Thus had the Free States, the people's part of the Union, gone up steadily to overshadowing material, intellectual, moral power. But up to 1850 this mighty growth had got no fit expression in State or national politics. All the great parties had mildly tried to remonstrate with the slave aristocracy, but quickly recoiled as from the mouth of a furnace. A few attempts had been made to organize a party for freedom, but nothing could gain foothold at Washington. A few noble men had lifted their voices against the rampant tyranny of the slaveholders: chief among these was John Quincy Adams, the John the Baptist crying in the desert of American partisan politics the coming of the kingdom of Heaven! But when the people had come up to a consciousness of their consolidated power, and the reverence for human right was changing and polarizing every Northern institution--in the fierce struggle that ushered in and succeeded the admission of California, between 1848 and 1856--this Northern superiority culminated in a great political movement against slavery. _This movement assumed a double form-positive, in the assertion that the Slave Power should be arrested; negative, in the assertion that the people should have their own way with it._ The Republican party said: _The slave aristocracy shall go no farther._ The 'Popular Sovereignty' party, or Douglas Democracy, said: _The people shall do what they choose about this matter._ Now the people were already the superior power in the republic, and were rapidly growing to hate the Slave Power; so the slaveholders, saw that the Northern Democracy, with their war cry of _popular sovereignty_, might in time be just as dangerous to them as their more open enemies. They repudiated both forms of Northern politics, and tied the executive, under James Buchanan, and the Supreme Court, under Judge Taney, to their dogma: _The right of the aristocracy is supreme. Slavery, not liberty, is the law of the republic._