The election of 1852 virtually destroyed the Whig party, and Franklin Pierce, the candidate of the Democratic party, was elected by great majorities.  If the Whig party had perished because it had no distinct position upon the one overshadowing question of the day, so neither did the new President comprehend the nature and condition of that issue.  In his first message he complacently congratulated the country that the slavery question had been settled peacefully and forever by the compromise measures of 1850.  He little knew how ineffective were those compromises; he never dreamed that it was a question that no compromise could settle permanently, and probably had no conception of the new force that was to be given to it during his own term of office.  Stephen A. Douglas, an acknowledged aspirant to the Presidency, being Chairman of the Senate Committee on Territories, introduced and carried through Congress a measure called the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, which, in providing for the admission of those Territories as States, embodied his doctrine of “Popular Sovereignty” in that it permitted the inhabitants to determine by popular vote whether they should come into the Union as free States or as slave States, and abolished the Missouri Compromise, which for thirty-four years had forbidden the acquisition of any slave territory north of the parallel of 36 deg. 30’.

The abrogation of this compromise, which had been looked upon as a sacred compact, convinced a majority of the Northern people that the system of slavery was filled with the spirit of aggressiveness and determined to spread itself into all the Territories.  Consequently there arose for the first time a powerful anti-slavery party, which, while denying that it had any purpose of meddling with that institution in the States where it already existed, declared that it should never be extended into any more of the national domain.  At the same time this was a stronger party in favor of the protective tariff than had ever before existed.  This organization, which gave itself the name “Republican party,” came into existence in 1854, the same year in which Senator Douglas’s bill abrogated the Missouri Compromise.  There are several claimants for the honor of first proposing it; but as a fact, it sprang into existence with virtual simultaneousness in several of the Northern States.  If there was a priority, it was in Massachusetts, where Robert Carter acted as Secretary of the Convention and wrote the resolutions.  Two years later this party entered the Presidential contest with John C. Fremont as its candidate.  It cast an enormous vote, but was not successful, mainly for the reason that the short-lived American (or Know-Nothing) party was then at its best, and had its own ticket, headed by Millard Fillmore.  Four years later still, it nominated and elected Abraham Lincoln as President, and the clearest argument for its existence that ever has been put forth is in Lincoln’s first speech in his famous debate with Senator Douglas, which was delivered in Springfield, Illinois, June 17, 1858.  The full text of that speech follows herewith.