Twenty Years of Congress Volume I Part 10

The public mind saw but one issue; every thing else was irrelevant.

At the first meeting, Douglas addressed a series of questions to Mr. Lincoln, skillfully prepared and well adapted to entrap him in contradictions, or commit him to such extreme doctrine as would ruin his canva.s.s. Mr. Lincoln's answers at the second meeting, held at Freeport, were both frank and adroit. Douglas had failed to gain a point by his resort to the Socratic mode of argument.

He had indeed only given Mr. Lincoln an opportunity to exhibit both his candor and his skill. After he had answered, he a.s.sumed the offensive, and addressed a series of questions to Mr. Douglas which were constructed with the design of forcing the latter to an unmistakable declaration of his creed. Douglas had been a party to the duplex construction of the Cincinnati platform of 1856, in which the people of the South had been comforted with the doctrine that slavery was protected in the Territories by the Const.i.tution against the authority of Congress and against the power of the Territorial citizens, until the period should be reached, when, under an enabling act to form a const.i.tution for a State government, the majority might decide the question of slavery. Of this doctrine Mr. Breckinridge was the Southern representative, and he had for that very reason been a.s.sociated with Mr. Buchanan on the Presidential ticket. On the other hand, the North was consoled, it would not be unfair to say cajoled, with the doctrine of popular sovereignty as defined by Mr. Douglas; and this gave to the people of the Territories the absolute right to settle the question of slavery for themselves at any time. The doctrine had, however, been utterly destroyed by the Dred Scott decision, and, to the confusion of all lines of division and distinction, Mr. Douglas had approved the opinion of the Supreme Court.

Douglas had little trouble in making answer in an _ad captandum_ manner to all Mr. Lincoln's questions save one. The crucial test was applied when Mr. Lincoln asked him "if the people of a Territory can, in any lawful way, against the wishes of any citizen of the United States, exclude slavery from their limits prior to the formation of a State const.i.tution?" In the first debate, when Douglas had the opening, he had, in the popular judgment, rather worsted Mr. Lincoln. His greater familiarity with the arts if not the tricks of the stump had given him an advantage. But now Mr.

Lincoln had the opening, and he threw Mr. Douglas upon the defensive by the question which reached the very marrow of the controversy.

Mr. Lincoln had measured the force of his question, and saw the dilemma in which it would place Douglas. Before the meeting he said, in private, that "Douglas could not answer that question in such way as to be elected both Senator and President. He might so answer it as to carry Illinois, but, in doing so, he would irretrievably injure his standing with the Southern Democracy."

Douglas quickly realized his own embarra.s.sment. He could not, in the face of the Supreme-Court decision, declare that the people of the Territory could exclude slavery by direct enactment. To admit, on the other hand, that slavery was fastened upon the Territories, --past all hope of resistance or protest on the part of a majority of the citizens--would be to concede the victory to Mr. Lincoln without further struggle. Between these impossible roads Douglas sought a third. He answered that, regardless of the decision of the Supreme Court, "the people of a Territory have the lawful means to introduce or exclude slavery as they choose, for the reason that slavery cannot exist unless supported by local police regulations.

Those police regulations can only be established by the local legislature; and, if the people are opposed to slavery, they will, by unfriendly legislation, effectually prevent the introduction."

This was a lame, illogical, evasive answer; but it was put forth by Douglas with an air of sincerity and urged in a tone of defiant confidence. It gave to his supporters a plausible answer. But Mr. Lincoln's a.n.a.lysis of the position was thorough, his ridicule of it effective. Douglas's invention for destroying a right under the Const.i.tution by a police regulation was admirably exposed, and his new theory that a thing "may be lawfully driven away from a place where it has a lawful right to go" was keenly reviewed by Mr. Lincoln. The debate of that day was the important one of the series. Mr. Lincoln had secured an advantage in the national relations of the contest which he held to the end. At the same time Douglas had escaped a danger which threatened his destruction in the State canva.s.s, and secured his return to the Senate. As to the respective merits of the contestants, it would be idle to expect an agreement among contemporary partisans. But a careful reading of the discussion a quarter of a century after it was held will convince the impartial that in principle, in candor, in the enduring force of logic, Mr. Lincoln had the advantage. It is due to fairness to add that probably not another man in the country, with the disabilities surrounding his position, could have maintained himself so ably, so fearlessly, so effectively, as Douglas.

BUCHANAN'S OPPOSITION TO DOUGLAS.

