The Republican platform specifically pledged not to extend slavery, "that the normal condition of all the territory of the United States is that of freedom; that as our Republican fathers, when they had abolished slavery in all our national territory" and "that in the recent vetoes by the federal governors of the acts of the Legislatures of Kansas and Nebraska, prohibiting slavery in those territories, we find a practical illustration of the boasted democratic principle of non-intervention and popular sovereignty, embodied in the Kansas-Nebraska bill, and a demonstration of the deception and fraud involved therein" (Republican Party platform 1860)
The misconception of the South was that the Union were abolitionists that wanted to abolish slavery altogether. Shown the Republican platform of 1860, that was not the case. The South's claimed that the North "advocates Negro equality" was also not true. Lincoln did believe slavery was unjust, but did not believe the equality of blacks in whites. In Lincoln's speech in the "Lincoln- Douglas Debate" in 1858, Lincoln states "I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races I do not understand that because I do not want a Negro woman for a slave I must necessarily want her for a wife. My understanding is that I can just let her alone. I am now in my fifteenth year, and I certainly never have had a black woman for either a slave or a wife" (Lincoln-Douglas Debate 1858). .
Pro slavery attitude seen in the commissions was seen when Judge William Harris spoke to the Georgia General Assembly. There he said, "Every other issue paled in comparison to the Republican threat to the South's racial order" (Dew 29). This quote showed that slavery was the most important issue to Southerners and that they were convinced that the Republicans were going to take slavery away from them.
