ery Northern institution--in the fierce struggle that
ushered in and succeeded the admission of California, between 1848 and
1856--this Northern superiority culminated in a great political movement
against slavery. _This movement assumed a double form-positive, in the
assertion that the Slave Power should be arrested; negative, in the
assertion that the people should have their own way with it._ The
Republican party said: _The slave aristocracy shall go no farther._ The
'Popular Sovereignty' party, or Douglas Democracy, said: _The people
shall do what they choose about this matter._ Now the people were
already the superior power in the republic, and were rapidly growing to
hate the Slave Power; so the slaveholders, saw that the Northern
Democracy, with their war cry of _popular sovereignty_, might in time be
just as dangerous to them as their more open enemies. They repudiated
both forms of Northern politics, and tied the executive, under James
Buchanan, and the Supreme Court, under Judge Taney, to their dogma: _The
right of the aristocracy is supreme. Slavery, not liberty, is the law of
the republic._

The great leaders of these Northern parties were Stephen H. Douglas and
William H. Seward. Mr. Douglas was the best practical politician,
popular debater, and magnetizer of the masses, the North has yet
produced. _He was the representative of the blind power of the North_,
and stood up all his life, in his better hours, for the right of the
people to make the republic what they would. But the representative
statesman of the era is the Secretary of State. The whole career of Mr.
Seward is so interwoven with the history of the political consolidation
of the people against the Slave Power, that the two must be studied
together to be understood. Nowhere so clearly and eloquently as in the
pages of this great philosophical statesman can be read the rapid growth
of that political movement that in twelve years captured every Free
State, placed a President in the chair, and then, with a splendid
generosity, invited the whole loyal people to unite in a party of the
Union, _knowing that henceforth the Union meant the people and liberty
against the aristocracy and slavery_. And only in the light of this view
can the course of this man and his great seeming opponent, but real
associate, be fitly displayed. _Douglas had taught the people of the
North that their will should be the law of the republic. Seward had told
them that will sh