of Mr. Monroe, known as the "era of good feeling," national party lines were almost totally obliterated, and local and personal controversies took their place. National questions were revived, however, and contested with extreme violence during several succeeding administrations. Thirty years later, when the issues of bank, tariff, internal improvements, and an independent treasury were disposed of, there was as complete a break up of parties as in the days of Monroe. It was not, however, in an "era of good feeling" that this later dislocation of parties took place; but an attempt was made in 1850 by leading politicians belonging to different organizations to unite the people by a compromise or an arrangement as unnatural as it was insincere—party lines if not obliterated were, as the authors intended, in a measure broken down. This compromise, as it was called, was a sacrifice of honest principles, and instead of allaying disputes, was followed by a terrific storm of contention and violence transcending thing the country had ever experienced, and ended in a civil war.

The time has not yet arrived for a calm and dispassionate review of the acts and actors of that period and the events of the immediately succeeding years; but the incidents that took place and the experience so dearly purchased should not be perverted, misunderstood, or wholly forgotten.

The compromises of 1850, instead of adjusting differences and making the people of one mind on political questions, actually caused in their practical results the alienation of life-long party friends, led to new associations among old opponents, and created organizations that partook more of a sectional character than of honest constitutional differences on fundamental questions relative to the powers and authority of the Government, such as had previously divided the people. The facility with which old political opponents came together in the compromise measures of 1850, and abandoned principles and doctrines for which they had battled through their whole lives, begot popular distrust. Confidence in the sincerity of the men who so readily made sacrifices of principles was forfeited or greatly impaired. The Whig party dwindled under it, and as an organization shortly went out of existence. A large portion of its members, disgusted with what they considered the insincerity if not faithlessness of their leaders, yet unwilling to attach themselves to the Democratic party, which had coalesced in the movement, gathered together in a secret organization, styling themselves "Know Nothings." Democrats in some quarters, scarcely less dissatisfied with the compromises, joined the Know Nothing order, and in one or two annual elections this strange combination, without avowed principles or purpose, save that of the defeat and overthrow of politicians, who were once their trusted favorites, was successful. In this demoralized condition of affairs, the Democrats by the accession of Whigs in the Southern States obtained possession of the Government and maintained their ascendancy through the Pierce administration; and, in a contest quite as much sectional as political, elected Buchanan in 1856.

But these were the expiring days of the old Democratic organization, which, under the amalgamating process of the compromise measures, became shattered and mixed, especially in the Southern States, with former Whigs, and was to a great extent thereafter sectionalized. The different opposing political elements united against it and organized and established the Republican party, which triumphed in the election of Lincoln in 1860. The administration which followed and was inaugurated in 1861 differed in essential particulars from either of the preceding political organizations. Men of opposing principles—Centralists, who like Hamilton and patriots of that class were for a strong imperial national government, with supervising and controlling authority over the States, on one hand, and Statists on the other, who, like Jefferson, adhered to State individuality and favored a league or federation of States, a national republic of limited and clearly defined powers, with a strict observance of all the reserved right of the local commonwealths—were brought together in the elections of 1860. It has been represented and recorded as grave history that the Republican party was an abolition party. Such was not the fact, although the small and utterly powerless faction which, under the lead of William Lloyd Garrison and others, had for years made aggressive war on slavery, was one of the elements which united with Whigs and Democrats in the election of Mr. Lincoln. Nor was that result a Whig triumph, though a large portion of the Whigs in the free States, after the compromises of 1850, from natural antagonism to the Democrats, entered into the Republican organization. While it is true that a large majority of the Whigs of the North relinquished their old organization and became Republicans, it is no less true that throughout the slave States, and in many of the free States, the members of the Whig party to a considerable extent supported Bell or Breckenridge. But Democrats dissatisfied with the measures of the Pierce and Buchanan administrations, in much larger numbers than is generally conceded, took early and efficient part in the Republican organizations—some on account of the repeal of the Missouri compromise, but a much larger number in consequence of the efforts of the central Government at Washington, by what was considered by them an abuse of civil trust, and by military interference, to overpower the settlers in Kansas, denying them the right of self-government, and an attempt arbitrarily and surreptitiously to impose upon the inhabitants against their will a fraudulent Constitution. It was this large contribution of free-thinking and independent Democrats, who had the courage to throw off party allegiance and discipline in behalf of the principles of free government on which our republican system is founded, the right of the people to self-government, and, consequently, the right to form and establish their own constitution without dictation or interference from the central government so long as they violated no provision of the organic law, that gave tone, form, and ascendancy to the Republican party in every free State.

Persistent efforts have been made to establish as historical truths the representations that the civil war had its origin in a scheme or purpose to abolish slavery in the States where it existed, and that the election of Abraham Lincoln was an abolition triumph—a premeditated, aggressive, sectional war upon the South; whereas the reverse is the fact—the Republican party in its inception was a strictly constitutional party, that defended the rights of the people, the rights of the States, and the rights of the Federal Government, which were assailed by a sectional combination that was not satisfied with the Constitution as it was, but proposed to exact new guarantees from the nation for the protection of what they called "Southern rights"—rights unknown to the Constitution. The misrepresentations that the Republicans were aggressive and aimed to change the organic law have not been without their influence, temporarily at least, in prejudicing and warping the public mind. It is true that the slavery question was most injudiciously and unwisely brought into the party controversies of the country; but it was done by the slaveholders or their political representatives in Congress after the failure of the nullifiers to obtain ascendancy in the Government on the subject of free trade and resistance to the revenue laws.

John C. Calhoun, a man of undoubted talents, but of unappeasable ambition, had at an early period of his life, while Secretary of War, and still a young man, aspired to the office of President. By his ability and patriotic course during the war of 1812, and subsequently by a brilliant career as a member of Mr. Monroe's Cabinet,