| The indignation of the North. |
This election took place on November 29th, 1854. Had it occurred before the Congressional elections of that year, it would most probably have caused a much more rapid development of the Republican party than happened, and the election of the Republican candidate for the presidency two years later. As it was, the struggle over the Kansas-Nebraska bill, and its final passage, had started the amalgamation of the Northern Whigs, the Free-soilers, and the Northern Democrats who opposed the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, into the Republican party, and had, in the Congressional elections of 1854, been the chief cause in changing a Democratic majority of more than eighty in the House of Representatives into a minority by more than seventy.
| The Republican party. |
Of course the disintegration of the two old parties would, under ordinary conditions, proceed slowly. The members of neither were willing to enter the organization, or bear the name, of the other. As the Northern Whigs had unanimously opposed the repeal of the restriction of 1820 upon slavery in the Territories, it was not unnatural that they should at first feel that they were already the anti-slavery-extension party, and that all persons holding to that principle should be willing to march under their banner. Some of the more liberal minds among them in the Northwest, especially in Wisconsin and Michigan, had, already in the summer of 1854, joined with the Free-soilers, and the Democrats who opposed the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, to form a new party, under a new name, the Republican party, which, indeed, had no other principle than that already represented by the Northern Whigs, but which did not repel the Democrats by requiring them to desert to their old enemy. The great majority of both Whigs and Democrats were, however, rather waiting to see how home rule in the Territories would work, and were in the meantime busying themselves, in large degree, with other questions, chief among which was the question whether the country ought not to be preserved against foreign Roman Catholic immigration, the question which gave rise to the short-lived Know-nothing party, with its principle of America for Americans, the only real service of which movement was the aid which it lent to the dissolution of the Whig party, and to the preparation of the way for the union of the Northern Whigs with the anti-slavery-extension elements of the other parties into the Republican party.
The interference of the Missourians in the first election in Kansas, demonstrating the impracticability of "popular sovereignty" in the Territories, was the very thing necessary to hasten the development of the Republican party, but it came too late to influence the elections of 1854, and the shock which it caused lost some of the sharpness of its effect before the autumn of 1856.
The Congress to which Whitfield presented his credentials was the one whose House of Representatives had been chosen in 1852. His claim to his seat was at first not resisted, and the first step in the programme for making Kansas a slaveholding Territory was thus successful.
| The Territorial legislature. |