and his adherents steadily wormed themselves into the citadel of the Democracy. Without dispute our country is suffering from the effects of a conspiracy unparalleled and its nature and extent in the history of mankind. - Explanatory introduction.

The Partisan Leader; A Tale of The Future is a political novel by the antebellum Virginia author and jurist Nathaniel Beverley Tucker. A two-volume work published in 1836 in New York City and in 1837 in Washington, D.C. under the pen-name "Edward William Sydney," the novel is set thirteen years into the future, in 1849, and imagines a world where the American states south of Virginia (South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Florida) have seceded from the Union. The story traces the formation of a band of Virginia insurgents who seek to free their state from federal control and adjoin it to the independent Southern Confederacy. Ever since the Southern states actually withdrew from the Union in 1861, the work has been viewed as a window into the development of secessionist thought, and, in some ways, a preview of the American Civil War. In 1861, it was reprinted in New York City with the title A Key to the Disunion Conspiracy. A confederate edition was published in Richmond in 1862. - Wikipedia.