Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 1.djvu/327

Rh the Southern mind, was simply that a constitutional right existed for their benefit. It may be a barren abstraction so far as Kansas was concerned, but to yield it was to invite aggression that would be effectively destructive of a vast investment the Southern people had made under the encouragement of the Union. So far as &quot;the Kansas imbroglio&quot; was concerned, they had expressed willingness to accept the line of 36° 30’ extended to the Pacific ocean, or to repeal it altogether; and as they were divided on the views of Mr. Douglas and Mr. Buchanan in regard to the meaning of intervention, they could have been induced to adopt either view, had the great leaders at the North agreed upon a settlement of the Kansas question.

Under these circumstances the new agitation began to assume definite form in a political party of opposition composed of all the Free Soilers, and &quot;Old Guard,&quot; as Mr. Giddings called the Abolitionists; scattered Whigs; the anti-slavery Democrats and the anti-Pierce men generally. Fusing without a distinct party name as yet and fighting under the one rallying cry of free Kansas, with out any regard to old party principles of a national character, the new combination swept over the North in 1854, while anarchy reigned in Kansas.

Sectionalism thus became successful. The speaker of the Thirty-fourth Congress was, for the first time in the history of the government, elected by a strictly sectional vote. &quot;It was,&quot; says an eminent authority of New England, &quot;a distinctive victory of the Free States over the consolidated power of the Slave States. It marked an epoch.&quot; And so it did. It made it clear that the &quot;fixed geographical majority&quot; had been nearly obtained. It indicated the possibility that a Southern Confederacy and a Northern United States might be the necessitated remedy for the irrepressible antagonism that had so long existed between &quot;the Old North and the Old South&quot; created by King James. The Southern States, however,