Liberty or Abolitionist party, but the Union
party that won." [109]

Postponement of secession for ten years gave the North preponderance
in population, voting power, production, and transportation; new
party organization; and convictions which made man-power and economic
resources effective. The Northern lead of four million people in 1850
had increased to seven millions by 1860. In 1850, each section had
thirty votes in the Senate; in 1860, the North had a majority of six,
due to the admission of California, Oregon, and Minnesota. In the House
of Representatives, the North had added seven to her majority. The Union
states and territories built during the decade 15,000 miles of railroad,
to 7,000 or 8,000 in the eleven seceding states. In shipping, the North
in 1860 built about 800 vessels to the seceding states' 200. In 1860,
in the eleven most important industries for war, Chadwick estimates that
the Union states produced $735,500,000; the seceding states $75,250,000,
"a manufacturing productivity eleven times as great for the North as for
the South". [110] In general, during the decade, the census figures
for 1860 show that since 1850 the North had increased its man-power,
transportation, and economic production from two to fifty times as fast
as the South, and that in 1860 the Union states were from two to twelve
times as powerful as the seceding states.

Possibly Southern secessionists and Northern abolitionists had some
basis for thinking that the North would let the "erring sisters depart
in peace" in 1850. Within the next ten years, however, there came a
decisive change. The North, exasperated by the Kansas-Nebraska Act of
1854, the high-handed acts of Southerners in Kansas in 1856, and the
Dred Scott dictum of the Supreme Court in 1857, felt that these things
amounted to a repeal of the Missouri Compromise and the opening up of
the territory to slavery. In 1860 Northern conviction, backed by an
effective, thorough party platform on a Union basis, swept the free
states. In 1850, it was a "Constitutional Union" party that accepted the
Compromise and arrested secession in the South; and Webster, foreseeing
a "remodelling of parties", had prophesied that "there must be a Union
party". [111] Webster's spirit and speeches and his strengthening of
federal power through Supreme Court cases won by his arguments had
helped to furnish the conviction which underlay the Union Party of 1860
and 1964. His consistent opposi