Many patriotic men put the Union above slavery or antislavery.

But the two sets of rival extremists had their will at last, and in seven short years deepened and embittered the contention to the degree that disunion and war seemed, certainly proved, the only way out of it.
The extravagance of the debates of those years amazes the modern reader.

Occasionally when I have occasion to recur to them I am myself nonplussed, for they did not sound so terrible at the time.

My father was a leader of the Union wing of the Democratic Party--headed in 1860 the Douglas presidential ticket in Tennessee--and remained a Unionist during the War of Sections.

He broke away from Pierce and retired from the editorship of the Washington Union upon the issue of the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, to which he was opposed, refusing the appointment of Governor of Oregon, with which the President sought to placate him, though it meant his return to the Senate of the United States in a year or two, when he and Oregon's delegate in Congress, Gen.
Joseph Lane--the Lane of the Breckenridge and Lane ticket of 1860--had brought the territory of Oregon in as a state.
I have often thought just where I would have come in and what might have happened to me if he had accepted the appointment and I had grown to manhood on the Pacific Coast.