These Yankee fanatics were a sectional party, charged Democrats. That was quite true. In only four slave states (all in the upper South) did Frémont tickets appear, and the Republicans won considerably less than one percent of the vote in these states. If Frémont won the presidency by carrying a solid North, warned Democrats, the Union would crumble. As Buchanan himself put it, “the Black Republicans must be . . . boldly assailed as disunionists, and this charge must be re-iterated again and again.”24 Southerners helped along the cause by threatening to secede if the Republicans won.
