Excerpt from Twenty-Eighth Annual Report of the American Anti-Slavery Society: By the Executive Committee, for the Year Ending May 1, 1861

The year has witnessed a Presidential election the most memora ble, taken with its accompaniments and apparent consequences, which the country has yet known. At the date of our last Report, the note of preparation was already sounding, and the mustering of the combatants had begun. On the 23d of April, 1860, the Demo cratic National Convention met at Charleston, S. C., to make its nominations and lay down its Platform. Every State in the Union was fully represented, but not, as in former days, by the harmonious members of a great, united party. Most of the Southern delegates had evidently come determined to reject the favorite of the great majority of the Northern Democracy, stephen A douglas, and with him his doctrine of Popular Sovereignty, and to commit the party unequivocally to extreme pro-slavery principles and mea sures; or, failing of this, to break up the Convention and wreck the party. Indeed, in View of subsequent events, there is reason to be lieve that the latter was the primary design of the Southern leaders; and that they pressed upon their Northern copartisans such demands as they knew would be rejected, so that they might make occasion for dividing the party and ensuring its defeat, and thus, in the success of the Republicans, obtain a pretext for seceding from the Union, and founding a grand slaveholding and slave-trading empire, pure from any taint of freedom. Be that, however, as it may, the South insisted that property in slaves should be regarded as no less sacred than any other property; that all the Territories should be open to the intro duction of it; and that, wherever held or carried, it should be pro tected by the Federal Government. The Northern delegates, on the other hand, warned, by the signs of a growing anti-slavery feeling at the North, that yielding to such extravagant demands would bring upon them sure defeat, refused to be dragged into a position of such deadly peril. They were willing to stand by all their old pro-slavery precedents; perhaps even, for the sake of still preserving an nu broken party, would have gone a little further slavery-ward than they had ever gone before; but to grant all which was asked was to incur too great a risk.

About the Publisher

Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com

This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.