The strength of the slavery sentiment steadily grew under the aggravations of the pro-slavery men who sought to force slavery into the new Territories of the West, and it was this continued discussion and the outrages perpetrated on the people of Kansas and Nebraska that made the election of a Republican President possible in 1860, and that finally precipitated the Civil War. Buchanan adhered to the South until open rebellion was organized by the capture of forts and arsenals and the organization of a Confederate government, but when he found himself powerless to restrain the South from armed rebellion, he reorganized his Cabinet and exhausted his then wasted powers to bring the South into submission to the Government. He had an aggressively loyal Cabinet during the last few months of his administration, and when he retired, generally denounced by the loyal sentiment of the country as a faithless Executive, he earnestly supported the Government in every measure necessary to suppress the rebellion and prevent the dismemberment of the Republic. He died soon after the close of the war, a thoroughly honest and patriotic public servant, but widely misunderstood. His revolutionary Kansas-Nebraska policy made the Republican revolution of 1860 inevitable, and made Abraham Lincoln President. THE LINCOLN-BRECKENRIDGE-DOUGLAS-BELL CONTEST 1860 In 1860 the nation proclaimed the third great political epoch of its history by an aggressive departure from Democracy to the Republicanism that has since ruled without material interruption. There have been two Democratic administrations since the Republican epoch of 1860, but though they, for the time, halted and modified the Republican policy, they never had the power to make a decisive reversal of Republican mastery. Thus an epoch of twelve years of Federalism, another of sixty years of Democracy, and another of forty years of Republicanism tell the story of the political revolutions of the Republic during a period of one hundred and twelve years.