We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it
must not break our bonds of affection."
Until after the election of Mr. Lincoln in November, 1860, the sole
issue between the North and the South, between Republicans on the one
hand and Democrats and Compromisers on the other, had related to
slavery. Logically, the position of the Republicans was impregnable.
Their platforms and their leaders agreed that the party intended
strictly to respect the Constitution, and not to interfere at all with
slavery in the States within which it now lawfully existed. They said
with truth that they had in no case deprived the slaveholding
communities of their rights, and they denied the truth of the charge
that they cherished an inchoate design to interfere with those rights;
adding very truly that, at worst, a mere design, which did not find
expression in an overt act, could give no right of action to the South.
Mr. Lincoln had been most explicit in declaring that the opposition to
slavery was not to go beyond efforts to prevent its _extension_, which
efforts would be wholly within the Constitution and the law. He repeated
these things in his inaugural.
But while these incontrovertible allegations gave the Republicans a
logical advantage of which they properly made the most, the South
claimed a right to make other collateral and equally undeniable facts
the ground of action.
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