Legislature, or of any individuals to give legal existence to slavery in any Territory of the United States.”  It opposed any change in the naturalization laws.  It recommended an adjustment of import duties to encourage the industrial interests of the whole country.  It advocated the immediate admission of Kansas, free homesteads to actual settlers, river and harbor improvements of a national character, and a railroad to the Pacific Ocean.  Bold on points of common agreement, it was unusually successful in avoiding points of controversy among its followers, or offering points for criticism to its enemies.

It is not surprising that Charleston and Chicago should furnish many striking contrasts.  At the Charleston Convention, the principal personal incident was a long and frank speech from one Gaulden, a Savannah slave-trader, in advocacy of the reopening of the African slave-trade.[5] In the Chicago Convention, the exact and extreme opposite of such a theme created one of the most interesting of the debates.  The platform had been read and received with tremendous cheers, when Mr. Giddings, of Ohio, who was everywhere eager to insist upon what he designated as the “primal truths” of the Declaration of Independence, moved to amend the first resolution by incorporating in it the phrase which announces the right of all men to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”  The convention was impatient to adopt the platform without change; several delegates urged objections, one of them pertinently observing that there were also many other truths enunciated in the Declaration of Independence.  “Mr. President,” said he, “I believe in the ten commandments, but I do not want them in a political platform.”  Mr. Giddings’s amendment was voted down, and the anti-slavery veteran, feeling himself wounded in his most cherished philosophy, rose and walked out of the convention.

  [Sidenote] Murat Halstead, “Conventions of 1860,” p. 138.

Personal friends, grieved that he should feel offended, and doubly sorry that the general harmony should be marred by even a single dissent, followed Mr. Giddings, and sought to change his purpose.  While thus persuading him, the discussion had passed to the second resolution, when George William Curtis, of New York, seized the chance to renew substantially Mr. Giddings’s amendment.  There were new objections, but Mr. Curtis swept them away with a captivating burst of oratory.  “I have to ask this convention,” said he, “whether they are prepared to go upon the record before the country as voting down the words of the Declaration of Independence?...  I rise simply to ask gentlemen to think well before, upon the free prairies of the West, in the summer of 1860, they dare to wince and quail before the assertions of the men in Philadelphia, in 1776—­before they dare to shrink from repeating the words that these great men enunciated.”  “This was a strong appeal, and took the convention by storm,” wrote a recording journalist.  A new vote formally embodied this portion of the Declaration of Independence in the Republican platform; and Mr. Giddings, overjoyed at his triumph, had already returned to his seat when the platform as a whole was adopted with repeated and renewed shouts of applause that seemed to shake the wigwam.