希望和恐惧并存的1860年选举

Welcome to the MAKING OF A NATION – American history in VOA Special English. Eighteen sixty was a year of mixed feelings of hope and fear.

Americans had hope for the future, because they would be electing a new president. But they had fear that even a new president could not hold the nation together. The states of the South were very close to leaving the Union over the issue of slavery.

This week in our series, Tony Riggs and Frank Oliver talk about the candidates and the issues in the election of eighteen sixty. After four years as president, James Buchanan decided not to run again. Buchanan was a Democrat. His party, like the nation, was split over slavery.

Southern Democrats wanted the party to support slavery. Northern Democrats refused. The opposition Republican Party expected to gain votes from dissatisfied Democrats. Republicans had become stronger since the last presidential election in eighteen fifty-six. They felt their candidate would win in eighteen sixty.

The Democratic nominating convention opened in April in Charleston, South Carolina. Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois was the leading candidate. He had the support of a majority of convention delegates. But he did not have the two-thirds majority needed to win the nomination.

Many Southern Democrats did not like Stephen Douglas. Some did not trust him. Others did not accept his policies on slavery. Douglas did not oppose slavery or the spread of slavery. However, he said no federal law could make slavery legal in a territory where the people did not want it. This was his policy of popular sovereignty.

The Southern Democrats who opposed Stephen Douglas were led by William Yancey of Alabama. Yancey wanted to get a pro-slavery statement into the party's platform. He was sure Douglas would not accept the nomination based on such a platform. If Yancey failed to get the statement he wanted, he would take Southern Democrats out of the convention. And out of the party.

The committee on resolutions considered three platforms. One platform declared that the people of a territory had the right to decide if slavery would be legal or illegal. The second declared that the Supreme Court had that right. And the third declared that no one did -- that slavery was legal everywhere.

William Yancey spoke to the convention in support of the pro-slavery platform. He said pro-slavery Democrats did not want to destroy the union. But he said someone had to make clear to anti-slavery Democrats that the union would be dissolved if the constitutional rights of slave owners were not honored.

Yancey spoke of the danger of a great slave rebellion. He described it as a sleeping volcano that threatened the lives, property, and honor of the people of the South. He said the actions of the North might cause that volcano to explode. Another convention delegate answered Yancey's speech. He said Northern Democrats were tired of defending the interests of the South.