Reversing the proportions of the Republican platform, the Democratic document devoted little more than a fifth of its verbiage to the slavery issue. It endorsed popular sovereignty and condemned the Republicans as a “sectional party” inciting “treason and armed resistance to law in the Territories.” Other planks in the platform reasserted old Jacksonian chestnuts: state’s rights; a government of limited powers; no federal aid to internal improvements; no national bank so “dangerous to our republican institutions and the liberties of the people.”
