It was in this mood that the country approached the presidential election of 1860. On either side there was a strongly surviving love for the Federal Union, an abiding conviction that it alone could guarantee the perpetuity of the American idea of local self-government and personal liberty. But on either side there was an aggressive party of disunion which must be reckoned with in politics. On the side of the North the disunionist party desired and insisted upon the utter and immediate and unconditional abolition of slavery as the sole condition of the Union's further existence. On the Southern side the extremists demanded that slavery should be recognized and protected as a national institution, with local and state freedom from it as a casual incident which should in no way be permitted to interfere with the right of the slaveholder to hold his slaves in bondage even when his convenience led him to carry them into any free state; and still further that the people of every territory should be free to decide for themselves whether or not slavery should be permitted within the domain controlled by them. Between these two opposing parties stood the overwhelming but rapidly weakening majority of the people, insisting that the perpetuity of the Union was of greater importance to liberty than either the maintenance or the extinction of slavery. How these forces fought the matter out must be the subject of another chapter. CHAPTER IX THE ELECTION OF 1860 When the time came to nominate candidates for the presidential election of 1860, something akin to despair had seized upon the minds of men--a despair that discouraged hopeful conservatism and prompted many to courses that could promise nothing other than disaster to the Union. In the event, the election of that year showed that there was a majority of nearly a million votes against the Republican party, in a total vote of about four and a half millions. There was still an overwhelming majority of the people, therefore, who regarded the preservation and perpetuity of the Republic as the paramount concern. There is every reason to believe that if circumstances had so shaped themselves as to put that matter immediately in issue, and if the contest could have been fairly fought out between the two opposing sentiments the majority of nearly a million votes cast against what was regarded as a sectional party, representing a purely geographical sentiment, would have been swelled to two millions or more. For in all parts of the country the Union was still an object of adoration and the Constitution remained a text-book of patriotic study.