Mr. Buchanan was elected President upon a political “platform,” adopted by the Cincinnati Convention, which nominated him, and which, like all the platforms of that period, dealt, among other things, with the vexed subject of slavery in Territories. But the Cincinnati platform of the Democratic party did not affirm the right of a Territorial legislature to establish or to prohibit slavery: nor did it admit the doctrine of “popular sovereignty,” as applied to a people while in the Territorial condition. What it did affirm was, that at the period when the people of a Territory should be forming and adopting a State constitution, they should be allowed to sanction or exclude slavery as they should see fit. This distinction has of course no interest at the present day. But in the condition of the Union in the year 1856, this distinction was of great practical importance. The political men who framed the Cincinnati platform had to consider how they could present to the people of the United States a principle of action on this exciting topic of slavery in the Territories, that would be consistent with the rights of slave-holding and non-slaveholding States in the common property of the Union, and at the same time affirm as a party doctrine a basis of proceeding that could be safely applied in any Territory and that would maintain its true relation as a Territory to the Government of the United States. If they were in pursuit of votes for their candidate, it should also be remembered that they were preparing for a great national party a set of political principles that would live and be active for a long time to come. Mr. Douglas had caused the Missouri Compromise to be swept away; he had procured the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which had affirmed something that was both new and strange in the politics of this difficult subject. This was, that in creating the body politic known as a Territory of the United States, Congress should neither legalize nor prohibit slavery while the Territorial condition continued, but that the same species of “popular sovereignty” should be held to be inherent in the people of a Territory that is inherent in the people of a State, so that they could act on the subject of slavery for themselves from the time of their first entry into the Territory and before they had been authorized to form themselves into a State. The ad captandum phrase “popular sovereignty” procured for this theory many adherents. But it was irreconcilable with what others asserted to be the true relation of a Territory to the Congress of the United States, and equally irreconcilable with the claim of the Southern slaveholder to go into a Territory with his property in slaves and to maintain there that property until the State constitution had sanctioned or prohibited it. The framers of the Cincinnati platform did not propose to elect a President on this basis. They therefore did not affirm that a Territorial legislature, or the people of a