Douglas was aided in his canva.s.s by the undisguised opposition of the administration. The hostility of President Buchanan and his Southern supporters was the best possible proof to the people of Illinois that Douglas was representing a doctrine which was not relished by the pro-slavery party. The courage with which he fought the administration gave an air of heroism to his canva.s.s and prestige to his position. It secured to him thousands of votes that would otherwise have gone to Mr. Lincoln. For every vote which the administration was able to withhold from Douglas, it added five to his supporters. The result of the contest was, that, while Douglas was enabled to secure a majority of eight in the Legislature in consequence of an apportionment that was favorable to his side, Mr. Lincoln received a plurality of four thousand in the popular vote. In a certain sense, therefore, each had won a victory, and each had incurred defeat. But the victory of Douglas and the means by which it was won proved to be his destruction in the wider field of his ambition. Mr. Lincoln's victory and defeat combined in the end to promote his political fortunes, and to open to him the ill.u.s.trious career which followed.

This debate was not a mere incident in American politics. It marked an era. Its influence and effect were co-extensive with the Republic. It introduced a new and distinct phase in the controversy that was engrossing all minds. The position of Douglas separated him from the Southern Democracy, and this, of itself, was a fact of great significance. The South saw that the ablest leader of the Northern Democracy had been compelled, in order to save himself at home, to abjure the very doctrine on which the safety of slave inst.i.tutions depended. The propositions enunciated by Douglas in answer to the questions of Mr. Lincoln, in the Freeport debate, were as distasteful to the Southern mind as the position of Mr.

Lincoln himself. Lincoln advocated a positive inhibition of slavery by the General Government. Mr. Douglas proposed to submit Southern rights under the Const.i.tution to the decision of the first mob or rabble that might get possession of a Territorial legislature, and pa.s.s a police regulation hostile to slavery. Against this construction of the Const.i.tution the South protested, and the protest carried with it implacable hostility to Douglas.

The separation of the Democratic party into warring factions was, therefore, inevitable. The line of division was the same on which the Republican party had been founded. It was the North against the South, the South against the North. The great ma.s.s of Northern Democrats began to consolidate in support of Douglas as determinedly as the ma.s.s of Northern Whigs had followed Seward. The Southern Democrats began, at the same time, to organize their States against Douglas. Until his break from the regular ranks in his opposition to the Lecompton Const.i.tution, Douglas had enjoyed boundless popularity with his party in the South. In every slave State, there was still a small number of his old supporters who remained true to him. But the great host had left him. He could not be trusted. He had failed to stand by the extreme faith; he had refused to respond to its last requirement. Even at the risk of permanently dissevering the Democratic party, the Southern leaders resolved to destroy Douglas.

To this end, in the session of Congress following the debate with Mr. Lincoln, the Democratic senators laid down, in a series of resolutions, the true exposition of the creed of their party.

Douglas was not personally referred to, but the resolutions were aimed so pointedly at what they regarded his heretical opinions, that his name might as well have been incorporated. The resolutions were adopted during the absence of Douglas from the Senate, on a health-seeking tour, after his laborious canva.s.s. With only the dissenting vote of Mr. Pugh of Ohio among the Democrats, it was declared that "neither Congress nor a territorial legislature, whether by direct legislation, or legislation of an indirect or unfriendly character, possesses the power to impair the right of any citizen of the United States to take his slave property into the common Territories, and there hold and enjoy the same while the territorial condition exists." Not satisfied with this utter destruction of the whole doctrine of popular sovereignty, the Democratic senators gave one more turn to the wrench, by declaring that if "the territorial government should fail or refuse to provide adequate protection to the rights of the slave-holder, it will be the duty of Congress to supply such deficiency." The doctrine thus laid down by the Democratic senators was, in plain terms, that the territorial legislature might protect slavery, but could not prohibit it; and that even the Congress of the United States could only intervene on the side of bondage, and never on the side of freedom.

DOUGLAS AND THE SOUTHERN DEMOCRACY.

Anxious as Douglas was to be re-established in full relations with his party, he had not failed to see the obstacles in his way. He now realized that a desperate fight was to be made against him; that he was to be humiliated and driven from the Democratic ranks.

The creed laid down by the Southern senators was such as no man could indorse without forfeiting his political life in free States.

Douglas did not propose to rush on self-destruction to oblige the Democracy of the slave States; nor was he of the type of men who, when the right cheek is smitten, will meekly turn the other for a second blow. When his Democratic a.s.sociates in the Senate proceeded to read him out of the party, they apparently failed to see that they were reading the Northern Democracy out with him. Jefferson Davis and Judah P. Benjamin might construct resolutions adapted to the lat.i.tude of the Gulf, and dragoon them through the Senate, with aid and pressure from Buchanan's administration; but Douglas commanded the votes of the Northern Democracy, and to the edict of a pro-slavery caucus he defiantly opposed the solid millions who followed his lead in the free States.

Without wrangling over the resolutions in the Senate, Douglas made answer to the whole series in a public letter of June 22, 1859, in which he said that "if it shall become the policy of the Democratic party to repudiate their time-honored principles, and interpolate such new issues as the revival of the African slave-trade, or the doctrine that the Const.i.tution carries slavery into the Territories beyond the power of the people to legally control it as other property," he would not "accept a nomination for the Presidency if tendered him." The aggressiveness of Southern opinion on the slavery question was thus shown by Douglas in a negative or indirect view. It is a remarkable fact, that, in still another letter, Douglas argued quite elaborately against the revival of the African slave-trade, which he believed to be among the designs of the most advanced cla.s.s of pro-slavery advocates. So acute a statesman as Douglas could not fail to see, that, at every step of his controversy with Southern Democrats, he was justifying the philosophy of Lincoln when he maintained that the country was to become wholly free, or wholly under the control of the slave power.

The controversy thus precipitated between Douglas and the South threatened the disruption of the Democratic party. That was an event of very serious significance. It would bring the conflict of sections still nearer by sundering a tie which had for so long a period bound together vast numbers from the North and the South in common sympathy and fraternal co-operation. Even those who were most opposed to the Democratic party beheld its peril with a certain feeling of regret not unmixed with apprehension. The Whig party had been destroyed; and its Northern and Southern members, who, but a few years before, had worked harmoniously for Harrison, for Clay, for Taylor, were now enrolled in rival and hostile organizations.

A similar dissolution of the Democratic party would sweep away the only common basis of political action still existing for men of the free States and men of the slave States. The separation of the Methodist church into Northern and Southern organizations, a few years before, had been regarded by Mr. Webster as a portent of evil for the Union. The division of the Democratic party would be still more ominous. The possibility of such an event showed how deeply the slavery question had affected all ranks,--social, religious, and political. It showed, too, how the spirit of Calhoun now inspired the party in whose councils the slightest word of Jackson had once been law. This change, beginning with the defeat of Van Buren in 1844, was at first slow; but it had afterwards moved so rapidly and so far, that men in the North, who wished to remain in the ranks of the Democracy, were compelled to trample on the principles, and surrender the prejudices, of a lifetime.

Efforts to harmonize proved futile. In Congress the breach was continually widening.

FACTIONS OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY.

The situation was cause of solicitude, and even grief, with thousands to whom the old party was peculiarly endeared. The traditions of Jefferson, of Madison, of Jackson, were devoutly treasured; and the splendid achievements of the American Democracy were recounted with the pride which attaches to an honorable family inheritance.

The fact was recalled that the Republic had grown to its imperial dimensions under Democratic statesmans.h.i.+p. It was remembered that Louisiana had been acquired from France, Florida from Spain, the independent Republic of Texas annexed, and California, with its vast dependencies, and its myriad millions of treasure, ceded by Mexico, all under Democratic administrations, and in spite of the resistance of their opponents. That a party whose history was inwoven with the glory of the Republic should now come to its end in a quarrel over the status of the negro, in a region where his labor was not wanted, was, to many of its members, as incomprehensible as it was sorrowful and exasperating. They protested, but they could not prevent. Anger was aroused, and men refused to listen to reason. They were borne along, they knew not whither or by what force. Time might have restored the party to harmony, but at the very height of the factional contest the representatives of both sections were hurried forward to the National Convention of 1860, with principle subordinated to pa.s.sion, with judgment displaced by a desire for revenge.

[NOTE.--The following are the questions, referred to on p. 147, which were propounded to Mr. Douglas by Mr. Lincoln in their debate at Freeport. The popular interest was centred in the second question.

_First_, If the people of Kansas shall, by means entirely un.o.bjectionable in all other respects, adopt a State Const.i.tution, and ask admission into the Union under it before they have the requisite number of inhabitants, according to the English bill-- some ninety-three thousand--will you vote to admit them?

