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Originally posted by True_Moose: This is, simplified, what happened. The Democrats were strongly southern based, and unapologetically in favor of slavery. The Whigs, the other main party at the time, could not come up with a united policy, they would preach the abolition of slavery when in the north and its promotion while in the south. Problem is, there were newspapers so the inconsistencies were exposed, and their inability to come to terms with the single overriding issue in America at the time caused an implosion, and a slide into irrelevance in the 1850s. Interesting side note - the Republicans were not abolitionists, they were Free-Soilers, who believed in keeping territories free from the competition of slaveholders for white farmers. When the Republican party came into being, since the Democrats were so dominant in the south, but unable to gain momentum in the north, the Republicans didn't even try to make themselves appealing to Southerners - they barely ran legitimate candidates in the South. When Abraham Lincoln (a Republican) was elected, none of his electoral votes came from (later) Confederate states. The southerners, who had a long history of feelings of vulnerability to their slaveholding, read Lincoln's election as a precursor to abolition, and seceded. Trying to explain the Civil War on an online forum is basically impossible. There were so many other factors, like anti-Catholic sentiment, the Mexican War, the antebellum movement, etc, that to pin the thing on one event would be naive. But the collapse of the Whig party, which gave rise to the regionalism of the two parties, certainly broadened the divide.

Thank you for the refresher. I keep a lot of information stored in memory, but I can't keep everything stored there. [img]graemlins/petard.gif[/img]