Southerners carried out an asymmetrical kind of political warfare that the rest of the country eventually ran out of patience in confronting. We had … - Allen C. Guelzo

[A]bsent Lincoln's proclamation, not a single fugitive slave would ever be other than a fugitive, rather than a legally free man.

What the Democratic Party has most liked to say about itself—that it is the party of the working man, the voice of the oppressed, the tribune of the people—loses some of its strut in the light of a rather long list of inconvenient facts, chiefly having to do with slavery and race. Such facts as these: that the Democrats were the party that championed chattel bondage, backed an expansionist war to expand slavery's realm, and corrupted the Supreme Court in order to open the western territories to the cancer. The party's Southern wing then led the nation into civil war in defense of slavery while its Northern wing did its best to stymie the administration of Abraham Lincoln, widely regarded by the Democrats as an accidental, even illegitimate, president. Thereafter, the party embraced Jim Crow as slavery's next-best substitute, elected a president who imposed segregation on the federal workforce, and remained the chief opponent of racial equality...

Southern slave owners constantly agitated in the 1850s for state centralization of economic activities that would promote slave agriculture: state-sponsored agricultural surveys, state-subsidized agricultural periodicals, and state investment in railroads (at more than twice the rate of Northern state assistance) which would unite the South and the West and encourage more intensive cotton cultivation. They were, as historian John Majewski remarks, the forerunners of the "southern Progressives of the early twentieth century."