_Second_, Can the people of a United-States Territory, in any lawful way, against the wish of any citizen of the United States, exclude slavery from its limits prior to the formation of a State Const.i.tution?

_Third_, If the Supreme Court of the United States shall decide that States cannot exclude slavery from their limits, are you in favor or acquiescing in, adopting, and following such decision as a rule of political action?

_Fourth_, Are you in favor of acquiring additional territory, in disregard of how such acquisition may affect the nation on the slavery question?]

CHAPTER VIII.

Excited Condition of the South.--The John Brown Raid at Harper's Ferry.--Character of Brown.--Governor Wise.--Hot Temper.--Course of Republicans in Regard to John Brown.--Misunderstanding of the Two Sections.--a.s.sembling of the Charleston Convention.--Position of Douglas and his Friends.--Imperious Demands of Southern Democrats.

--Caleb Cus.h.i.+ng selected for Chairman of the Convention.--The South has Control of the Committee on Resolutions.--Resistance of the Douglas Delegates.--They defeat the Report of the Committee.-- Delegates from Seven Southern States withdraw.--Convention unable to make a Nomination.--Adjourns to Baltimore.--Convention divides.

--Nomination of both Douglas and Breckinridge.--Const.i.tutional Union Convention.--Nomination of Bell and Everett.--The Chicago Convention.--Its Members.h.i.+p and Character.--Mr. Seward's Position.

--His Disabilities.--Work of his Friends, Thurlow Weed and William M. Evarts.--Opposition of Horace Greeley.--Objections from Doubtful States.--Various Candidates.--Nomination of Lincoln and Hamlin.-- Four Presidential Tickets in the Field.--Animated Canva.s.s.--The Long Struggle over.--The South defeated.--Election of Lincoln.-- Political Revolution of 1860 complete.

The South was unnaturally and unjustifiably excited. The people of the slave States could not see the situation accurately, but, like a man with disordered nerves, they exaggerated every thing.

Their sense of proportion seemed to be destroyed, so that they could no longer perceive the intrinsic relation which one incident had to another. In this condition of mind, when the most ordinary events were misapprehended and mismeasured, they were startled and alarmed by an occurrence of extraordinary and exceptional character.

On the quiet morning of October, 1859, with no warning whatever to the inhabitants, the United-States a.r.s.enal, at Harper's Ferry, Virginia, was found to be in the possession of an invading mob.

The town was besieged, many of its citizens made prisoners, telegraph wires cut, railway-trains stopped by a force which the people, as they were aroused from sleep, had no means of estimating. A resisting body was soon organized, militia came in from the surrounding country, regular troops were hurried up from Was.h.i.+ngton.

By the opening of the second day, a force of fifteen hundred men surrounded the a.r.s.enal, and, when the insurgents surrendered, it was found that there had been but twenty-two in all. Four were still alive, including their leader, John Brown.

JOHN BROWN AT HARPER'S FERRY.

Brown was a man of singular courage, perseverance, and zeal, but was entirely misguided and misinformed. He had conceived the utterly impracticable scheme of liberating the slaves of the South by calling on them to rise, putting arms in their hands, and aiding them to gain their freedom. He had borne a very conspicuous and courageous part in the Kansas struggles, and had been a terror to the slave-holders on the Missouri border. His bravery was of a rare type. He had no sense of fear. Governor Wise stated that during the fight, while Brown held the a.r.s.enal, with one of his sons lying dead beside him, another gasping with a mortal wound, he felt the pulse of the dying boy, used his own musket, and coolly commanded his men, all amid a shower of bullets from the attacking force. While of sound mind on most subjects, Brown had evidently lost his mental balance on the one topic of slavery. His scheme miscarried the moment its execution was attempted, as any one not blinded by fanaticism could have from the first foreseen.

