could act in most. Loving his country first, his section next, but just to all-so that through his endeavors in the senate of the United States, Massachusetts obtained from the general government her just dues, deferred for forty years, of hundreds of thousands of dollars, a feat which none of her agents had ever been able to accomplish. Besides, his friends were not pressing his name before the convention, so that he was not a partisan in the personal strife there going on. I thought such a man deserved, at least, the poor compliment of a vote from Massachusetts, and therefore I threw my vote for Jefferson Davis, of Mississippi; and I claim, at least, that that vote was guided by intelligence.

"Through a series of fifty-seven ballotings, the voting did not materially change. Afterward, almost by common consent, an adjournment was carried, and we are to go to Baltimore, on the 18th of June next, to finish our work.”

General Butler went to Baltimore. All possibility of uniting the party was there prevented by the immovable resolve of the friends of Mr. Douglas to force his nomination. The convention was again divided, and General Butler went out with the delegates who had a determination equally fixed to defeat the nomination of Mr. Douglas. The Douglas men nominated their chief for the presidency. They selected, as a candidate for the second office, Herschell Johnson, of Georgia, an avowed disunionist, and an open advocate of the slave trade, who, at a public meeting in industrial Philadelphia, had permitted himself to say, that he thought "it was the best plan for capital to own its labor." The retiring body nominated for the presidency, Mr. Breckinridge, of Kentucky, and Mr. Lane, of Oregon, for the vice-presidency. These candidates received from General Butler an energetic, an unwavering support-the only kind of support he ever gave to anything.

Let us see how the four parties stood in the contest of that year. The Cincinnati platform of 1856 said: Let the people in each territory decide, when they form a constitution, whether they will come into the Union as a slave state or as a free state.

But the delay in the admission of Kansas, gave intense interest to the question, whether slavery could exist in a territory before its admission.

This was the issue in 1860.

The republican platform said: No, it can not exist. Freedom is

Slavery can exist only by local

the normal condition of all territory. law. There is no authority anywhere competent to legalize slavery in a territory of the United States. The Supreme Court can not do it. Congress can not do it. The territorial legislature can not do it.

The Douglas platform said: We do not know whether slavery can exist in a territory or not. There is a difference of opinion among us upon the subject. The Supreme Court must decide, and its decision shall be final and binding.

The Breckinridge platform said: Slavery lawfully exists in a territory the moment a slave-owner enters it with his slaves. The United States is bound to maintain his right to hold slaves in a territory. But when the people of the territory frame a state constitution, they are to decide whether to enter the Union as a slave or as a free state. If as a slave state, they are to be admitted without question. If as a free state, the slave owners must retire or emancipate.

The Bell and Everett party, declining to construct a platform, expressed no opinion upon the question at issue.

Thus, of the four parties in the field, two only had the courage to look the state of things in the face, and to avow a positive convic tion, namely, the republicans and the Breckinridge men. These two, alone, made platforms upon which an honest voter could intelligently stand. The other parties shirked the issue, and meant to shirk it. The most pitiable spectacle ever afforded in the politics of the United States, was the stump wrigglings of Mr. Douglas during the campaign, when he taxed all his great ingenuity to seem to say something that should win votes in one section, without losing votes in the other. Tragical as the end was to him, all men felt that his disappointment was just, though they would have gladly seen him recover from the shock, take the bitter lesson to heart, and join with his old allies in saving the country.

Before leaving Baltimore, the leaders of the Breckinridge party came to an explicit understanding upon two important points.

First, the northern men received from Mr. Breckinridge and his southern supporters, not merely the strongest possible declarations of devotion to the Union and the Constitution, but a particular disavowal and repudiation of the cry then heard all over the South, that in case of the success of the republican party, the South would

secede. There is no doubt in the minds of the well-informed, that Mr. Breckinridge was sincere in these professions, and it is known that he adhered to the Union, in his heart, down to the time when war became evidently inevitable. There is reason, too, to believe that he has since bitterly regretted having abandoned the cause of his country.

Secondly, the Breckinridge leaders at Baltimore arranged their programme of future operations. They were aware of the certainty of their defeat. In all probability, the republicans would come into power. That party (as the Breckinridge democrats supposed) being unused to govern, and inheriting immense and unexampled difficulties, would break down, would quarrel among themselves, would become ridiculous or offensive, and so prepare the way for the triumphant return of the democracy to power in 1865. Mr. Douglas, too, they thought, would destroy himself, as a political power, by having wantonly broken up his party. The democrats, then, would adhere to their young and popular candidate, and elect him; if not in 1864, then in 1868.

