Summary

Slavery would disappear as a source of conflict if a Republican won the presidency, the editors asserted in this reprinted article from the New York Courier and Enquirer. They considered Democrats the agitators in the issue. Republicans, they argued, would not touch slavery in the Southern states out of deference to the Constitution and would support enforcement of the fugitive slave law.

EXCERPT:

"The rights of the South ... would be far safer in the hands of such men as Seward or Lincoln, than they ever because, while they would necessarily prevent the extension of slavery into free territory, they would scrupulously stand by all the constitutional rights of the slave States, and exercise a moral influence at the North favorable to a faithful execution of the fugitive slave law, and adverse the to the interference to a handful of troublesome Abolitionists, whose incendiary conduct was disgusting Republicans, at the same time that scheming Democratic leaders privately encouraged their interference with the South in order to foster slavery excitement."

Full-text web version of newspaper

"In the heat of the campaign of 1860 both Franklin Democrats and Republicans shifted their emphasis on slavery."