The matter was taken up in hot wrath by the South, with Governor Wise in the lead. The design was not known to or approved by any body of men in the North; but an investigation was moved in the Senate, by Mr. Mason of Virginia, with the evident view of fixing the responsibility on the Northern people, or, at least, upon the Republican party. These men affected to see in John Brown, and his handful of followers, only the advance guard of another irruption of Goths and Vandals from the North, bent on inciting servile insurrection, on plunder, pillage, and devastation. Mr. Mason's committee found no sentiment in the North justifying Brown, but the irritating and offensive course of the Virginia senator called forth a great deal of defiant anti-slavery expression which, in his judgment, was tantamount to treason. Brown was tried and executed. He would not permit the plea of unsound mind to be made on his behalf, and to the end he behaved with that calm courage which always attracts respect and admiration. Much was made of the deliverance of the South, from a great peril, and every thing indicated that the John Brown episode was to be drawn into the political campaign as an indictment against anti-slavery men. It was loudly charged by the South, and by their partisans throughout the North, that such insurrections were the legitimate outgrowth of Republican teaching, and that the national safety demanded the defeat and dissolution of the Republican party. Thus challenged, the Republican party did not stand on the defensive. Many of its members openly expressed their pity for the zealot, whose rashness had led him to indefensible deeds and thence to the scaffold. On the day of his execution, bells were tolled in many Northern towns --not in approval of what Brown had done, but from compa.s.sion for the fate of an old man whose mind had become distempered by suffering, and by morbid reflection on the suffering of others; from a feeling that his sentence, in view of this fact, was severe; and lastly, and more markedly, as a Northern rebuke to the attempt on the part of the South to make a political issue from an occurrence which was as unforeseen and exceptional as it was deplorable.

The fear and agitation in the South were not feigned but real.

Instead of injuring the Republican party, this very fact increased its strength in the North. The terror of the South at the bare prospect of a negro insurrection led many who had not before studied the slavery question to give serious heed to this phase of it.

The least reflection led men to see that a domestic inst.i.tution must be very undesirable which could keep an entire community of brave men in dread of some indefinable tragedy. Mobs and riots of much greater magnitude than the John Brown uprising had frequently occurred in the free States, and they were put down by the firm authority of law, without the dread hand of a spectre behind which might in a moment light the horizon with the conflagration of homes, and subject wives and daughters to a fate of nameless horror.

Instead, therefore, of arresting the spread of Republican principles, the mad scheme of John Brown tended to develop and strengthen them.

The conviction grew rapidly that if slavery could produce such alarm and such demoralization in a strong State like Virginia, inhabited by a race of white men whose courage was never surpa.s.sed, it was not an inst.i.tution to be encouraged, but that its growth should be prohibited in the new communities where its weakening and baleful influence was not yet felt.

Sentiment of this kind could not be properly comprehended in the South. It was honestly misrepresented by some, willfully misrepresented by others. All construed it into a belief, on the part of a large proportion of the Northern people, that John Brown was entirely justifiable. His wild invasion of the South, they apprehended, would be repeated as opportunity offered on a larger scale and with more deadly purpose. This opinion was stimulated and developed for political ends by many whose intelligence should have led them to more enlightened views. False charges being constantly repeated and plied with incessant zeal, the most radical misconception became fixed in the Southern mind. It was idle for the Republican party to declare that their aim was only to prevent the extension of slavery to free territory, and that they were pledged not to interfere with its existence in the States. Such distinctions were not accepted by the Southern people. Their leaders had taught them that the one necessarily involved the other, and that a man who was in favor of the Wilmot Proviso was as bitter an enemy to the South as one who incited a servile insurrection. These views were unceasingly pressed upon the South by the Northern Democracy, who, in their zeal to defeat the Republicans at home, did not scruple to misrepresent their aims in the most reckless manner. They were constantly misleading the public opinion of the slave States, until at last the South recognized no difference between the creed of Seward and the creed of Gerrit Smith, and held Lincoln responsible for all the views and expressions of William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips. The calling of a National Republican Convention was to their disordered imagination a threat of destruction. The success of its candidates would, in their view, be just cause for resistance outside the pale of the Const.i.tution.

MEETING OF CHARLESTON CONVENTION.

It was at the height of this overwrought condition of the Southern mind, that the National Convention of the Democratic party met at Charleston on the 23d of April, 1860. The convention had been a.s.sembled in South Carolina, as the most discontented and extreme of Southern States, in order to signify that the Democracy could harmonize on her soil, and speak peace to the nation through the voice which had so often spoken peace before. But the Northern Democrats failed to comprehend their Southern allies. In their anxiety to impress the slave-holders with the depth and malignity of Northern anti-slavery feeling, they had unwittingly implicated themselves as accessories to the crime they charged on others. If they were, in fact, the friends to the South which they so loudly proclaimed themselves to be, now was the time to show their faith by their works. The Southern delegates had come to the convention in a truculent spirit,--as men who felt that they were enduring wrongs which must then and there be righted. They had a grievance for which they demanded redress, as a preliminary step to further conference. They wanted no evasion, they would accept no delay.

