, and were fairly interpreted to mean that
the people of the Territories, pending their territorial condition,
had no power to exclude slavery therefrom. In Mr. Buchanan's letter
of acceptance, he completely buried his personality in the platform,
and Albert G. Brown of Mississippi, and Governor Wise of Virginia,
pronounced him as true to the South as Mr. Calhoun himself. These
were the tickets for 1856, but the real contest was between Buchanan
and Fremont. It was pre-eminently a conflict of principles. The
issues could hardly have been better defined, and they were vital.
It was a struggle between two civilizations, between reason and
brute force, between the principles of Democracy and the creed of
Absolutism; and the case was argued with a force, earnestness, and
fervor, never before known. No Presidential contest had ever so
touched the popular heart, or so lifted up and ennobled the people
by the contagion of a great and pervading moral enthusiasm. The
campaign for Buchanan, however, was not particularly animated, at
least in the Northern States. It illustrated the power of party
machinery, and the desperate purpose to press forward along a path
which had been followed too far to call a halt. It was a struggle
for party ascendancy by continual and most humiliating concessions
to the ever-multiplying demands of slavery; and the ardor of the
struggle must have been cooled by many troublesome misgivings as
to the final effect of these concessions, and the policy of purchasing
a victory at such a price.

The excitement of the canvass was aggravated by very exasperating
circumstances. The brutal and cowardly assault of Brooks upon
Sumner was the counterpart of border ruffianism in Kansas, and
perhaps did more to stir the blood of the people of the Northern
States than any of the wholesale outrages thus far perpetrated in
that distant border. These outrages, however, were now multiplied
in all directions, and took on new shapes. They were legislative,
executive, and judicial, cropping out in private pillage and
assassination, in organized marauding and murder, and in armed
violence; and these horrid demonstrations enlivened the canvass to
the end. Republican enthusiasm reached its white heat, borrowing
the self-forgetting devotion and dedicated zeal of a religious
conversion. Banks and tariffs and methods of administration were
completely forgotten, while thousands of Democrats who had been
trained in the