to turn favorably towards him who were not of his party, and gave him extensive strength. While the slave power, moreover, flung Pierce aside after squeezing dry the pulp of his popularity, it judged favorably of "Old Buck," the Northern partner in the "Ostend manifesto," as an instrument to use next; nor, as the sequel will show, did it judge wholly amiss.

Fremont, the Republican antagonist, brought rash youth once more into comparison, but his selection was carefully made; and, though the gallant pathfinder might not have been a judicious leader to gather the first fruits of a national victory, his brilliant and dashing energy well quali fied him to rally the anti-slavery hosts, where the hope was not so much to win as to gain confidence. Not the least of Fremont's qualifications in this latter respect was his romantic espousal of Benton's gifted daughter, by which the new party seemed to ally itself to a second of those border-State families, like the Blairs, Jacksonian by recollection, whose influence at the time was well worth courting, and which even flattered the false hope that Republicanism was capable of being planted upon slave soil, thus ceasing at once to be geographical in the persuasive spread of moral ideas. As for Fillmore, the American candidate, his selection had been virtually made and accepted nearly a year previous, and before he took a tour abroad, from which he returned this summer in time to participate in the canvass. Fillmore and Americanism rallied the decimated bands of conservatives and oldfashioned lovers of parchment, for whom moral compromise and the ligaments of systems irreconcilable had still a magic. "Sectional," "geographical," were epithets now applied to the Republican organization, even more repelling than "Freedom shriekers," "Nigger worshippers," or that favorite Southern sobriquet of "Black Republicans.” Many old-time Whigs in the free States, lately influential, like Everett, Winthrop, and Washington Hunt, thought, as the latter once expressed himself, that while wishing to prevent wrong on the slavery question, they could not make it the sole object of their thoughts to the exclusion

1856.

A GEOGRAPHICAL CAMPAIGN.

355

of "more practical concerns; " and the small fry of rotten coalitionists and squint-brained reformers that wriggled in the net of the new party among fish of better size, repelled them. Hence they preferred to ride in the lumbering old stage coach, where the company was sure to be select, with Crittenden and many other honorable slaveholders to keep up national affiliations, even though the carriage should come in last. Fillmore himself, however, thought he had at least an even chance of winning, and was much exalted by the Know-Nothing success in New York the previous year. In a campaign speech he now advanced the new and astounding doctrine, that if a political party should succeed which selected, as these Republicans had done for the first time in our annals, candidates for both Presidency and Vice-Presidency from the free States alone to rule over the whole Union, such a humiliation to the South ought to justify that section in withdrawing allegiance.†

True was it, in a physical sense, that the present Republican party began by being geographical. But this was from the force of accidental circumstances, and because the South had departed from the faith of the fathers, and refused either to have emancipation discussed or to confine the slave system to the fifteen States in which it now existed. In the truly enlightened sense it was slavery that was sectional and geographical, while freedom was national and universal. And yet, in the prevailing opinion of the voting mass, North as well as South, Republicanism this year was doomed to defeat; such was the reverence felt for Union, as influenced by long precedent and the equilibrium of systems. At the same time, earnestness prevailed over insipid allegiance on either side. of the border. The August State elections showed in Missouri, North Carolina, Arkansas, Kentucky, and Texas a decided and generally an increased Democratic prepon

* 2 T. Weed's Memoirs, c. 18.

Newspapers of the day; 2 T. Weed's Memoirs, c. 18; 2 Coleman's Crittenden, 133; 2 Curtis's Buchanan.

derance over the American fraternizers. And Northern States, such as Iowa, Vermont, and Maine, pronounced themselves Republican, - Hannibal Hamlin, a Senator who had lately renounced the Democratic faith, being chosen governor in the last-named State. The October State elections, however, turned the scales of a close national contest; for while in Ohio the Republicans strongly prevailed, Pennsylvania and Indiana went Democratic, and a fusion of Republicans and Americans in the Keystone State was effected in vain. November came, with the last of State elections, the vote for national candidates, and the chilling frost together. New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Indiana, and Illinois were all in the Democratic column. But the rest of the free States pushed gallantly forward for Fremont; while New York chose, besides, a governor upon the new platform of the Jeffersonian ordinance, in John A. King, a triumph all the more glorious inasmuch as "Hards" and "Softs" had coalesced upon their candidates, and drawn forth from the senile ex-President Van Buren a letter which seemed to discredit his own FreeSoil course of 1848.