The Northern delegates begged for the nomination of Douglas as the certain method of defeating the Republicans, and asked that they might not be borne down by a platform which they could not carry in the North. The Southern delegates demanded a platform which should embody the Const.i.tutional rights of the slave-holder, and they would not qualify or conceal their requirements. If the North would sustain those rights, all would be well. If the North would not sustain them, it was of infinite moment to the South to be promptly and definitely advised of the fact. The Southern delegates were not presenting a particular man as candidate. On that point they would be liberal and conciliatory. But they were fighting for a principle, and would not surrender it or compromise it.

The supporters of Douglas from the North saw that they would be utterly destroyed at home if they consented to the extreme Southern demand. Their destruction would be equally sure even with Douglas as their candidate if the platform should announce principles which he had been controverting ever since his revolt against the Lecompton bill. For the first time in the history of national Democratic conventions the Northern delegates refused to submit to the exactions of the South. Hitherto platforms had been constructed just as Southern men dictated. Candidates had been taken as their preference directed. But now the Northern men, pressed by the rising tide of Republicanism in every free State, demanded some ground on which they could stand and make a contest at home.

PROCEEDINGS OF CHARLESTON CONVENTION.

Caleb Cus.h.i.+ng of Ma.s.sachusetts was chosen President of the Convention.

The political career of Mr. Cus.h.i.+ng had not been distinguished for steady adherence to party. He was elected to Congress in 1834, as representative from the Ess.e.x district in Ma.s.sachusetts. He was at that time a zealous member of the Whig party, and was active on the Northern or anti-slavery side in the discussions relating to the "right of pet.i.tion." He served in the House for eight years.

After the triumph of Harrison in 1840, Mr. Cus.h.i.+ng evidently aspired to be a party leader. In the quarrel which ensued between President Tyler and Mr. Clay, he saw an opportunity to gratify his ambition by adhering to the administration. This brought him into very close relations with Mr. Webster, who remained in Tyler's Cabinet after his colleagues retired, and threw him at the same time into rank antagonism with Mr. Clay, to whose political fortunes he had previously been devoted. In view of the retirement of Mr. Webster from the State Department in 1843, President Tyler nominated Mr.

Cus.h.i.+ng for Secretary of the Treasury, but the Whig senators, appreciating his power and influence in that important position, procured his rejection. Some Democratic votes from the South were secured against him because of his course in the House of Representatives. The President then nominated him as Commissioner to China, and he was promptly confirmed. Oriental diplomatists never encountered a minister better fitted to meet them with their own weapons.

Upon his return home, Mr. Cus.h.i.+ng found that Mr. Webster had resumed his place as the leader of the Northern Whigs. Mr. Clay had meanwhile been defeated for the Presidency, his followers were discouraged, the administration of Mr. Polk was in power. Mr.

Cus.h.i.+ng at once joined the Democracy, and was made a Brigadier- General in the army raised for the war with Mexico. From that time onward he became a partisan of the extreme State-rights school of the Southern Democracy, and was appropriately selected for Attorney- General by President Pierce in 1853. In conjunction with Jefferson Davis, he was considered to be the guiding and controlling force in the administration. His thorough education, his remarkable attainments, his eminence in the law, his ability as an advocate, rendered his active co-operation of great value to the pro-slavery Democrats of the South. He was naturally selected for the important and difficult duty of presiding over the convention whose deliberations were to affect the interests of the Government, and possibly the fate of the Union.

It was soon evident that the South would have every advantage in the convention which an intelligent and skillful administration of parliamentary law could afford. Without showing unfairness, the presiding officer, especially in a large and boisterous a.s.sembly, can impart confidence and strength to the side with which he may sympathize. But, apart from any power to be derived from having the chairman of the convention, the South had a more palpable advantage from the mode in which the standing committees must, according to precedent, be const.i.tuted. As one member must be taken from each State, the Southern men obtained the control of all the committees, from the fact that the delegates from California and Oregon steadily voted with them. There were thirty-three States in the Union in 1860,--eighteen free and fifteen slave-holding.

California and Oregon, uniting with the South, gave to that section seventeen, and left to the North but sixteen on all the committees.

The Democratic delegates from the Pacific States a.s.sumed a weighty responsibility in thus giving to the Disunionists of the South preliminary control of the convention, by permitting them to shape authoritatively all the business to be submitted. It left the real majority of the convention in the att.i.tude of a protesting minority.