ward, he was identifying his name, and the ultraism of Alabama, too intimately and conspicuously with the movement represented in that hall. When he concluded it was evident that there would not be any more speech making. If the eloquence of Yancey had become a weariness, who should dare propose to stand up before the jaded crowd, sick, as all were, of the very sound of the human voice.

Mr. Avery of North Carolina offered a resolution of thanks to Mr. Cushing, who, on rising to acknowledge the compliment, was received with extravagant applause. He said:

Gentlemen of the Convention-I beg you to accept the expression of my heartfelt acknowledgment of your thanks. I do not intend to say any thing more, except to congratulate you upon the most felicitous termination of your labors, both in the adoption of platform, and in the nomination of your candidates.

A motion, by Judge Meek, that the President have power to appoint committees, was adopted. And at eleven o'clock the Convention ad

journed sine die.

THE CONTEST AT BALTIMORE-THE SPIRIT OF THE

SPLIT.

When the Seceders appeared at Baltimore, pursuant to the programme of the Southern Congressmen, advertised in their manifesto and perfected at Richmond, the contest between the antagonisms which had been fully developed at Charleston, resolved itself into a simple one on credentials, between the original Charleston delegates, and the delegations from several States, provided to fill up the gaps caused by secession, with the deciding vote in the hand of Dean Richmond, chairman of the New York delegation. Richmond & Co., while able to say whether the Convention should be consolidated by admitting the original Southern delegates, or disrupted by excluding the seceders, could not say, in case of consolidation, who should be the nominee. The friends of Douglas were without confidence in Richmond ("the Dean"), and were only prevented from denouncing him, by the appreciation of their dependence upon him. If he slaughtered Douglas, they had the power and the will to slaughter his man, and would have prevented the nomination of any candidate for whom he, in connection with the South, might have thrown his influence. Hence the hesitation of New York-her long consultations-her vascillation, and retrograde movements. She struggled for a compromise, but both sides were so fierce that compromising was out of the question. The Southerners thought they had compromised enough in coming to Baltimore, and condescending to ask admission into the Convention from which they had seceded. The friends of Douglas could not be expected to throw away the last chance for their candidate, by making up the Convention, so far as possible, out of its original materials. Such a compromise as that would have been, not a capitulation, but a surrender at discretion. They did, at the solicitation, indeed the dictatorial demand of New York, back out from two propositions, and were

sorry for it afterward. They had taken the ground that no delegate accredited to the Richmond Convention, should be allowed to enter that at Baltimore. They were drawn from this point by the strong case of Mississippi. They had also declared the necessity of a pledge or understanding, that all delegates entering the Convention, should make or assent to, to the effect that they would support the nominees of the Convention. After urging this for a few hours, and observing the explosive excitement engendered by it, they withdrew it. They also, or rather New York, succumbed respecting their delegation from Georgia. Yet it was impossible to satisfy the demands of the South and preserve the unity of the Convention, without passing under the yoke of Yancey, and they could not consent to that humiliation.

The friends of Mr. Douglas finding their boasted availability in candidate and platform repudiated, and themselves treated as "property," rather than Sovereign, became infuriated. They were animated by passions whose force is terrible. There was in the first place an unappeasable hungering for the spoils, common, I suppose, to all politicians. They had long been placed on short allowance. In yielding to the demands of the South, and following their leaders ambitious of national eminence, they had been deserted by the greater portion of the people of their own localities. They had long been stung by the taunts of their Republican neighbors, that they were serfs of Southern masters, and in the new demands and arrogant intolerance of the South, they felt that they were regarded as inferiors, and treated accordingly. They had assumed that the South was under obligations to them for fighting battles for Slavery, and were exasperated upon discovering that no such obligation was recognized as having existence. They found, in short, that they could not be "sound" on the slavery question, without yielding up their most profound convictions, and all manly instincts. They were prepared to say that slavery should be tolerated-they could even go so far as to say that they did not care whether it was voted up or down-in or out of a Territory-but they were not willing to vote it up, and glorify it as a good thing, and especially acknowledge its political pre-eminence. And behind all this, they represented the purposes of Mr. Douglas, and had taken up his quarrel with the Lecompton wing of the party, and it became their fixed resolution to use every atom of power they could acquire, to vindicate the position of Mr. Douglas and his regularity in the party, and if possible, to assert by authority his control over the organization.

They proceeded to Baltimore in a state of stimulated enthusiasm, and partial blindness. They did not know the power and desperation of the South, and were foolish enough to believe the opposition to them in that quarter would quietly subside. They were, however, met in a spirit more intolerant than their own. Virginia, upon whom they had depended to give Douglas the nomination, in the spirit of harmony and according to Democratic usages, was the first to make threats, and finally led the seceding column-the mother of Democracy thus becoming chief of the seceders.

The appearance of the Seceders at Baltimore, and their evident pur pose and power to control the Convention or destroy it, produced ex

tremely hostile feeling on the part of the North-west. The immediate friends of Douglas became rancorous. Their temper was not improved by the fact that in the most conspicuous case, and on the vital point, they were manifestly worsted in argument. The report of Mr. Stevens of Oregon from the committee on Credentials, displays the strength, according to the usage of the party, of the case of the seceders. There was no way of proceeding to business, which to them had a single pointthe nomination of Douglas-but to blow up the Convention. If a single one of the Douglas delegations from the Gulf States should be admitted, the explosion would take place just as if all were admitted. The compromising and trading New Yorkers found an absence of available material for obtaining advantages in political stock gambling. They were alternately bulls tossing up the Douglas stock and bears tearing it down, and yet, through all the fluctuations, they were unable to make a sale or a purchase on which any thing could be realized. The North-west was as determined and impracticable regarding one scheme as the South was regarding another. The Democracy of the North-west rose out of the status of serfdom. There was servile insurrection, with attendant horrors, and Baltimore became a political St. Domingo.

