who had been elected in 1852, an event occurred which greatly aroused the country, and broke up old party ties. This was the introduction and passage by Congress of the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, repealing the famous Missouri Compromise of 1820. Large numbers of Democrats, especially throughout all the Northern States, refused to sustain this measure, and the Democratic party, so triumphant in 1852, almost everywhere met with disastrous defeat in the elections of 1854. This defeat would, doubtless, have been even more disastrous but for the fact that the disruption of parties, caused by the elections of 1852 and the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, had been too recent to allow the organization of a permanent political party. There appears to be a temporary necessity for a "make shift" organization, and this was found in the "Know Nothing" party. Of a narrow creed and with secret workings, it was necessarily of short
Meantime, the anti-slavery discussion of the Abolitionists had been doing its perfect work. The Abolitionists had for many years received the hearty moral sympathies of many of the purest and ablest men in the old Whig and Democratic parties. The literature and the best journalism of the country were long thus in moral sympathy with what was generally denounced in political circles as "crazy fanaticism." A novel of great literary merit and wonderful popularity-Mrs. Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin"-had taught the people to