ld, and won,
not yet the country, but the strongholds of the North. The new party
gave expression and effect to the anti-slavery sentiment which had
become so deep and wide. It was wholly dissociated from the extremists
who had shocked and alarmed the conservatism of the country; and
Garrison and Phillips had only impatience and scorn for its principles
and measures. Its leadership included many men experienced in
congressional and administrative life, men like Seward and Sumner and
Chase and Wade and Fessenden and Banks, who had matched themselves
against the best leaders of the South and the South's Northern allies.
It brought together the best of the old Whig, Democratic, and Free Soil
parties. In its rank and file it gathered on the whole the best
conscience and intelligence of the North. After the election the
_Springfield Republican_ pointed out that the party's success had been
exactly along the geographical lines of an efficient free-school system,
and it had been defeated where public schools were deficient, as in
Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Indiana, and the solid South.

The immediate and burning issue of the campaign was Kansas. Whatever the
exact right and wrong of its local broils, there was no question of the
broad facts--the fraudulent election of the Legislature, the character
of its statute-book, and its support by President Pierce's
administration. It was the wrongs of the Kansas settlers far more than
the wrongs of the Southern slaves on which the Republican speakers and
newspapers dwelt. In truth the animus of the party was quite as much
the resentment by the North of Southern political aggression as it was
regard for the slaves or thought of their future condition. The policy
of excluding slavery from the Territories, and thus naturally from the
new States, tended ultimately to its discouragement and probable
extinction where it already existed. But any such result appeared very
remote.

The opposition to the Republican party was weighty in numbers, but
inharmonious and with no definite creed. The Democratic platform was an
equivocation. It declared for "non-interference by Congress with slavery
in State or Territory." But this left it an open question whether any
one could "interfere." Could the people of a Territory exclude slavery
if they wished? Or did the Constitution protect it there, as Calhoun and
his followers claimed? An ambiguity was left which permitted Calhoun men
and Douglas men to act