But a party whose only program is an endorsement of the _status quo_ is destined to go to pieces whenever the course of events brings a principle strongly to the fore. The American Union was moving toward a civil conflict in which ideological differences, as deep as any that have appeared in modern revolutions, were to divide men. As always occurs in such crises, the compromisers are regarded as unreliable by both sides and are soon ejected from the scene. It now seems impossible that the Whig Party, with its political history, could have survived the fifties. But the interesting fact from the standpoint of theoretical discussion is that the Democratic Party, because it was a radically based party, was able to take over and defend certain of the defensible earlier Whig positions. Murray points out the paradoxical fact that the Democratic Party “purloined the leadership of conservative property interests in Georgia and the South.”[70] It is no less paradoxical that it should have purloined the defense of the states’ rights doctrine thirty years after Jackson had threatened to hang disunionists. The paradox can be resolved only by seeing that the Whig position was one of self-stultification; and this is why a rising young political leader in Illinois of Whig affiliation left the party to lead a re-conceived Republican Party. The evidence of Lincoln’s life greatly favors the supposition that he was a conservative. But he saw that conservatism to be politically effective cannot be Whiggism, that it cannot perpetually argue from circumstance. He saw that to be politically effective conservatism must have something more than a temperamental love of quietude or a relish for success. It must have some ideal objective. He found objectives in the moral idea of freedom and the political idea of union.