tion to test the validity of the consolidation, the Supreme Court
of the United States on December 6, 1907, declared in favor of the
constitutionality of the act.

XIV

The first national convention of the Republican party was held in
Pittsburgh on February 22 and 23, 1856. While this gathering was an
informal convention, it was made for the purpose of effecting a national
organization of the groups of Republicans which had grown up in the
States where slavery was prohibited. Pittsburgh was, therefore, in a
broad sense, the place where the birth of the Republican party occurred.
A digression on this subject, in order that the record may be made
clear, will probably not be unwelcome.

In 1620, three months before the landing of the _Mayflower_ at
Provincetown, a Dutch vessel carried African slaves up the James River,
and on the soil of Virginia there was planted a system of servitude
which at last extended throughout the Colonies and flourished with
increasing vigor in the South, until, in the War of the Rebellion,
Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation put an end forever to
slavery in America. When the builders of our Government met in the
Constitutional Convention of 1787, slavery was a problem which more than
once threatened to wreck the scheme for an indissoluble union of the
States. But it was compromised under a suggestion implied in the
Constitution itself, that slavery should not be checked in the States
in which it existed until 1808. In the meantime the entire labor system
of the South was built upon African slavery, while at the North the
horror of the public conscience grew against the degrading institution
from year to year. By 1854 the men in the free States who were opposed
to slavery had begun to unite themselves by political bonds, and in the
spring and summer of that year, groups of such men met in more or less
informal conferences in Wisconsin, Michigan, New York, Maine,
Massachusetts, Iowa, Ohio, and other northern States. But it was at
Jackson, Michigan, where the men who were uniting their political
fortunes to accomplish the destruction of slavery first assembled in a
formal convention on July 6, 1854, nominated a full State ticket, and
adopted a platform containing these declarations:

Resolved: That, postponing and suspending all differences with
regard to political economy or administrative policy, in view of
the imminent danger that Kansas and Nebraska will be grasped