James Blaine

It was a distinctive victory of the free States over the consolidated power of the slave States.

Had the vexed question in the Territory been left to actual settlers it would have been at once decided adversely to slavery.

In the South they saw and felt their danger, and they determined at all hazards to defend themselves against policies which involved the total destruction of their social and industrial fabric.

Their point of view was so radically different from that held by a large number of Northern people that it left no common ground for action,--scarcely, indeed, an opportunity for reasoning together.

To abandon the institution was to sacrifice four thousand millions of property specially protected by law.

They could see no way, and they no longer desired to see a way, by which they might rid themselves of the servile labor which was at once their strength and their weakness.

Their entire industrial system was founded upon an institution which was bitterly opposed in the free States.

The design was audacious, but from the stand-point of the men who were committed to it, it was not illogical.

They could not acquire a majority of the total population, but they aimed to secure by far the larger share of the vast domain comprised in the United States.

If they were to be outvoted and, as they thought, outraged by free-State majorities, then they would break up the government and form a confederacy of their own.

If the slave-holders could maintain their supremacy in the Union, they would prefer to remain.

Since the struggle of 1850 the dissolution of the Union had been in the minds of many Southern leaders, and, as the older class of statesmen passed away, this design grew and strengthened until it became a fixed policy.

Although, as the Southern leaders realized, the free States had flanked them by the admission of California with an anti-slavery constitution, the Southern acquisition of Kansas would pierce the very centre of the army of freedom, and…

The struggle for Kansas was therefore to be maintained and possession secured at all hazards.

If this could be acquired they felt assured that so long as the Union should exist no free State could be admitted without the corresponding admission of another slave State.

Southern men knew that the repeal of the Missouri Compromise gave them a privilege which they had not before enjoyed,--the privilege of settling with their slaves on the rich plains and in the fertile valleys that stretched westward from…

They understood the question perfectly and left the apologies and explanations to Northern men, who were hard pressed by anti-slavery constituents.

It was soon perceived by all, as the sagacious had seen from the first, that the Missouri Compromise had not been repealed merely to exhibit unity in the scope of the United-States statutes respecting slavery in the Territories.

But each felt itself to be altogether in the right and its opponent altogether in the wrong.

Before the end of the year a large majority of the people of the North and a large majority of the people of the South were distinctly arrayed against each other on a question which touched the interest, the pride, the conscience, and the…

It was felt to be a question not of expediency but of morality, not of policy but of honor.

Every other issue was merged in the one absorbing demand by Southern slave-holders for what they sincerely believed to be their rights in the Territories.

Old political landmarks disappeared, and party prejudices of three generations were swept aside in a day.

The latter infused into the ranks of the new organization a spirit and an energy which Whig traditions could never inspire.

The Know-Nothings, therefore, speedily disappeared, and a new party sprang into existence composed of anti-slavery Whigs and anti-slavery Democrats.