Читать книгу The industrial republic: a study of the America of ten years hence онлайн

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Over the California question, there came at last a crisis, and all the Conservative forces of the nation were scarcely equal to the settling of it. Edward Everett and Rufus Choate and Calhoun and Clay and Webster, and a dozen others that one might name, exerted all their influence, and went about warning their countrymen of the danger, and denouncing what Webster called “the din and roll and rub-a-dub of Abolition presses and Abolition lectures.” Under these circumstances the “Compromise” was adopted, and the vote of the Abolitionist Party fell off to one hundred and fifty-six thousand.

But then came the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, which brought Lincoln into politics. The Abolition clamour surged up as never before—here was one proof the more, they said, that Slavery was menacing American institutions. The whole country seemed suddenly to be full of their supporters; and the Kansas Raid only added more fuel to the flame. The Republican Party was formed, the Black Republican Party, as the slave-holders called it; and at the Presidential election of 1856, they cast more than one million three hundred thousand votes, about one-third of the total vote of the country.