In accepting the nomination, I need scarcely say that I accept, in the same spirit, the resolutions constituting the platform of principles erected by the convention. To this platform I intend to conform myself throughout the canvass, believing that I have no right, as the candidate of the Democratic party, by answering interrogatories, to present new and different issues before the people.
In all Presidential elections which have occurred for the past fifty years, the State election in Pennsylvania, occurring in the autumn before the election of a President, has been regarded as of great importance. The Republican party was now in the field, with General Fremont as its candidate, and with the advantage which it had derived in all the free States from the consequences of the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, the passage of the so-called “Kansas-Nebraska Act,” which had been followed in Kansas by an internecine contest between pro-slavery and anti-slavery settlers. A brutal personal assault upon Senator Sumner, of Massachusetts, by a rash and foolish Southerner, had added fuel to the already kindled sectional flame of Northern feeling. The precise political issue between the Democratic and Republican parties, so far as it related to slavery, concerned of course slavery in the Territories. It was apparent that if the Republicans should gain the State of Pennsylvania in the State election of October, there was a very strong probability, rather a moral certainty, that the electoral votes of all the free States in the Presidential election would be obtained by that party, while there was no probability that it would prevail in a single slave-holding State. The political issue, therefore, was whether the sectional division of the free and the slave States in the election of a President was to come then, or whether it was to be averted. The State election in Pennsylvania, in October, turned in favor of the Democrats. Her twenty-seven electoral votes were thus morally certain to be given to Mr. Buchanan in the Presidential election. In the interval, a large body of his friends and neighbors assembled at Wheatland, and called him out. His remarks, never before printed, are now extant in his handwriting. He said: