Worse still, so far as the future of the Republic was concerned, this purely geographical election had been sought and secured upon a purely geographical and sectional question. Refine the matter as the platform-makers might, and qualify and explain policies as the party did, the fact was as apparent then as it is now that the sole reason for the Republican party's existence was hostility to slavery and an earnest desire to abolish that institution in this land by whatever means there might be available to that end. That purpose alone held together in political union the otherwise discordant elements of which the party was composed. In other words a party founded exclusively upon hostility to the domestic institutions of the Southern States had elected a president by means of a purely sectional and geographical vote, against the expressed will of the people as reflected in a popular majority of nearly a million ballots. These facts of history are here set forth not by way of condemnation and not at all with any intent to criticise them or the authors of them adversely, but solely in aid of understanding. They are set forth in order that the reader who was not born early enough in the nineteenth century to remember them may understand the conditions and circumstances that gave birth to the war. The election of Mr. Lincoln under these circumstances and in this way was accepted by the extreme pro-slavery men at the South as a challenge to them to dissolve the Union if they dared. They proceeded to accept the challenge, but their influence was not dominant in Virginia or in those states which looked to Virginia for guidance in this crisis and the lack of such dominance was an embarrassment to them. South Carolina, in which state the extremists were most influential, adopted an ordinance of secession on the twentieth of December, 1860. The other cotton states followed South Carolina's lead until seven of them were counted as seceding states. But Virginia resolutely held aloof, and North Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, and Missouri awaited Virginia's leadership, while Maryland and Delaware stood firmly by the Union. Without these states the attempt to disrupt the Union would of course have been an absurdity from the beginning. But unless Virginia could be drawn into the movement the other border states were resolute to withhold themselves from it, for the double reason that Virginia's influence as the mother of the states concerned was paramount, and that Virginia's geographical position, the numbers of her population, her importance in American history and her productiveness of those supplies upon which military operations must depend, rendered that state an absolutely indispensable member of the new Confederacy if its war of independence was to be in the least degree hopeful of success.