The South was amazed to hear its favorite threat of secession despised and hooted at. The seceders were sneeringly asked why they came back? and told that they had no business there-that Richmond was the place for them. Yancey had said it would be dishonorable for seceders to sneak back and beg to be allowed to re-enter the Convention. Now, why were they sneaking back? What had they done with their honor? The double-headed mass-meetings held every night for a week, constantly inflamed every antagonism within the party. Every old feverish sore was rent open by speakers from one stump or the other, and the want of unity in the party was so manifest that feeble efforts to make speeches in the old time strain of "conciliation, harmony, every thing for the man, nothing for the principle," were received with derision and remarks abundantly garnished with profanity, that there was no occasion for that sort of twaddle.

Just in the crisis of the Convention Mr. Douglas lost his nerve, and wrote by mail and telegraph to his most confidential and influential friends, beseeching them to save the party, if it could be done by withdrawing his name from the contest. It was too late, however. He was the implement of a revolution, and it was necessary that he should be used. He had raised a greater tempest than he had imagined. He had stirred up the storm but could not control the whirlwind.

After the Conventions, the feeling between the people of the Theatre and those of the Institute was so fiercely belligerant, that they could not talk in good humor. The fact that a family quarrel is of the most remorseless character, was manifest in the conversation of every group of ten persons to be seen on the streets or about the hotels. Each faction accused the other in the most harsh terms, of being factionists, bolters, traitors, incendiaries, etc., etc.-epithets conveying imputations offensive, in a political sense, being exhausted in vain efforts on both sides to do justice to the subject.

The North-western delegates, on their return home, congratulated themselves upon the presumption, that if they had ripped up the Democratic party, they had shown the Republicans that they, as Democrats, were not doughfaces. The reflection that they were no more to be reproached as serfs of the South, seemed sweet and ample consolation for all the struggles and perils through which they had passed, and the pangs they had suffered in the dissolution of the party. They talked all the way over the mountains to this effect: "Well, there is one thing of which we can't be accused any more. There was not a doughface shown in the North-west." The fact is the South was never before quite so well matched in her own game of brag and intolerable arrogance. They never before met in Convention face to face, with oath to oath, and menace for menace, and told with as much vehemence as they threatened to secede, that they might "do it and be d-d."

I shared a railroad seat, when crossing the mountains, with a Northwestern delegate, one of the most zealous of the partisans of Douglas. He was in a bad humor with the South. I asked what was the matter. He said: "I have been vexed. After all the battles we have fought for the South-to be served in this manner-it is ungrateful and mean.' He wanted the South to be made sweat under an Abolition President. He was glad Seward was not the Republican candidate, for he would be too easy on the South. He hoped Lincoln would make them sweat. The Southerners had been ruling over niggers so long they thought they could rule white men just the same. The South should not go out of the Union either. The would stay in and sweat. The fugitive slaves might go to Canada or to the devil in welcome, and their masters after them. He never would trouble his head about them any more. did not care whether the Fugitive Slave law was enforced or not. He declared the South had alienated her best friends forever, and must now do the best she could for herself. He was also disposed to disparage the Southern country, depreciate the resources of the South, and magnify the evils that beset her.

He

And this conversation, I am convinced, represents the feeling with which the North-western delegates crossed the mountains returning home. The extent and bearings of the political revolution, of which this is one of the indications, may be further illustrated from the barroom talk at Baltimore. One delegate from Indiana was happy to tell the Seceders that the valley of the Wabash was worth more than all the country between the Potomac and the Rio Grande, niggers included. And then an Ohioan boasted that there was "one town in a corner of Ohio, called Cincinnati, worth more than the whole d-d State of Alabama. Another assured the Seceders that he thought more of Black Republicans than of such fellows as they were, and that if there was to be a fight between sections, he was for his own side of the Ohio.

THE SECOND RICHMOND CONVENTION.

During the session of the Baltimore Convention, the South Carolina delegates remained at Richmond, and after the 21st, the day to which they had adjourned, they adjourned from day to day.

On the evening of Tuesday, the 26th, a number of the Southern delegates were in the city, among others, Messrs. Scott and Yancey of Alabama, and the Convention assembled in Metropolitan Hall. Col. Irwin, the President, called the Convention to order.

Mr. Middleton of South Carolina made a report from the committee on Credentials on the New York case (the New York Commissioners). The committee found that those commissioners had been "duly elected as delegates from the third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth Congressional Districts of New York to the Richmond Convention.'

After some discussion the whole matter was laid on the table by the following vote:

AYES-Virginia, South Carolina 7, Florida 3, Alabama 9, Mississippi 7-27.

NOES-North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia 10, Louisiana 6, Texas 4-21.

Mr. Dargam of South Carolina then offered the following resolution: Resolved, That this Convention approve of the Platform of Principles recommended by the majority report at the Charleston Convention.

The question was put, and the resolution was adopted unanimously, amid loud cheering.

Mr. Furman of South Carolina, on behalf of his delegation, offered the following resolution:

Resolved, That John C. Breckenridge of Kentucky, and Joseph Lane of Oregon, are, and they are hereby declared to be the choice, unanimously, of this Convention, for President and Vice-President of the United States.

There were a few votes of thanks, as usual on such occasions, and the Convention adjourned sine die.

The Richmond Enquirer says:

66

The galleries during the session were thronged, and whilst there was great enthusiasm, there was no one occasion, in the slightest degree, to disturb good order. All the proceedings were conducted with a calmness, dignity and decorum which we have never seen excelled."