Southern slaveholders habitually pressured northerners to accept policies that secured slavery’s future and slaveholders’ power, including the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act and the admission of new slave states, insisting that the nation would come apart if northerners did not accede. Free-state residents grew increasingly unwilling to swallow such measures, particularly as it became clear that their populations were growing much more quickly than in the slave states and that a sectional party—one that drew its strength only from the free states—might be capable of winning the presidency and
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