Supporting the candidate and spitting on the platform became the expressive if inelegant watchword of many Northern Whigs, but for every Whig vote which this phrase kept to his party allegiance in the free States, it drove two over to the Democracy in the slave States.
Blaine describes the conflicting loyalties of Northern Whigs towards their candidate and platform.
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Under such circumstances, to send a military force into any State, with orders to act against the people, would be simply making war upon them.
Without the exercise of those functions which belong exclusively to the civil service, the laws cannot be executed in any event, no matter what may be the physical strength which the Government has at its command.
But this is a totally different thing from an offensive war to punish the people for the political misdeeds of their State Government, or to enforce an acknowledgment that the Government of the United States is supreme.
And if Congress shall break up the present Union by unconstitutionally putting strife and enmity and armed hostility between different sections of the country, instead of the domestic tranquility which the Constitution was meant to insure…
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