judgment entered, to revolutionize public law and to give slavery a home in every Territory independently of the will of the community inhabiting the Territory, the wrath of the people rose against it, the Supreme Court was itself discredited, and the concurring judges bore, to their death, a burden of obloquy. The "opinion" reacted upon the cause in whose interest it was made, and sharply intensified the continuing agitation.

One cordial voice, however, greeted it. It was the voice of the Executive of the Nation. President Buchanan had long held to the view that Congress possessed the power which it had repeatedly exercised, and which the Dred Scott" opinion" denounced. But he made haste to accept the new gospel and tender it to the country as a cure-all for the evils of the political situation. He informed Congress, February 2, 1858, when transmitting the Lecompton Constitution, that "Slavery exists in Kansas by virtue of the Constitution of the United States." And he urged Congress to admit the State into the Union at once, under the transmitted constitution. On the forefront of that instrument was the promise that the "right of property is before and higher than any constitutional sanction, and the right of the owner of a slave in Kansas to such a slave and its increase is the same and as inviolable as the right of the owner of any property whatever." But the people of Kansas by a majority of 10,000 votes, at a special election thereon, refused to accept admission in that way, and they remained in a territorial condition until after the Presidential election of 1860. The State was admitted January 29, 1861, under a "free State" constitution, and what President Buchanan in his message of February 2, 1858, denounced as the "treasonable pertinacity" of the people in resisting the fraud and violence used to force slavery on them was at last rewarded.

Meantime the contest in Kansas continued. The struggle for supremacy was seen to be between two widely different civilizations, and was marked by every form of bitterness. The State was, in a sense, a camp. United States troops were required to preserve a semblance of order. One territorial governor after another, sent out by the Administration, found himself unable to carry out the policy required by the Administra

tion, and resigned. The controversies spread to every neighborhood, in the North and in the South. The North smarted under a sense of injury, the South under a fear of loss of power. To the one the Dred Scott "opinion" had come as a blow which angered; to the other, as a touch which incited. lust of dominion. Under such circumstances, and in complications of a portentous character, all dating from the fateful repeal of the Missouri Compromise, the Presidential election of 1860 summoned the country to a momentous duty.

THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION OF 1860.

The Republican National Convention in its declaration of principles did not advance beyond the lines fixed in 1856.

In one respect it made a more emphatic utterance. In 1856 it declared for the preservation of the "right of the States." In 1860 it defined more clearly its position. It declared that "the maintenance inviolate of the rights of the States, and especially the right of each State to order and control its own domestic institutions according to its own judgment exclusively, is essential to that balance of power on which the perfection and endurance of our political fabric depends." It added a denunciation of the "reckless extravagance which pervades every department" of the Buchanan administration. It pronounced for "such an adjustment of imposts as to encourage the development of the industrial interests of the whole country." It demanded the use of the public lands for actual settlers, and a complete "homestead measure." The key-notes of its position were the assertion that slavery was a "purely local interest," and the denial that the "personal relation between master and servant involved an unqualified property in persons."

The Democratic National Convention broke into two factions; but the difference was more as to persons than things. For the Douglas wing, after re-affirming the double-faced Cincinnati resolutions of 1856, added a declaration that the measure of restriction imposed by the Federal Constitution on the power of a territorial legislature over the subject of the domestic relations when finally determined by the Supreme Court of the United States "should be respected by all good citizens,

and enforced with promptness and fidelity by every branch of the General Government." This was regarded as an acquiescence, more or less frank, in the Dred Scott "opinion." The Breckenridge wing on the other hand, distinctly denied the power of Congress or a territorial legislature to impair the security of slave "property" in any of the Territories, and as distinctly asserted the duty of the Federal Government in all its departments to protect such rights in the Territories.

