Up to 1860 there were very few political con-
tests in which the dividing lines between right
and wrong so nearly coincided with those drawn
between the two opposing parties as in that of
1844. The Democrats favored the annexation of
Texas, and the addition of new slave territory to
the Union ; the Whigs did not. Almost every
good element in the country stood behind Clay ;
the vast majority of intelligent, high -minded,
upright men supported him. Polk was backed
by rabid Southern fire-eaters and slavery exten-
sionists, who had deified negro bondage and ex-
alted it beyond the Union, the Constitution, and



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ABOLITIONISTS AND SLAVE BARONS. 291

eyerything else ; by the almost solid foreign
vote, still unfit for the duties of American
citizenship ; by the vicious and criminal classes
in all the great cities of the North and in New
Orleans ; by the corrupt politicians, who found
ignorance and viciousness tools ready forged to
their hands, wherewith to perpetrate the gi-
gantic frauds without which the election would
have been lost ; and, lastly, he was also backed
indirectly but most powerfully by the political
Abolitionists.
These Abolitionists had formed themselves
into the Liberty party, and ran Birney for
president; and though they polled but little
over sixty thousand votes, yet as these were
drawn almost entirely from the ranks of Clay's
supporters, they were primarily responsible for
his defeat; for the defections were sufficiently
large to turn the scale in certain pivotal and
closely contested states, notably New York.
Their action in this case was wholly evil, alike
in its immediate and its remote results; they
simply played into the hands of the extreme
slavery men like Calhoun, and became, for the
time being, the willing accomplices of the latter.
