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432 Election of President Buchanan. [i856 popular majorities in fifteen States, elected or won over to themselves one hundred and seventeen members of the House of Representatives, and secured eleven votes in the Senate. Representatives of all the older parties came together in their ranks, in novel agreement, their purposes mastered and brought into imperative concert by the signal crisis which had been precipitated upon the country by the repeal of the Missouri Compromise. They got their programme from the Free- Soilers, whom they bodily absorbed; their radical and aggressive spirit from the Abolitionists, whom they received without liking ; their liberal views upon constitutional questions from the Whigs, who constituted both in numbers and in influence the commanding element among them ; and their popular impulses from the Democrats, who did not leave behind them their faith in their old party ideals. The contest for the Presidency narrowed itself at once to a struggle between the Democrats and this new union of their opponents. The Know-Nothings met in convention in February, and nominated Fill- more; but when it came to the vote in November they succeeded in choosing their electors nowhere but in the little State of Delaware. The Republicans could not hold a really national convention : no States south of Delaware, Maryland, and Kentucky sent delegates to assist them at their nomination ; and they nominated no statesman of their new faith, but John C. Fremont, a popular young soldier who had aided very efficiently in the conquest of California in the war with Mexico, and who had hitherto been reckoned a Democrat. In the election, never- theless, they secured one hundred and fourteen electoral votes for their candidate, as against one hundred and seventy-four for the Democratic nominee. They carried every State of the north and north-west except Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Indiana, and Illinois; showed themselves practically the only party of opposition in the north-west ; and polled a popular vote of 1,341,264, to their opponents' 1,838,169. The political field of battle was once more ordered and in set array. The issue had been very definitely joined. The Democrats had nominated James Buchanan, of Pennsylvania, who was then the Minister of the United States in London. He had been out of the country during these last years of heat and bitterness ; but the platform of principles adopted by the convention which nominated him had endorsed the Compromise legislation of 1850 and what was now known to be its natural corollary, the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, as explicitly as the Republicans had repudiated them; and Buchanan himself had joined with the American ministers in France and Spain (October 18, 1854) in advising the government of the United States to acquire the island of Cuba, by purchase if possible, by force if necessary. That was in substance to advise, as the country then looked at it, the addition of more slave territory; and the advice had been tendered just after the Gadsden purchase in the south-west, and at a time, as it presently appeared,