Thus, all parties agreed as to the complete and exclusive control of the States over slavery within their limits. As to slavery in the Territories, the Republicans affirmed the Congressional right and duty to prohibit. The Douglas Democrats held to the doctrine of Congressional non-interference, and to. a popular sovereignty power in the Territories subject to the Constitution as construed by the Supreme Court. And the Breckenridge Democrats asserted the inviolability of the slaveholders' rights except as limited by State constitutions. A divided Democracy polled 2,223,110 votes. The Republicans polled 1,866,452 votes. A third party, "Constitutional Union," whose candidate was John Bell, polled 590,631 votes. But in the Electoral College, Abraham Lincoln received 180 out of 302 votes, and was elected. He was in a minority on the popular vote of 947,289 votes. He carried every Northern State except New Jersey, in which he received four electoral votes and John Bell three. Douglas carried Missouri alone. Bell carried Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia, and Breckinridge the remaining fourteen States. Lincoln was therefore the constitutionally elected President, though his party was in a larger minority of the popular vote than any other successful candidate had ever been. His declared policy involved resistance only to the indefinite extension of slavery over the Territories of the Union. It involved interference with slavery in no State in the Union. And his election was due to divisions among his adversaries divisions which were fostered by a disunion interest in the South with a view to produce the result which had been reached, and thus to furnish the occasion for secession and separation. Their act was doubly perfidious-an act of perfidy to their party, and an act of treachery to their country.

THE SECESSION MOVEMENT.

The election occurred on the 6th day of November, 1860. By the 7th of November, the machinery for promoting the secession of all the slave States was put in motion, and by the 18th of February, 1861, two weeks before the inauguration of Abraham Lincoln as President of the United States, Jefferson Davis had been elected and inaugurated as President of the "Confederate States," had organized his Cabinet, and had pre pared himself for the issue which had been made by them with the United States.

It is now known that this movement was not made without careful consideration and calculation of probable results. It is also known that it was made in the full conviction that friends of slavery in the North would not permit the new Administration to use force to overcome it.

This conviction was based upon personal assurances of which some proofs remain. For instance, there was found in the Mississippi home of Jefferson Davis, when captured by our troops, a letter from ex-President Franklin Pierce, written from the Clarendon Hotel, New York City, during the year before (on January 6, 1860), in which he says that he has never believed that actual disruption of the Union could occur without blood, and that if that dire calamity should come through the madness of Northern abolitionism, the fighting will not be along Mason and Dixon's line merely, "but within our own borders, in our own streets," between those who respect their political obligations and those who have apparently no impelling power but that which fanatical passion on the subject of domestic slavery imparts.

The Democracy of Philadelphia, at a meeting on the 16th of January, 1861, presided over by an intimate personal friend of President Buchanan, two days before the election of Jefferson Davis as President of the Confederacy, resolved that if the South should separate from the Union, Pennsylvania's sympathy would be "with our brethren of the South whose wrongs we feel as our own."

Ex-Governor Rodman M. Price of New Jersey, in the spring of 1861, wrote to M. F. Maury of Fredericksburg, Va., that in the event of secession, New Jersey "would go with the South from every wise, prudential, and patriotic consideration." A seceding Representative from South Carolina, de claiming for secession after the November election in 1860, declared, amid thunders of applause by a Charleston audience, "that there are a million of Democrats in the North who, when the Black Republicans attempt to march upon the South, will be found a wall of fire in the front "- -a boast to which the facts already stated and the editorials of such newspapers as the New York Herald of November 9, 1860, which claimed for each State "the right to break the tie of the Confederation, as a nation might break a treaty, and to repel coercion as a nation might repel invasion," and the Albany Argus of November 10, 1860, which in a contingency declared itself ready to applaud Southern "resort to revolution and a separation from the Union," and the speeches and action of the representative Democrats of New York in their meeting of January 31, 1861, lent every appearance of probability.

When the secession movement began, the two Democratic Representatives from California openly advocated the secession of the Pacific Coast States and the creation of a Pacific Republic. Democrats in the West openly discussed the expediency of organizing a Western Republic. And Fernando Wood, then Democratic mayor of the city of New York, in his message of January 6, 1861, suggested whether the time had not now come for New York City to throw off its allegiance both to the State of New York and to the Union, and to become a "free city." He descanted upon the commercial and other advantages which that city would derive from such a step.

PRESIDENT BUCHANAN'S MESSAGE.

Much of the demoralization which these suggestions disclose was due to the position taken by the Buchanan administration before the secession of a single State. That " public functionary" failed to utter in his Annual Message of Decem