In accepting the nomination, I need scarcely say that I accept, in the same spirit, the resolutions constituting the platform of principles erected by the convention. To this platform I intend to conform myself throughout the canvass, believing that I have no right, as the candidate of the Democratic party, by answering interrogatories, to present new and different issues before the people.
In all Presidential elections which have occurred for the past fifty years, the State election in Pennsylvania, occurring in the autumn before the election of a President, has been regarded as of great importance. The Republican party was now in the field, with General Fremont as its candidate, and with the advantage which it had derived in all the free States from the consequences of the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, the passage of the so-called “Kansas-Nebraska Act,” which had been followed in Kansas by an internecine contest between pro-slavery and anti-slavery settlers. A brutal personal assault upon Senator Sumner, of Massachusetts, by a rash and foolish Southerner, had added fuel to the already kindled sectional flame of Northern feeling. The precise political issue between the Democratic and Republican parties, so far as it related to slavery, concerned of course slavery in the Territories. It was apparent that if the Republicans should gain the State of Pennsylvania in the State election of October, there was a very strong probability, rather a moral certainty, that the electoral votes of all the free States in the Presidential election would be obtained by that party, while there was no probability that it would prevail in a single slave-holding State. The political issue, therefore, was whether the sectional division of the free and the slave States in the election of a President was to come then, or whether it was to be averted. The State election in Pennsylvania, in October, turned in favor of the Democrats. Her twenty-seven electoral votes were thus morally certain to be given to Mr. Buchanan in the Presidential election. In the interval, a large body of his friends and neighbors assembled at Wheatland, and called him out. His remarks, never before printed, are now extant in his handwriting. He said:
My Friends and Neighbors:—
I am glad to see you and to receive and reciprocate your congratulations upon the triumph of the Democrats in Pennsylvania and Indiana.
It is my sober and solemn conviction that Mr. Fillmore uttered the words of soberness and truth when he declared that if the Northern sectional party should succeed, it would lead inevitably to the destruction of this beautiful fabric reared by our forefathers, cemented by their blood, and bequeathed to us as a priceless inheritance.
The people of the North seem to have forgotten the warning of the Father of his Country against geographical parties. And by far the most dangerous of all such parties is that of a combined North against a combined South on the question of slavery. This is no mere political question—no question addressing itself to the material interests of men. It rises far higher. With the South it is a question of self-preservation, of personal security around the family altar, of life or of death. The Southern people still cherish a love for the Union; but what to them is even our blessed confederacy, the wisest and the best form of government ever devised by man, if they cannot enjoy its blessings and its benefits without being in constant alarm for their wives and children.
The storm of abolition against the South has been gathering for almost a quarter of a century. It had been increasing by every various form of agitation which fanaticism could devise. We had reached the crisis. The danger was imminent. Republicanism was sweeping over the North like a tornado. It appeared to be resistless in its course. The blessed Union of these States—the last hope for human liberty on earth—appeared to be tottering on its base. Had Pennsylvania yielded, had she become an abolition State, without a special interposition of Divine Providence, we should have been precipitated into the yawning gulf of dissolution. But she stood erect and firm as her own Alleghanies. She breasted the storm and drove it back. The night is departing, and the roseate and propitious morn now breaking upon us promises a long day of peace and prosperity for our country. To secure this, all we of the North have to do is to permit our Southern neighbors to manage their own domestic affairs, as they permit us to manage ours. It is merely to adopt the golden rule, and do unto them as we would they should do unto us, in the like circumstances. All they ask from us is simply to let them alone. This is the whole spirit and essence of the much abused Cincinnati platform. This does no more than adopt the doctrine which is the very root of all our institutions, and recognize the right of a majority of the people of a Territory, when about to enter the Union as a State, to decide for themselves whether domestic slavery shall or shall not exist among them. This is not to favor the extension of slavery, but simply to deny the right of an abolitionist in Massachusetts or Vermont to prescribe to the people of Kansas what they shall or shall not do in regard to this question.
Who contests the principle that the will of the majority shall govern? What genuine republican of any party can deny this? The opposition have never met this question fairly. Within a brief period, the people of this country will condemn their own folly for suffering the assertion of so plain and elementary a principle of all popular governments to have endangered our blessed Constitution and Union, which owe their origin to this very principle.
I congratulate you, my friends and neighbors, that peace has been restored to Kansas. As a Pennsylvanian I rejoice that this good work has been accomplished by two sons of our good old mother State, God bless her! We have reason to be proud of Colonel Geary and General Smith. We shall hear no more of bleeding Kansas. There will be no more shrieks for her unhappy destiny. The people of this fine country, protected from external violence and internal commotion, will decide the question of slavery for themselves, and then slide gracefully into the Union and become one of the sisters in our great Confederacy.
Indeed, viewed in the eye of sober reason, this Kansas question is one of the most absurd of all the Proteus-like forms which abolition fanaticism has ever assumed to divide and distract the country. And why do I say this? Kansas might enter the Union with a free constitution to-day, and once admitted, no human power known to the Constitution could prevent her from establishing slavery to-morrow. No free-soiler has ever even contended that she would not possess this power.