But despite these considerations, an acrimonious controversy had
continued with growing bitterness for years. The Republican Party had
at length been organized to maintain the tenet that Congress could and
must exclude slaves from the territories; and, finally, its candidates
for President and Vice-President had been elected to office. By the
withdrawal from Congress of the Senators and Representatives from the
Cotton States, the party found itself in January, 1861, controlling
both branches of the National Legislature. Despite, however, the
history and platform of the party, statutes were passed organizing the
territories of Colorado, Dakota and Nevada, without any provision
prohibiting slavery therein. Thus months before the date of Virginia's
secession, the Republican Party gave this unequivocal assurance of its
purpose to accord slaveholders the right to carry slaves into the
territories.
The Hon. James G. Blaine, writing twenty-five years after the
happening, thus characterizes the action of his party:
"When the Missouri Compromise was repealed, and the territories of
the United States north of the line 35 degrees, 30 minutes were left
without slavery inhibition or restriction, the agitation began which
ended in the overthrow of the Democratic Party and the election of
Mr. Lincoln to the Presidency of the United States. It will,
therefore, always remain as one of the singular contradictions in
the political history of the country, that after seven years of
almost exclusive agitation on this question, the Republicans, the
first time they had the power as a distinctive political
organization, to enforce the cardinal article of their political
creed, quietly and unanimously abandoned it. And they abandoned it
without a word of explanation."[270]
Mr. Blaine, in asserting that the Republican Party "unanimously
abandoned" this cardinal article of its political creed, probably
overstates the case. There were thousands of the party, and many of
its foremost leaders, who had not surrendered their contention. At all
events, the abandonment had not been made in such an authoritative and
formal way as to commend itself to men yearning for peace and desiring
an end of the controversy over the territories. This action, however,
of the Republican Congress, in organizing the territories of Colorado,
Dakota and Nevada without prohibitions as to slavery, constituted such
a recognition of the constitutional rights of the slaveholders and a
determination to abide by the decision of the Supreme Court, as to
render baseless the charge that Virginia seceded in order to establish
the right of her citizens to carry their slaves into the territories.
As we shall hereafter see, Virginia was willing to re-enact the
Missouri Compromise; make it a part of the constitution and thus
forever exclude slavery from all the territory north of the historic
line established by that settlement.