De Alexander

The predominant sentiment demanded that Kansas should be free, and the excitement aroused by the repeal of the Missouri Compromise was quickly rekindled when the South approved the murderous methods intended to make it a slave State.

Clark's majority, slender as it finally appeared by the official count, was due to the Whigs occupying common ground with Free-soilers who discarded party attachments in behalf of their cherished convictions.

The result of the election could scarcely be called a Whig victory; but it was a popular rebuke to the Nebraska bill.

The campaign opened with two clearly defined issues--limitation of the liquor traffic and condemnation of the Nebraska Act.

Everything is un-American, he argued, which makes a distinction between the native-born American and the one who renounces his allegiance to a foreign land and swears fealty to the country that adopts him.

Early in the campaign, Greeley favoured dropping the name of Whig and organising an anti-Nebraska or Republican party, with a ticket of Whigs and Democrats, as had been done in some of the Western States.

People realised that a governor no less than a legislature was needed to make laws, and, with the spirit of reformers, the delegates demanded his nomination.

When, at last, the Maine liquor bill, which he had introduced and engineered, passed the Legislature, his name was a household word throughout the State.

He might be broken, but he could not be bent.

As the champion of the Wilmot Proviso concluded, the assembly resembled the Buffalo convention of 1848 at the moment of its declaration for free soil, free speech, free labour, and free men.

He showed that the position of judge in interpreting the law was a very different thing from that of making the law by steering a party into power in a crucial campaign.

In 1819, as secretary of a mass-meeting called to oppose the Missouri Compromise, he had declared that Congress possessed the clear and indisputable power to prohibit the admission of slavery in any State or territory thereafter to be…

Although now well advanced in years, age had not cowed his spirit or lessened the purity of a character which shone in the gentleness of amiable manners; but his pro-slavery platform hit his consistency a hard blow.

Yet after all, the time seemed ripe for the formation of a party whose cardinal principle might be summed up as opposition to the extension of slavery."--James F.

That the different elements of opposition should be fused into one complete whole seemed political wisdom.

These men were now brought together by an absorbing sense of duty and a common impulse of resistance to the encroachments of slavery.

Wit, wisdom, patriotism, and pathos, mingled with the loftiest strains of eloquence, compelled the attention and the admiration of every listener.

Public meetings, full of enthusiasm and noble sentiment, resembled religious gatherings enlisted in a holy war against a great social evil.

So far as one can judge from contemporary accounts he never spoke better than on this occasion; or when it was more evident that he spoke with all the sincere emotion of one whose mind and heart alike were filled with the cause for which…

He was neither impassioned nor always impressive; but when he spoke he seemed to strike a blow that had in it the whole vigour and strength of the public sentiment which he represented.

You may sooner, by act of Congress, compel the sea to suppress its upheavings, and the round earth to extinguish its internal fires.

He marshalled the opposition, and, when he finally took the floor on the 17th of February, he made a legal argument as close, logical, and carefully considered as if addressed to the Supreme Court of the United States.

When it commenced the slavery question seemed settled; when it closed the country was in a ferment.

The struggle of slavery and freedom was now to be fought to a finish.

It is true they say we are all on one platform, but when did we get there?