the impulse to fusion was greatly weakened.  Finally, the original Democratic State Committee rescinded (October 12) all its resolutions of fusion, and the Douglas State Committee withdrew (October 18) its straight Douglas ticket.  This action left in the field the original electoral ticket nominated by the Democratic State Convention at Reading, prior to the Charleston Convention, untrammeled by any instructions or agreements.  It was nevertheless a fusion ticket in part, because nine of the candidates (one-third of the whole number) were pledged to Douglas.  What share or promise the Bell faction had in it was not made public.  At the Presidential election it was voted for by a large number of fusionists; but a portion of the Douglas men voted straight for Douglas, and a portion of the Bell men straight for Bell.[5]

  [Sidenote] Greeley, “American Conflict,” Vol.  I., p. 328.

  [Sidenote] Ibid., p. 328.

In New Jersey also a definite fusion agreement was reached between the Bell, Breckinridge, and Douglas factions.  An electoral ticket was formed, composed of two adherents of Bell, two of Breckinridge, and three of Douglas.  This was the only State in which the fusion movement produced any result in the election.  It turned out that a considerable fraction of the Douglas voters refused to be transferred by the agreement which their local managers had entered into.  They would not vote for the two Bell men and the two Breckinridge men on the fusion ticket, but ran a straight Douglas ticket, adopting the three electors on the fusion ticket.  By this turn of the canvass the three Douglas electors whose names were on both tickets were chosen, but the remainder of the fusion ticket was defeated, giving Lincoln four electoral votes out of the seven in New Jersey.  Some slight efforts towards fusion were made in two or three other States, but accomplished nothing worthy of note, and would have had no influence on the result, even had it been consummated.

All these efforts to avert or postpone the grave political change which was impending were of no avail.  In the long six years’ agitation popular intelligence had ripened to conviction and determination.  Every voter substantially understood the several phases of the great slavery issue, its abstract morality, its economic influence on society, the intrigue of the Administration and the Senate to make Kansas a slave-State, the judicial status of slavery as expounded in the Dred Scott decision, the validity and the effect of the fugitive-slave law, the question of the balance of political power as involved in the choice between slavery extension and slavery restriction—­and, reaching beyond even this, the issue so clearly presented by Lincoln whether the States ultimately should become all slave or all free.  In the whole history of American polities the voters of the United States never pronounced a more deliberate judgment than that which they recorded upon these grave questions at the Presidential election in November, 1860.