choice, had but twelve. If Seward was to be beaten, it must be now; and it was for Pennsylvania to say. The delegation hurried to a committee-room, where Judge Pettis, disregarding the action of the caucus by which McLean had been adopted as the delegation's second choice, moved that, on the second ballot, Pennsylvania's vote be cast solidly for Lincoln. The motion was carried. Returning to the hall the delegation found the second ballot under way. In a moment the name of Pennsylvania was called. The whole Wigwam heard the answer: "Pennsylvania casts her fiftytwo votes for Abraham Lincoln." The meaning was clear. The break to Lincoln had begun. New York sat as if stupefied, while all over the hall cheer followed cheer.

It seemed but a moment before the second ballot was ended, and it was known that Lincoln's vote had risen from 102 to 181. The tension as the third ballot was taken was almost unbearable. A hundred pencils kept score while the delegations were called, and it soon became apparent that Lincoln was outstripping Seward. The last vote was hardly given before the whisper went around, "Two hundred and thirty-one and one-half for Lincoln; two and one-half more will give him the nomination." An instant of silence followed, in which the convention grappled with the idea, and tried to pull itself together to act. The chairman of the Ohio delegation was the first to get his breath. "Mr. President," he cried, springing on his chair and stretching out his arm to secure recognition, “I rise to change four votes from Mr. Chase to Mr. Lincoln."

It took a moment to realize the truth. New York saw it, and the white faces of her noble delegation were bowed in despair. Greeley saw it, and a guileless smile spread over his features as he watched Thurlow Weed press his hand hard against his wet eyelids. Illinois saw it, and tears poured from the eyes of more than one of the overwrought,

"The

devoted men as they grasped one another's hands and vainly struggled against the sobs which kept back their shouts. The crowd saw it, and broke out in a mad hurrah. scene which followed," wrote one spectator, "baffles all human description. After an instant's silence, as deep as death, which seemed to be required to enable the assembly to take in the full force of the announcement, the wildest and mightiest yell (for it can be called by no other name) burst forth from ten thousand voices which we ever heard from mortal throats. This strange and tremendous demonstration, accompanied with leaping up and down, tossing hats, handkerchiefs, and canes recklessly into the air, with the waving of flags, and with every other conceivable mode of exultant and unbridled joy, continued steadily and without pause for perhaps ten minutes.

"It then began to rise and fall in slow and billowing bursts, and for perhaps the next five minutes these stupendous waves of uncontrollable excitement, now rising into the deepest and fiercest shouts, and then sinking like the ground swell of the ocean into hoarse and lessening murmurs, rolled through the multitude. Every now and then it would seem as though the physical power of the assembly was exhausted and that quiet would be restored, when all at once a new hurricane would break out, more prolonged and terrific than anything before. If sheer exhaustion had not prevented, we don't know but the applause would have continued to this hour."

Without, the scene was repeated. At the first instant of realization in the Wigwam a man on the platform had shouted to a man stationed on the roof, "Hallelujah; Abe Lincoln is nominated!" A cannon boomed the news to the multitude below, and twenty thousand throats took up the cry. The city heard it, and one hundred guns on the Tremont House, innumerable whistles on the river and

lake front, on locomotives and factories, and the bells in all the steeples, broke forth. For twenty-four hours the clamor never ceased. It spread to the prairies, and before morning they were afire with pride and excite

ment.

Too

And while all this went on, where was Lincoln? much of a candidate, as he had told Swett, to go to Chicago, yet hardly enough of one to stay away, he had ended by remaining in Springfield, where he spent the week in restless waiting and discussion. He drifted about the public square, went often to the telegraph office, looked out for every returning visitor from Chicago, played occasional games of ball, made fruitless efforts to read, went home at unusual hours. He felt in his bones that he had a fighting chance, so he told a friend, but the chance was not so strong that he could indulge in much exultation. By Friday morning he was tired and depressed, but still eager for news. One of his friends, the Hon. James C. Conkling, returned early in the day from Chicago, and Lincoln soon went around to his law office. "Upon entering," says Mr. Conkling, “Lincoln threw himself upon the office lounge, and remarked rather wearily, 'Well, I guess I'll go back to practising law.' As he lay there on the lounge, I gave him such information as I had been able to obtain. I told him the tendency was to drop Seward; that the outlook for him was very encouraging. He listened attentively, and thanked me, saying I had given him a clearer idea of the situation than he had been able to get from any other source. He was not very sanguine of the result. He did not express the opinion that he would be nominated."

But he could not be quiet, and soon left Mr. Conkling, to join the throng around the telegraph office, where the reports from the convention were coming in. The nominations were being reported, his own among the others. Then news

came that the balloting had begun. He could not endure to wait for the result. He remembered a commission his wife had given him that morning, and started across the square to execute it. His errand was done, and he was standing in the door of the shop, talking, when a shout went up from the group at the telegraph office. The next instant an excited boy came rushing pell-mell down the stairs of the office, and, plunging through the crowd, ran across the square, shouting, “Mr. Lincoln, Mr. Lincoln, you are nominated!" The cry was repeated on all sides. The people came flocking about him, half laughing, half crying, shaking his hand when they could get it, and one another's when they could not. For a few minutes, carried away by excitement, Lincoln seemed simply one of the proud and exultant crowd. Then remembering what it all meant, he said, "My friends, I am glad to receive your congratulations, and as there is a little woman down on Eighth street who will be glad to hear the news, you must excuse me until I inform her." He slipped away, telegram in hand, his coat-tails flying out behind, and strode towards home, only to find when he reached there that his friends were before him, and that the "little woman" already knew that the honor which for twenty years and more she had believed and stoutly declared her husband deserved, and which a great multitude of men had sworn to do their best to obtain for him, at last had come.

CHAPTER XX

THE CAMPAIGN OF 1860.

THIRTY-SIX hours after Lincoln received the news of his nomination, an evening train from Chicago brought to Springfield a company of distinguished-looking strangers. As they stepped from their coach cannon were fired, rockets set off, bands played, and enthusiastic cheering went up from a crowd of waiting people. A long and noisy procession accompanied them to their hotel and later to a modest twostoried house in an unfashionable part of the town. The gentlemen whom the citizens of Springfield received with such demonstration formed the committee, sent by the Republican National Convention to notify Abraham Lincoln that he had been nominated as its candidate for the presidency of the United States.

The delegation had in its number some of the most distinguished workers of the Republican party of that day :-Mr. George Ashmun, Samuel Bowles, and Governor Boutwell of Massachusetts, William M. Evarts of New York, Judge Kelley of Pennsylvania, David K. Carter of Ohio, Francis P. Blair of Missouri, the Hon. Gideon Welles of Connecticut, Amos Tuck of New Hampshire, Carl Schurz of Wisconsin. Only a few of these gentlemen had ever seen Mr. Lincoln and to many of them his nomination had been a bitter disappointment.

As the committee filed into Mr. Lincoln's simple home there was a sore misgiving in more than one heart, and as Mr. Ashmun, their chairman, presented to him the letter notifying him of his nomination they eyed their candidate with