401. The Constitutional Union Party. Meanwhile (May 9) another party, calling itself the National Constitutional Union party, met at Baltimore. These men were the remnants of the old Whig and American or Know-nothing parties. They nominated John Bell, of Tennessee, and Edward Everett, of Massachusetts, and declared for "the Constitution of the country, the union of the states, and the enforcement of the laws."

402. Election of Lincoln.—The Republican party met in convention at Chicago on May 16, and nominated Abraham Lincoln, and Hannibal Hamlin of Maine. It

1. Repudiated the principles of the Dred Scott decision. 2. Demanded the admission of Kansas as a free state.

3. Denied all sympathy with any kind of interference with slavery in the states.

4. Insisted that the territories must be kept free.

5. Called for a railroad to the Pacific, and a homestead law.

The election took place in November, 1860. Of 303 electoral votes cast, Lincoln received 180; Breckinridge, 72; Bell, 39; and Douglas, 12.

SUMMARY

1. The Compromise of 1850 did not settle the question of slavery in the territories, and an attempt to organize Kansas and Nebraska brought it up again.

2. In the organization of these territories a new political doctrine, "popular sovereignty," was announced.

3. This was applied in Kansas, and the struggle for Kansas began. The first territorial government was proslavery. The antislavery men then made a constitution (Topeka) and formed a free state government. Thereupon the proslavery men formed a constitution (Lecompton) for a slave state. This was submitted to Congress and rejected, and Kansas remained a territory till 1861.

4. In the course of the struggle for free soil in Kansas the Whig party went to pieces, the Democratic was split into two wings, and the Know-nothing or Native American party and the Republican party

arose.

5. The Republican party was defeated in 1856, but the Dred Scott decision in 1857 and the continued struggle in Kansas forced the question of slavery to the front, and in 1860 Lincoln was elected.

403. The Movement of Population.

to us.

The twenty years which elapsed between the election of Harrison, in 1840, and the election of Lincoln, in 1860, had seen a most astonishing change in our country. In 1840 neither Texas, nor the immense region afterwards acquired from Mexico, belonged There were then but twenty-six states and five territories, inhabited by 17,000,000 people, of whom but 876,000 lived west of the Mississippi River, mostly close to the river bank in Missouri, Arkansas, and Louisiana. The great Northwest was still a wilderness, and many a city now familiar to us had no existence. Toledo and Milwaukee and Indianapolis had each less than 3000 inhabitants; Chicago had less

than 5000; and Cleveland, Columbus, and Detroit, each less than 10,000. Yet the rapid growth of cities had been one of the characteristics of the period 1830 to 1840.

The effect of new mechanical appliances on the movement of population was amazing. The day when emigrants settled along the banks of streams, pushed their boats up the rivers by means of poles, carried their goods on the backs of pack horses, and floated their produce in Kentucky broadhorns down the Ohio and Mississippi to New Orleans, was fast disappearing. The steamboat, the canal, the railroad, had opened new possibilities. Land once valueless as too far from market suddenly became valuable. Men grew loath to live in a wilderness; the rush of emigrants across the Mississippi was checked. The region between the Alleghanies and the great river began to fill up rapidly. During the twenty years, 1821 to 1841, but two states, Arkansas (1836), and Michigan (1837), were admitted to the Union, and but three new territories, Florida (1822-23), Wisconsin (1836), and Iowa (1838), were established.

So few people went west from the Atlantic seaboard states that in each one of them except Maine and Georgia population increased more rapidly than it had ever done for forty years. From the Mississippi valley states, however, numbers of people went to Wisconsin and Iowa.

In consequence of this, Iowa was admitted to the Union in 1846, and Wisconsin in 1848. Minnesota and Oregon were made territories. Florida and Texas had been admitted in 1845, and the number of states was thus raised to thirty before 1850. The population of the country in 1850 was 23,000,000. Two states in the Mississippi valley now had each of them more than a million of inhabitants.

404. The First States on the Pacific. - Until 1850 the people had moved westward steadily. Each state as it was admitted had always touched some other state east, or north, or south of it. After 1850 the people, attracted by the gold mines in California, or the rich farming land and pleasant climate of Oregon, rushed across the plains to the Pacific, and between