The Republican party existed exclusively at the North. It made no pretense of existing in the Southern half of the Republic. It did not even go through the empty form of nominating electors in the Southern states either in 1856 or four years later in 1860. It did not hope in either of those years for a single electoral vote from any state lying south of the Potomac or the Ohio. Its purpose was to carry the election and to control the country by a strictly sectional and geographical vote--a thing that had never before been attempted or thought of by any party, and a thing the very suggestion of which caused great alarm throughout the country. For, men anxiously asked, if one section of the Union is thus to dominate the other how shall we be able to maintain the Union in its present disturbed and distracted condition? Hitherto, they reflected, majorities have been drawn from all the states in contests that were purely national in their inspiration and in their significance, and all men have held themselves bound to submit to the will of such majorities, as representing the ultimate judgment of all the states and all the people; but, they anxiously asked themselves, how long will the states or the people of one part of the country consent to be governed by the elected candidates of a party which exists solely in the other part of the country; a party which does not even ask for votes except in that other part, in support of its candidates; a party whose platform is one of avowed hostility to the industrial, social and domestic labor system of the southern half of the Republic; a party which has no existence or recognition or representation in that part of the Union, and which includes among its most active and aggressive members those who openly declare their purpose to overthrow the domestic institutions of the South, in defiance of all constitutional guarantees, and by any means that may be available, even including servile war in states where the negroes outnumber the whites by two or three to one? Considerations of this kind undoubtedly restrained many voters at the North in the election of 1856, and for a time after that election there seemed to be a promise of peace in the influence of conservatism on the one side and on the other in spite of what was going on in Kansas. At the same time the state of feeling throughout the country was well-nigh indistinguishable from that which prevails during the existence of actual civil war. Only the old devotion to the Union which existed in both the Northern and Southern mind prevented men from flying at each other's throats. Then, as if to emphasize the inevitableness of war and to hasten its coming, there occurred the raid of John Brown at Harper's Ferry, Virginia, in the autumn of 1859--only a year before a presidential election must occur.