ry, or any other authority, could give legal
existence to slavery in any Territory of the United States. It
asserted the sovereign power of Congress over the Territories, and
its right and duty to prohibit it therein. Know-Nothingism received
no recognition, and the double-faced issue of the restoration of
the Missouri compromise was disowned, while the freedom of Kansas
was dealt with as a mere incident of the conflict between liberty
and slavery. On this broad platform John C. Fremont was nominated
for President on the first ballot, and Wm. L. Dayton was unanimously
nominated for Vice-President. The National Republican party was
thus splendidly launched, and nothing seemed to stand in the way
of its triumph but the mischievous action of the Know-Nothing party,
and a surviving faction of pro-slavery Whigs. The former party
met in National Convention in Philadelphia, on the twenty-second
of February, and nominated Millard Fillmore for President and Andrew
J. Donelson for Vice President. Some bolters from this convention
subsequently nominated Nathaniel P. Banks and William F. Johnson
as their candidates, and a remnant of the Whig party held a convention
at Baltimore on the seventeenth of September, and endorsed Fillmore
and Donelson; but a dissatisfied portion of the convention afterward
nominated Commodore Stockton and Kenneth Raynor. All these factions
were destined soon to political extinction, but in a hand-to-hand
fight with the slave power they yet formed a considerable obstacle
to that union and harmony in the free States which were necessary
to success.

The Democratic National Convention met at Cincinnati on the second
of June. The candidates were Buchanan, Pierce, and Douglas. On
the seventeenth ballot Buchanan was unanimously nominated for
President, and on the second ballot John C. Breckenridge was
nominated for Vice President. The platform re-affirmed the action
of Congress respecting the repeal of the Missouri compromise and
the compromises of 1850, and recognized the right of the people of
all the Territories, including Kansas and Nebraska, whenever the
number of their inhabitants justified it, to form a Constitution
with or without domestic slavery, and to be admitted into the Union
upon terms of equality with the other States. These declarations,
together with the express denial to Congress of the right to
interfere with slavery in the Territories, were accepted as
satisfactory to the South