"We have lost a battle," was the comment of a Republican organ * on the day after election; "the Bunker Hill of the new struggle for freedom is past; the Saratoga and Yorktown are yet to be achieved." And surely, when these electoral results were fully reckoned, they might well have carried dismay to the citadel of pro-slavery strength. Never had so great a work been done by a political party within the first year of its birth, against deep and inveterate prejudices which were too irrational not to diminish, should provocation to free sentiment continue. "Black Republicanism" carried New England; swept the great State of New York, burying a oncehonored son, Millard Fillmore, in lasting discomfiture; and, despite some disappointments encountered elsewhere, took vigorous and emphatic possession of the broad Northwest. Pennsylvania had borne up her favorite son,

*The New York Tribune.

1856.

BUCHANAN CHOSEN PRESIDENT.

357

Buchanan, by an electoral majority of scarcely more than 1,000, in a total vote of over 460,000; Indiana's margin, too, was very close; and the transfer of these two States -or of Pennsylvania alone, with New Jersey or Illinois added to the Republican column would have reversed the national result, against the united phalanx of the solid South. For the Native-Americans, with their proscriptive tenets, the defeat was overwhelming. Fillmore and Donnelson carried but a single State, Maryland; and the minorities footed up by their party in every other Southern State promised but a feeble resistance of loyalty to that bolder programme favored in that section, of "rule or ruin." Natives against foreigners, Protestants against Roman Catholics, no union of Church and State, more stringent naturalization laws, all this was but as dust in the balance in these days; and as for the slavery problem in its present national development, neither foes nor promoters could ever compromise again.'

The American people were not, then, quite ready to plunge into sectional controversy; nor, to be frank, did they quite believe all that orators depicted in the late. canvass, of "bleeding Kansas" or "bleeding Sumner." Northern Know-Nothings, indeed, and the secret Hindoo council, passed the victim by like the priest and Levite of the parable, too honorable to hurt, and too scrupulous of national citizenship to help. It was not strange if, in the dead level of lawlessness which the wrongs of our distant territorial rule fostered, the want of picturesqueness detracted from the effect. Following the arrest of Robinson and the flight of the other free-State leaders, squatter sovereignty in Kansas lapsed for many months into chaos and civil disorder, while these Maygreen and fertile plains were ravaged at large by August. armed robbers and ruffians. Lecompte's judicial machinery, whose process had been perverted to hounding down territorial treason, and marching ragamuffin rioters

* See Electoral Tables in Appendix.

with shot-guns and powder-flasks as a posse comitatus, could scarcely bring a cattle thief to honest trial. Free settlers were murdered; friends of the murderer were murdered in retaliation. Plundering parties spread over Kansas to harass and expel the peaceful.

Into the cold narrative of these atrocities—which, unfortunately, were not all committed on one side - we refrain from entering. One of the pacifying proposals brought forward in Congress by Crittenden, the last of slavery's pacificators, had been to despatch Winfield Scott to the scene, in all the plenitude of his military greatness. But Scott was no favorite of this administration, being almost at swords' points with the Secretary of War. An excellent officer of high rank was sent, however, in Gen. Persifer F. Smith, who took command presently of the regular troops in this military department, but was chary about using them, heeding the temper the House had lately shown on the army appropriation bill. All through the summer, emigrants from the free States had been on the move for Kansas, resolute in the cause, and arriving by the hundreds. Atchison and the border-Missourians tried in alarm to interdict their passage. The banks of the Missouri river were guarded by pro-slavery pickets, steamboats were stopped and searched, arms were confiscated, and individuals suspected to be from the North were turned back. But Kansas could be reached by more routes than one, and the intercepted colonists soon began taking up a new route through Iowa and Nebraska; more than three hundred of them, with women and children, being circuitously led to their destination by the irrepressible Lane, early in August. Topeka became thus repopulated, and new free towns began to spring up on the way, Lawrence and Lecompton becoming the rallying-points of intestine turbulence. Governor Shannon, whose views concerning territorial traitors and treason had undergone considerable change, after being brought face to face with the opposing

The whole story of the Kansas civil war is faithfully and graphically recounted in Spring's Kansas, cs. 7-9.