Excerpt from New England Emigrant Aid Company: And Its Influence, Through the Kansas Contest, Upon National History It must be a contest on the prairies, and the power victorious there, would, in due time, govern the country. Was it possible to bring these two kinds of civilization to a decisive struggle? Was it possible to arouse the North to effective resistance, after more than thirty years of continuous defeat by the South? During all this period of the successful aggression and increasing strength of Slavery, there was in the North corresponding apprehension and alarm. On the repeal of the Missouri Compromise this apprehension became despondency, and this alarm became despair. There were in the Northern States two agencies professedly hostile to Slavery. One was political, and opposed Slavery extension in a legal way, by means of legislative restriction. The other was sentimental and contended for the overthrow of Slavery by revolutionary methods - advocating the dissolution of the Union as the best and only sure way to this result. The first of these two agencies was the Free Soil party, which was first formed in 1848, and put into shape for political action by the convention that nominated Martin Van Buren and Charles Francis Adams. This new party drew its supporters, in about equal numbers, from the Whig and Democratic parties, while it completely absorbed a feeble political organization, which at the time had a kind of nebulous existence under the name of the Liberty party. From the time of its creation, in 1848, to the day of the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, in 1854, the Free Soil party had scarcely increased at all, either in influence or numbers. Its purpose was to insert in every act of Congress opening a territory to settlement, a provision to forever exclude Slavery therefrom. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.