d out that Douglas was
virtually advising a territorial government to nullify a judgment of the
Supreme Court. The cry was caught up in the South and was fatal to
Douglas's hopes of support from that section.

The Charleston Convention, split into two hostile sections, broke up
without a decision. The Douglas men, who were the majority, met at
Baltimore, acclaimed him as Democratic candidate and adopted his
programme. The dissentients held another Convention at Charleston and
adopted Breckinridge with a programme based upon the widest
interpretation of the Dred Scott judgment. To add to the multiplicity of
voices the rump of the old Whig Party, calling themselves the party of
"the Union, the Constitution and the Laws," nominated Everett and Bell.

The split in the Democratic Party helped the Republicans in another than
the obvious fashion of giving them the chance of slipping in over the
heads of divided opponents. It helped their moral position in the North.
It deprived the Democrats of their most effective appeal to Union-loving
men--the assertion that their party was national while the Republicans
were sectional. For Douglas was now practically as sectional as Lincoln.
As little as Lincoln could he command any considerable support south of
the Potomac. Moreover, the repudiation of Douglas seemed to many
Northerners to prove that the South was arrogant and unreasonable beyond
possibility of parley or compromise. The wildest of her protagonists
could not pretend that Douglas was a "Black Abolitionist," or that he
meditated any assault upon the domestic institutions of the Southern
States. If the Southerners could not work with him, with what
Northerner, not utterly and unconditionally subservient to them, could
they work? It seemed to many that the choice lay between a vigorous
protest now and the acceptance of the numerically superior North of a
permanently inferior position in the Confederation.

In his last electoral campaign the "Little Giant" put up a plucky fight
against his enemies North and South. But he had met his Waterloo. In the
whole Union he carried but one State and half of another. The South was
almost solid for Breckinridge. The North and West, from New England to
California, was as solid for Lincoln. A few border States gave their
votes for Everett. But, owing to the now overwhelming numerical
superiority of the Free States, the Republicans had in the Electoral
College a decided majority over all ot