convention of their own, which adjourned to meet at Richmond, Va., on June 12.

It was a foregone conclusion that Senator Stephen A. Douglas [Ill.] would be the nominee of the Baltimore Convention, and that another candidate would be the nominee of the Richmond Convention on the platform presented by the majority of the resolutions committee of the Charleston Convention before the division.

On May 9, the Constitutional Union party, composed largely of the supporters of Millard Fillmore in 1856, met at Baltimore, and nominated John Bell [Tenn.]1 for President, and Edward Everett [Mass.]' for VicePresident, on a platform which declared:

"That it was both the part of patriotism and of duty to recognize no political principle other than the Constitution of the country, the Union of the States, and the enforcement of the laws."

It was generally recognized that the new party would cut a small figure in the election. Thaddeus

Bell, born in 1797, was a lawyer, who, after service in the Tennessee Senate, had been a Representative in Congress (1827-41), serving as Speaker in 1834. He was a founder of the Whig party, and advocated abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia. In 1841 he was Secretary of War under President Harrison, and, with other members of the Cabinet, resigned when President Tyler abandoned Whig policies. He was United States Senator from 1847 to 1859. When secession from the Union was first proposed he opposed participation in it by his State, but afterwards supported this. He died in 1869.

Everett, born in 1794, had been a Representative in Congress from 1825 to 1835; Governor of Massachusetts from 1835 to 1839; minister to Great Britain from 1841 to 1845; Secretary of State under President Fillmore in 1852; and Senator from 1853 to 1854. He supported Lincoln's administration, and was the "orator of the day” (but not of all time) at the dedication of the Gettysburg National Cemetery on November 19, 1863, when Lincoln made the shorter, but more memorable, address. He was accounted the most "classic" orator of his generation.

Stevens [Pa.] wittily characterized the convention as "a family party, and all there.' However, events so shaped themselves that, with less than half the popular votes of the Douglas ticket, the Bell-Everett ticket secured more than three times the number of the Douglas electoral votes.

It was generally expected that Senator William H. Seward [N. Y.] would be the Presidential nominee of the Republican Convention. However, there was a growing desire in the Republican party, even in Seward's own State, to select a candidate who would not be handicapped by the antagonism which the promulgator of the "higher law" had aroused among the conservative element in the North.

Among the Presidential "dark horses" there began to loom up that far-seeing and self-sacrificing Illinois lawyer who had divided the Democratic party by forcing Douglas to declare his Freeport Doctrine. Therefore, when the Republican leaders of New York City learned that Abraham Lincoln had accepted an invitation to deliver an address in Plymouth Church, Brooklyn, of which the Abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher was pastor, they secured a change of the place of speaking to a less radical forum, Cooper Union in New York City, in order that the speaker might not endanger his Presidential prospects by being charged with Abolitionism.

Lincoln had chosen as his theme, "Slavery as the Fathers Viewed It," and, carefully preparing the speech by studying Elliott's Debates, he had written it out in full. When, on February 27, 1860, he stepped upon the large platform of Cooper Union, he found himself surrounded by every Republican leader of New York and Brooklyn, and facing an audience which filled the seats and aisles.

After a highly complimentary introduction by William Cullen Bryant, the editor of the New York Evening Post, he proceeded to deliver the most conclusive argument that had yet been presented against the thesis of the Democrats in general, and Senator Douglas in particular, that the founders of the nation intended that the Federal government should have no control over slavery in the Territories.

Says Henry C. Whitney, the friend and biographer of Lincoln, in his Life of Lincoln :

"This great speech is worthy of study. It was the last elaborate speech he ever made. In it he departed somewhat from his former style. The close political student will notice a system, formalism, precision, and rigidity of logic not apparent in former speeches; a terseness and vigor of language of greater emphasis than was before known; an absolute pruning of all redundancies, both in thought and expression. It was a massive structure of unhewn logic, without an interstice or flaw. Singular to say, the style, in some places, is almost precisely that of John C. Calhoun, yet the speech bears the same relation to the slavery issue

that Webster's reply to Hayne bore to 'the Constitution and the Union' in 1830. It was a dignified, stately, solemn declaration of the concrete principles of liberty as they then existed in the minds of the American people, and as they would be enforced by them at the first opportunity. "It was a genuine revelation and surprise. The conservative Evening Post published the speech entire the next day by express order of its venerable editor... The entire press of the city eulogized it in the highest terms. On the last day of winter, in 1860, Mr. Lincoln awoke to find himself famous; on the first day of winter, in 1860, he was President-elect of this mighty nation."

At the conclusion of his speech Lincoln spoke on the moral side of the slavery question. The South, he

said, would ultimately demand the overthrow of our free State constitutions.

"Demanding what they [now] do, and for the reason they do, they can voluntarily stop nowhere short of this consummation. Holding . . . that slavery is morally right and socially elevating, they cannot cease to demand a full national recognition of it as a legal right and a social blessing. "Nor can we justifiably withhold this on any ground save our conviction that slavery is wrong. If slavery is right, all words, acts, laws, and constitutions against it are themselves wrong, and should be silenced and swept away. . . . Their thinking it right, and our thinking it wrong, is the precise fact upon which depends the whole controversy. . . .

"Let us stand by our duty fearlessly and effectively. Let us be diverted by none of those sophistical contrivances wherewith we are so industriously plied and belabored -contrivances such as groping for some middle ground between the right and the wrong; vain as the search for a man who should be neither a living man nor a dead man; such as a policy of 'don't care' on a question about which all true men do care; such as Union appeals beseeching all true Union men to yield to Disunionists, reversing the divine rule, and calling, not the sinners, but the righteous to repentance; such as invocations to Washington, imploring men to unsay what Washington said and undo what Washington did.

"Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction to the government, nor of dungeons to ourselves. Let us have faith that right makes might; and in that faith let us to the end dare to do our duty as we understand it."

Abraham Lincoln and Senator Hannibal Hamlin [Me.]' were nominated for President and Vice-President

1 Hamlin was a lawyer who had been Speaker of the Maine legislature; a Representative in Congress from 1843 to 1847; a Senator from 1848,

respectively by the Republican National Convention, which met in Chicago on May 16–18.

The platform endorsed the principles of the Declaration of Independence and their embodiment in the Constitution; it denounced the threats of disunion made by members of the Democracy, the armed invasion of any State or Territory, the Buchanan administration for its Lecompton policy, the Supreme Court for its Dred Scott decision; it declared that the normal condition of all the territory of the United States is that of freedom, and that this should be maintained; it branded the practical opening of the slave trade under Buchanan's administration as a crime against humanity; it held that events in Kansas had proved the doctrine of Popular Sovereignty a sham; and it declared for a protective tariff, the homestead law, internal improvements (especially a Pacific railroad to bind the Union together), and against discrimination against foreign-born citizens.

The adjourned Democratic Convention met, as ordered, at Baltimore on June 18. Several contesting delegations were presented. The Douglas ones were seated, whereupon the delegations from the Southern States and California and Oregon, as well as a part of the Massachusetts delegation, withdrew, leaving less than two thirds of the total delegates in the convention. Mr. Cushing resigned the chairmanship. Although the plan of nominating candidates by a two-thirds vote of all the delegates counting seceders, which Cushing had declared at Charleston to be the only proper method,

with the interval of 1857, when he was Governor of Maine. After the Civil War he reëntered the Senate, serving from 1869 to 1881. He died in 1891 at the age of 82. His acts and speeches during his last term as Senator, especially in opposition to Chinese Exclusion, place him among the sterling statesmen of that body.