Having concluded these arrangements, they separated, to meet in Washington after the election, and renew the compact, or else to change it to meet any unexpected issue of the campaign.

On his return to Lowell, General Butler found himself the most unpopular man in Massachusetts. Not that Massachusetts approved the course or the character of Mr. Douglas. Not that Massachusetts was incapable of appreciating a bold and honest man, who stood in opposition to her cherished sentiments. It was because she saw one of her public men acting in conjunction with the party which seemed to her identified with that which threatened a disruption to the country if it should be fairly beaten in an election. The platform of that party was profoundly odious to her. It appeared to her, not merely erroneous, but immoral and monstrous, and she could not but feel that the northern supporters of it were guilty of a kind of subserviency that bordered upon baseness. She did not understand the series of events which would have compelled Mr. Douglas, if he had been elected, to go to unimagined lengths in quieting the apprehensions of the South. She could not, in that time of intense excitement, pause to consider, that if General Butler's course was wrong, it was, at least, disinterested and unequivocal.

He was hooted in the streets of Lowell, and a public meeting, at

which he was to give an account of his stewardship, was broken up by a mob.

A second meeting was called. General Butler then obtained a hearing, and justified his course in a speech of extraordinary force and cogency. He characterized the Douglas ticket as "two-faced," designed to win both sections, by deceiving both. "Hurrah for Johnson! he goes for intervention. Hurrah for Douglas! he goes for non-intervention unless the Supreme Court tells him to go the other way. Hurrah for Johnson! he goes against popular sovereignty. Hurrah for Douglas! he goes for popular sovereignty if the Supreme Court will let him! Hurrah for Johnson! he is for disunion! Hurrah for Douglas! he is for the Union."

He met the charge brought against Mr. Breckinridge of sympathy with southern disunionists. "In a speech, but a day or two since at Frankfort, in the presence of his life-long friends and political opponents, who could have gainsayed the declaration if it were not true, Mr. Breckinridge proudly said :-'I am an American and a Kentuckian, who never did an act nor cherished a thought that was not full of devotion to the constitution and the Union.' Proud words, proudly spoken, and incapable of contradiction. Yet we, who support this gallant and conservative leader, are called disunionists, and charged with being untrue to democracy. By whom is this charge made? By Pierre Soulé, an avowed disunionist, in Louisiana; by John Forsyth and the Atlanta Confederacy,' in Georgia, which maintains the duty of the South to leave the Union if Lincoln is elected; and yet these same men are the foremost of the southern supporters of Douglas; by Gaulding, of Georgia, who is now stumping the state for Douglas, making the same speech that he made in the convention at Baltimore, where he argued that non-intervention meant that congress had no power to prevent the exportation of negroes from Africa, and that the slave trade was the true popular sovereignty in full expansion.

"Would you believe it, fellow-citizens, this speech was applauded in the Douglas convention, and that too, by a delegate from Massachusetts, ay, and from Middlesex county.

"When I left that convention, I declared that I would no longer sit where the African slave trade, made piracy and felony by the laws of my country, was openly advocated and applauded. Yet such, at the South, are the supporters of Douglas."

General Butler was the Breckinridge candidate for the governorship of Massachusetts. He had been a candidate for the same office a few years before, and had received the full support of his party, about 50,000 votes. On this occasion only 6,000 of his fellow-citizens cast their votes for him; the whole number of voters being more than 170,000.

CHAPTER III.

MASSACHUSETTS READY.

PERHAPS the commonest mistake made in commenting upon human actions, is to overrate the understanding, and underrate the moral worth of the actor. We flatter ourselves that we are very great and very bad beings; the humiliating truth seems to be, that we are rather good and extremely little. Mr. Dickens has a character in one of his novels, who was fond of giving out that he was born in a ditch, and struggled up from that lowly estate to the position of a man whose check was good for any number of thousands of pounds; but it came out at last, that he was born of "poor but respectable parents," who had given him the rudiments of education in the most ordinary and common-place way. The blustering fool could not face the homely, creditable truth of his origin, and so invented the flattering lie, that he was the castaway offspring of a stroller. A vanity of this kind is common to the race. We do not, as a general thing, purposely deceive ourselves, but it appears to be universally taken for granted, that man is a tremendous creature, capable of seeing the end from the beginning, and accustomed o form plans which contemplate and cause the actual issue. This lelusion, I suppose, is nourished, by our constantly viewing the results of human ingenuity in vast accumulation. We omit to consider, that it took all the lifetime of man to build the Great Eastern, and that a new suit of Sunday clothes is the result of the severe cogitation and laboriously gathered knowledge of all the ingenious tailors that ever lived, to say nothing of the inventive weavers, curriers, and shoemakers.