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Not only had Lincoln's name for nearly two years found constant mention in the newspapers, but both friendly and hostile comment had coupled it with the two ranking political leaders in the free-States Seward and Douglas.

Under this theory, the courts of slave States had generally accorded freedom to slaves, even when acquired by the laws of a free-State, and reciprocally the courts of free-States had enforced the master's right to his slave where that right depended on the laws of a slave-State.

All these devices had, however, confessedly failed of their object. Northern emigration and anti-slavery sentiment were clearly in possession of Kansas, and a majority of voters stood ready upon fair occasion to place her in the column of free-States. It had become a game on the chess-board of national politics. The moving pieces stood in Missouri and Kansas, but the players sat in Washington.

By Shelton F. Leake, of Virginia: No constitutional power to abolish slavery or slave-trade in the States, Territories, or District of Columbia. Protection to slavery in Territories, and in transit through or sojourn in free-States. Fugitive slaves lost through State legislation, or by act of State authorities, to be paid for.

The popular vote in the nation at large stood: Buchanan, 1,838,169; Frémont, 1,341,264; Fillmore, 874,534. By States Buchanan received the votes of fourteen slave-States and five free-States, a total of 174 electors; Frémont the vote of eleven free-States, a total of 114 electors; and Fillmore the vote of one slave-State, a total of eight electors. In the campaign which preceded Mr.

On the whole, the principal results of the struggle were, to sectionalize parties more completely, ripen Southern sentiment towards secession, and combine wavering voters in the free-States in support of Republican doctrines. On the night of May 24-25, 1856, five pro-slavery men living on Pottawatomie Creek, in Kansas, were mysteriously and brutally assassinated.

In reality it was a double game. There was plot and under-plot. Beneath the struggle between the free-States and the slave-States were the intrigue and deception carried on between Northern Democrats and Southern Democrats. The Kansas-Nebraska act was a double-tongued statute, and the Cincinnati platform a Janus-faced banner.

She did not need an amendment of the fugitive-slave act, or a repeal of personal liberty bills, but a change in the public sentiment of the free-States.

The great anti-slavery public was not slow in making a practical application of its dogmas: that a sweeping and revolutionary exposition of the Constitution had been attempted when confessedly the case and question had no right to be in court; that an evident partisan dictum of national judges had been built on an avowed partisan decision of State judges; that both the legislative and judicial authority of the nation had been trifled with; that the settler's "sovereignty" in Kansas consisted only of a Southern planter's right to bring his slaves there; and that if under the "property" theory the Constitution carries slavery to the Territories, it would by the same inevitable logic carry it into free-States.

Among them the voters by undisputed constitutional majorities, in orderly, legal, and unquestioned proceedings, chose the candidate whose platform pronounced the final popular verdict that slavery should not be extended, and whose election unchangeably transferred the balance of power to the free-States.