[396] _Ibid._, 98. As they read these speeches of the great leaders, as they heard from Negroes themselves the evils of slavery, as they learned of the high-handed doings in Kansas, the zeal of the Scandinavians for human freedom increased. There were no old party traditions, feelings, or feuds, to keep them from judging the issue of slavery's expansion on its merits; no loyalty to the memories of dead heroes held them in mortmain. Some few of them voted for Cass in 1848 and for Pierce in 1852, but by 1856 there was only one issue for them: simply and straightforwardly and almost to a man, they became Republicans.[397] The Democrats, of course, did not let the children of the North go without an effort to secure them in their ranks. In 1856 Elias Stangeland of Madison, Wisconsin, started a Norwegian paper, _Den Norske Amerikaner_, in support of James Buchanan. His efforts to get Langeland to undertake the editorship failed because the latter was an ardent admirer of Fremont. The paper had a short life, and probably Langeland is right in attributing its disappearance to the withdrawal of the Democratic subsidy.[398] A long time was to elapse before a successful attempt would be made to maintain a Democratic paper in Norwegian or Swedish. [397] Peterson, _Svenskarne i Illinois_, xii; Mattson, _The Story of an Emigrant_, 56; Nelson, _History of the Scandinavians_, I, 305, 310. [398] Langeland, _Nordmændene i Amerika_, 110. What the anti-slavery agitation left undone towards making the Scandinavians unswervingly Republican, was accomplished by the Civil War. The lingering glories of the golden age of the Democracy of Jackson and Jefferson were entirely obscured by the attitude of the Democratic party toward the conduct of the war. Only when the memories of the Civil War grew less vivid and less influential with new arrivals from the Old World, and not until moral questions were superseded in political discussions by economic questions relating to the tariff, currency, and labor, did the Scandinavians begin to arrange themselves in any considerable numbers outside the Republican ranks.