It had been a long time coming. Hopelessly divided by the issue of slavery, thirty-one million American citizens were in 1860

Called upon to elect the 16th President of the United States. The Democratic Party met At its National Party Convention in Charleston, South Carolina, in order to choose their nominee

for the presidency. Split over slavery, each faction, Northern Democrats on the one hand and Southern Democrats on the other, presented its own opposite proposal for the party platform. In

February 1860, Senator Jefferson Davis of Mississippi claimed that neither the Congress of the United States nor the territorial parliaments had the power to touch slavery. Southern Democrats

and few Northern pro-slavery Democrats support the Davis resolution: "the Government of a Territory (...) is provisional and temporary, and during its existence all citizens of the United

States have an equal right to settle with their property in the Territory, without their rights, either of person or property, being destroyed or impaired by Congressional or Territorial legislation."

The Southerners' desire was to pass a slave code, that is, a federal law protecting slavery in the territor

By 1865, total warfare imposed by Generals Grant and Sherman had ravaged the South, leaving behind huge areas of devastation. It was the first modern war, with 360,000 casualties in the North and more than 250,000 in the South (about two percent of the country's total population), the Civil War cost more human lives than all other American wars combined — including the Vietnam. In the Cotton Belt states, one quarter of the white male population fit for military service was dead. For four long years, twenty million Yankees with their well-equipped armies were not able to overcome the five million people of the Confederacy. However, Lincoln's military policy, including the emancipation of the slaves, inescapably forced the Dixie to collapse.

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