commonwealths--were brought together in the elections of 1860. It has
been represented and recorded as grave history that the Republican party
was an abolition party. Such was not the fact, although the small and
utterly powerless faction which, under the lead of William Lloyd
Garrison and others, had for years made aggressive war on slavery, was
one of the elements which united with Whigs and Democrats in the
election of Mr. Lincoln. Nor was that result a Whig triumph, though a
large portion of the Whigs in the free States, after the compromises of
1850, from natural antagonism to the Democrats, entered into the
Republican organization. While it is true that a large majority of the
Whigs of the North relinquished their old organization and became
Republicans, it is no less true that throughout the slave States, and
in many of the free States, the members of the Whig party to a
considerable extent supported Bell or Breckenridge. But Democrats
dissatisfied with the measures of the Pierce and Buchanan
administrations, in much larger numbers than is generally conceded, took
early and efficient part in the Republican organizations--some on
account of the repeal of the Missouri compromise, but a much larger
number in consequence of the efforts of the central Government at
Washington, by what was considered by them an abuse of civil trust, and
by military interference, to overpower the settlers in Kansas, denying
them the right of self-government, and an attempt arbitrarily and
surreptitiously to impose upon the inhabitants against their will a
fraudulent Constitution. It was this large contribution of free-thinking
and independent Democrats, who had the courage to throw off party
allegiance and discipline in behalf of the principles of free government
on which our republican system is founded, the right of the people to
self-government, and, consequently, the right to form and establish
their own constitution without dictation or interference from the
central government so long as they violated no provision of the organic
law, that gave tone, form, and ascendancy to the Republican party in
every free State.

Persistent efforts have been made to establish as historical truths the
representations that the civil war had its origin in a scheme or purpose
to abolish slavery in the States where it existed, and that the election
of Abraham Lincoln was an abolition triumph--a premeditated, aggressive,
sectional war upon the South;