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 424 The Free-Soil party. [i852-60 and in the sight of all the people, upon law ; and a singularly vivid legal sense everywhere pervaded the nation. No one to whom the country gave serious heed proposed any interference whatever with slavery in the South or in any Slave State. But the number steadily grew of those who demanded that the purpose of the southern leaders to obtain new territory for slavery in the West should be checked and defeated: it grew not only in New England, where the abolitionists were most numerous, but grew also, and assumed an even more practical tone and definite way of action, in the northern tier of States to the westward, where free communities in Ohio, Indiana, Wisconsin, and Dlinois lay in close vicinity to the lands concerning which the fight for "free soil" as against slavery must be fought out. Wherever there were new communities but just springing up, there was a fresh choice to be made, it seemed, with regard to slavery, in spite of nominal compromise after compromise, notwithstanding so-called settlement after settlement of the matter, in Congress. It was a question always open or to be opened until it should break national parties asunder. It could never be closed so long as unoccupied territories were at hand for which the fateful choice remained to be made. It was the independent groups of thinking men who had made up their minds to resist the extension of slavery that began the work of disintegration which by 1852 had gone so far. At first they deliberately avoided the formation of an independent political party. They were of both parties, Whigs and Democrats ; they felt the compulsion of party allegiance still strong upon them, and rejected with unaffected distaste every proposal to break away from and oppose their old associates, whose creed and practice alike they still relished and sympathised with in most things. They realised, too, the weakness and probable instability of a party whose existence was founded, and staked, upon a single issue. For long, therefore, they contented themselves with questioning individual candidates for Congress, named by the regular parties, concerning their opinions and purposes upon the slavery question, and gave or withdrew from them their support according as their replies pleased or displeased them. It was only when they saw how ineffectual this must prove, how casual, unsystematic, haphazard, that they found themselves at length constrained to take independent action. Then at last they held their own conventions, and even ventured their own independent nominations for the Presidency, assuming the role of a national organisation, a distinct Free-Soil party. Democrats and Whigs alike joined them at first ; but as time went on it turned out that they were to draw their strength from the Whig rather than from the Democratic ranks. The Democratic party depended for its organisation and leadership upon the South much more than the Whig party did. It formed its purposes with regard to slavery, therefore, much more readily and confidently, and kept up its spirit much more naturally