john adams, period. there was a brief john quincy adams presidency. otherwise presidents who'd sat in the executive mansion throughout that period had been slaveholders or effectively the supporters of slave holders in one way or another. that was obviously a big majority on the supreme court, which is also hugely consequential in the 1850s and was political the way that political alliances worked as the party system developed in the 1830s and forties, meant that effectively southern slave holders could exercise a veto in almost all circumstances over any attempt by the federal government to interfere with the rights of slave holders. and yet the republican party, the whole raison d'etre of the republican party in the 1850s was to stand up to that of northerners. the majority of them by 1860 had come to embrace that. and the question is a critical question for the coming of the civil war is why that was so, how, when and why did white northerners who had once been content, many of them, to tolerate the existence of enslavement, especially if it was el