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[116] opposition that the constitutional enactments and the voice of the majority might encounter. Such a theory, logically applied, would lead to endless divisions and to the destruction of all nationality, for no confederation could have existed under such conditions; the States themselves would soon have been broken up by the claims of the counties of which they were composed to separate from them; and if the Northern States had sanctioned this theory by allowing the slaveholders quietly to withdraw from the Union, they could not have prevented other secessions from taking place in their midst, at the first symptom of those inevitable differences the solution of which had hitherto been left to the popular vote. We have already shown how little the Southern leaders thought of State sovereignty as soon as they had organized their new Confederacy; but at the time of which we speak this fatal doctrine had taken a strong hold of the public mind in all the slave States, and it dragged the most loyal citizens into the rebellion, as soon as the usurping legislatures had declared in favor of separation. The various parties went to work early in the spring of 1860 to prepare for the Presidential elections which were to take place in November. On the 23d of April all the delegates of the Democratic party met in convention at Charleston. The drawing up of a programme or platform—to use the popular term—was the first task of those preliminary assemblies, after which, the choice of candidates destined to carry out that programme was more easy and had a more definite meaning; for the Americans have acquired the habit in political life of attaching more importance to principles than to persons. The Democratic party in the free States, so far as any calculations could be made, was nearly as numerous as the Republican party; it had adopted for its programme, under the name of Popular Sovereignty, the right of every new State or Territory to adopt or to exclude slavery. Its alliance with the Democrats of the South had already triumphed in many elections; this alliance had only to be continued to secure the nomination of Mr. Douglas, the recognized chief of the Northern Democrats. But the slaveholders of the South, as it has already been stated, desired to push matters to extremes. They demanded
Philadelphia, Jos. H. Coates and co., 1876.
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