Stephen Arnold Douglas

The ten years of American history from 1850 to 1860 have a fascination second only to that of the four years which followed. Indeed, unless one has a taste for military science, it is a question whether the great war itself is more absorbing than the great debate that led up to it; whether even Gettysburg and Chickamauga, the March to the Sea, the Wilderness, Appomattox, are of more surpassing interest than the dramatic political changes, —the downfall of the Whig party, the swift rise and the equally swift submergence of the Know-Nothing party, the birth of the Republican party, the disruption and overthrow of the long-dominant Democratic party, —through which the[Pg 2] country came at last to see that only the sword could make an end of the long controversy between the North and the South.