The terrors of the wars 3

In the House of Representatives which met in December, 1855, the anti-Nebraska men were
divided among themselves, and the Know-Nothings held the balance of power. No candidate for
the speakership, however, was able to command a majority, and finally, after it had been agreed
that a plurality would be sufficient, the contest closed, on the one hundred and thirty-third ballot,
with the election of a Republican, N. P. Banks. Meanwhile in the South, the Whigs were rapidly
leaving the party, pausing a moment with the Know-Nothings, only to find that their inevitable
resting-place, under stress of sectional feeling, was with the Democrats.
On Washington's birthday, 1856, the Know-Nothing national convention met at Philadelphia. It
promptly split upon the subject of slavery, and a portion of its membership sent word offering
support to another convention which was sitting at Pittsburgh, and which had been called to form
a national organization for the Republican party. A third assembly held on this same day was
composed of the newspaper editors of Illinois, and may be looked upon as the organization of the
Republican party in that state. At the dinner following this informal convention, Lincoln, who
was one of the speakers, was toasted as "the next United States Senator."
Some four months afterward, in Philadelphia, the Republicans held their first national
convention. Only a few years previous its members had called themselves by various names-Democrats, Free-Soilers, Know-Nothings, Whigs. The old hostilities of these different groups
had not yet died out. Consequently, though Seward was far and away the most eminent member
of the new party, he was not nominated for President. That dangerous honor was bestowed upon
a dashing soldier and explorer of the Rocky Mountains and the Far West, John C. Fremont.*
*For an account of Fremont, see Stewart Edward White, "The Forty-Niners" (in "The Chronicles
of America"), Chapter II.
The key to the political situation in the North, during that momentous year, was to be found in
the great number of able Whigs who, seeing that their own party was lost but refusing to be
sidetracked by the make-believe issue of the Know-Nothings, were now hesitating what to do.
Though the ordinary politicians among the Republicans doubtless wished to conciliate these
unattached Whigs, the astuteness of the leaders was too great to allow them to succumb to that
temptation. They seem to have feared the possible effect of immediately incorporating in their
ranks, while their new organization was still so plastic, the bulk of those conservative classes
which were, after all, the backbone of this irreducible Whig minimum.
The Republican campaign was conducted with a degree of passion that had scarcely been
equaled in America before that day. To the well-ordered spirit of the conservative classes the tone
which the Republicans assumed appeared shocking. Boldly sectional in their language, sweeping
in their denunciation of slavery, the leaders of the campaign made bitter and effective use of a
number of recent events. "Uncle Tom's Cabin", published in 1852, and already immensely

popular, was used as a political tract to arouse, by its gruesome picture of slavery, a hatred of
slaveholders. Returned settlers from Kansas went about the North telling horrible stories of
guerrilla warfare, so colored as to throw the odium all on one side. The scandal of the moment
was the attack made by Preston Brooks on Sumner, after the latter's furious diatribe in the
Senate, which was published as "The Crime Against Kansas". With double skill the Republicans
made equal capital out of the intellectual violence of the speech and the physical violence of the
retort. In addition to this, there was ready to their hands the evidence of Southern and
Democratic sympathy with a filibustering attempt to conquer the republic of Nicaragua, where
William Walker, an American adventurer, had recently made himself dictator. Walker had
succeeded in having his minister acknowledged by the Democratic Administration, and in
obtaining the endorsement of a great Democratic meeting which was held in New York. It
looked, therefore, as if the party of political evasion had an anchor to windward, and that, in the
event of their losing in Kansas, they intended to placate their Southern wing by the annexation of
Nicaragua.
Here, indeed, was a stronger political tempest than Douglas, weatherwise though he was, had
foreseen. How was political evasion to brave it? With a courage quite equal to the boldness of the
Republicans, the Democrats took another tack and steered for less troubled waters. Their
convention at Cincinnati was temperate and discreet in all its expressions, and for President it
nominated a Northerner, James Buchanan of Pennsylvania, a man who was wholly dissociated in
the public mind from the struggle over Kansas.
The Democratic party leaders knew that they already had two strong groups of supporters.
Whatever they did, the South would have to go along with them, in its reaction against the
furious sectionalism of the Republicans. Besides the Southern support, the Democrats counted
upon the aid of the professional politicians--those men who considered politics rather as a
fascinating game than as serious and difficult work based upon principle. Upon these the
Democrats could confidently rely, for they already had, in Douglas in the North and Toombs in
the South, two master politicians who knew this type and its impulses intimately, because they
themselves belonged to it. But the Democrats needed the support of a third group. If they could
only win over the Northern remnant of the Whigs that was still unattached, their position would
be secure. In their efforts to obtain this