Webster's formula counseled an evasion of the problem of slavery.

From his point of view it was plainly insoluble.

But an affirmation of an inseparable relationship between American nationality and American democracy would just as manifestly have demanded its candid, courageous, and persistent agitation.
The slavery question, when it could no longer be avoided, gradually separated the American people into five different political parties or factions--the Abolitionists, the Southern Democrats, the Northern Democrats, the Constitutional Unionists, and the Republicans.

Each of these factions selected one of the several alternative methods of solution or evasion, to which the problem of negro slavery could be reduced, and each deserves its special consideration.
Of the five alternatives, the least substantial was that of the Constitutional Unionists.

These well-meaning gentlemen, composed for the most part of former Whigs, persisted in asserting that the Constitution was capable of solving every political problem generated under its protection; and this assertion, in the teeth of the fact that the Union had been torn asunder by means of a Constitutional controversy, had become merely an absurdity.