With respect to the attitude of the Republican Party, the situation
was not so simple. The Republican Party was organized in 1854 to
maintain the tenet that Congress had the right, as it was its duty, to
exclude slave owners with their slaves from the territories. The
Supreme Court of the United States three years later decided that
Congress possessed no such power, yet in its platform of 1860 the
Republican Party reasserted its position and hence advanced the more
portentous claim that Congress had a right to legislate upon the
subject in disregard of the mandates of the highest court of the
Republic. It must also be borne in mind that the Republican Party was
sectional in its origin, membership and spirit. Even its National
conventions were composed of representatives gathered practically from
only one of the two great divisions of the Union. Its nominees for
President and Vice-President in 1856 and 1860 were both taken from the
same section. Electoral tickets bearing the names of its candidates
were presented for the suffrages of the people only in the Northern
and Border States; and, finally, by electoral votes coming exclusively
from the North, its candidates were elected, though the majority in
favor of their opponents aggregated nearly a million of the popular
suffrage. These conditions may well have aroused the conviction that
the rights and interests of Virginia and the South would receive scant
recognition at the hands of the incoming administration, yet the fact
remains that before the date of Virginia's secession, the Republican
Party had, by legislative enactments and official pledges, given proof
of its purpose to protect slaveholders in every right previously
established by the laws of Congress and the decisions of the Federal
Courts.