factions--the Abolitionists, the Southern Democrats, the Northern
Democrats, the Constitutional Unionists, and the Republicans. Each of
these factions selected one of the several alternative methods of
solution or evasion, to which the problem of negro slavery could be
reduced, and each deserves its special consideration.

Of the five alternatives, the least substantial was that of the
Constitutional Unionists. These well-meaning gentlemen, composed for the
most part of former Whigs, persisted in asserting that the Constitution
was capable of solving every political problem generated under its
protection; and this assertion, in the teeth of the fact that the Union
had been torn asunder by means of a Constitutional controversy, had
become merely an absurdity. Up to 1850 the position of such
Constitutional Unionists as Webster and Clay could be plausibly
defended; but after the failure of that final compromise, it was plain
that a man of any intellectual substance must seek support for his
special interpretation of the Constitution by means of a special
interpretation of the national idea. That slavery was Constitutional
nobody could deny, any more than they could deny the Constitutionality
of anti-slavery agitation. The real question, to which the controversy
had been reduced, had become, Is slavery consistent with the principle
which constitutes the basis of American national integrity--the
principle of democracy?

Each of the four other factions answered this question in a different
way; and every one of these answers was derived from different aspects
of the system of traditional American ideas. The Abolitionists believed
that a democratic state, which ignored the natural rights proclaimed by
the Declaration of Independence, was a piece of organized political
hypocrisy,--worthy only of destruction. The Southerners believed that
democracy meant above all the preservation of recognized Constitutional
rights in property of all kinds, and freedom from interference in the
management of their local affairs. The Northern Democrats insisted just
as strenuously as the South on local self-government, and tried to erect
it into the constituent principle of democracy; but they were loyal to
the Union and would not admit either that slavery could be nationalized,
or that secession had any legal justification. Finally the Republicans
believed with the Abolitionists that slavery was wrong; while they
believed with the Northern Dem