Slavery and four years of war : $b a political history of slavery in the United States, together with a narrative of the campaigns and battles of the Civil War in which the author took part, 1861-1865. Vols. 1-2Keifer, Joseph Warren
History
Slavery and four years of war : $b a political history of slavery in the United States, together with a narrative of the campaigns and battles of the Civil War in which the author took part, 1861-1865. Vols. 1-2
Keifer, Joseph Warren
Slavery -- United States; United States -- History -- Civil War, 1861-1865 -- Campaigns
Douglas failed of nomination at Charleston for want of a two thirds
vote of the entire convention as originally organized. The convention
adjourned to meet, June 11th, at Baltimore, and the seceding branch
of it also adjourned to meet at the same time at Richmond, but
later it decided to meet with and again become a part of the
convention at Baltimore. At this time the South had control of
the Senate, and May 25, 1860, before the convention reassembled,
and after a most acrimonious debate into which Douglas was drawn
and in which Jefferson Davis bitterly assailed him, the resolutions
of the latter were passed, affirming the "_property_" theory, with
the new doctrine of constitutional protection of it in the Territories
added.
The convention reassembled, and at the end of five days' wrangle
and recrimination, during which the members called each other
"disorganizers," "bolters," "traitors," "disunionists," "abolitionists,"
accompanied by violent threats, it disrupted again, its chairman,
Caleb Cushing, of Massachusetts, led the bolters and was followed
by the delegates generally from the Southern States. They organized
at once a separate convention.
Douglas was nominated by the originally organized convention, and
John C. Breckinridge by the bolters, each on the sharply defined
platform relating to slavery, mentioned above.
Still another political body assembled in Baltimore in 1860, to
wit: "The Constitutional Union Convention." It met May 9th. Its
platform was intended to be comprehensive and so simple and patriotic
that everybody might endorse it. It declared against recognizing
any principle other than
"_The Constitution of the Country, the Union of the States, and
the Enforcement of the Laws._"
John Bell of Tennessee was nominated on this broad platform for
President, with Edward Everett of Massachusetts for Vice-President,
both eminently respectable statesmen, but the times were not
auspicious for mere generalized principles or mere respectability.
The great Wigwam - Republican Convention met at Chicago, May 16,
1860, with delegates from all the free States, the Territories of
Kansas and Nebraska, and from Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky,
and Missouri.
Its platform was long, and affirmed the principles of the Declaration
of Independence, pronounced against interfering with slavery in
the States, denounced the John Brown raid as "among the gravest of
crimes," and, in the main, was temperate and conservative.
On the question of slavery in the Territories it was radical:
"That the new dogma that the Constitution, of its own force, carries
slavery in to any or all of the Territories of the United States,
is a dangerous political heresy, at variance with the explicit
provisions of that instrument itself," etc.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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