The
Republican party became, in time and under stress of war, the
refuge of this sentiment and proved sufficiently far-sighted to
merge its identity temporarily in the composite Union party of
1864. But in 1860 it was still a sectional party. Among its
leaders Lincoln was perhaps the only Unionist in the same sense
as Bell and Everett.
Perhaps the truest Unionists of the North, outside the
Constitutional Union Party, in 1860, were those Democrats in the
following of Douglas who, after fighting to the last ditch
against both the sectional parties, were to accept, in 1861, the
alternative of war rather than dissolution. The course of
Douglas himself, as we shall see hereafter, showed that in his
mind there was a fixed limit of concession beyond which he could
not go. When circumstances forced him to that limit, the
sentiment of Union took control of him, swept aside his political
jugglery, abolished his time-serving, and drove him into
cooperation with his bitterest foes that the Union might be
saved. Nor was the pure sentiment of Union confined to the North
and West. Though undoubtedly the sentiment of locality was more
powerful through the South, yet when the test came in the
election of 1860, the leading candidate of the upper South, in
Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee, was John Bell, the
Constitutional Unionist.
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