convention assembled at Charleston, South Carolina; but no sooner had the body convened than its utter distraction of counsels was apparent. The delegates were divided on the slavery question, and, after much debating and wrangling, the party was disrupted. The delegates from the South, unable to obtain a distinct expression of their views in the platform of principles, and seeing that the Northern wing of the party was determined to nominate Senator Douglas-the great defender of popular sovereignty-withdrew from the convention. The remainder, embracing most of the delegates from the North, continued in session, balloted for a while for a candidate, and on the 3d of May adjourned to Baltimore.

In that city, on the 18th of June, the delegates of the Northern wing of the party reassembled and chose Douglas as their standard-bearer in the approaching canvass. The seceding delegates adjourned, first to Richmond and afterwards to Baltimore, where they met on the 28th of June, and nominated John C. Breckinridge, of Kentucky. A fourth political party entered the field and took the name of Constitutional Unionists. Representatives of this party met in convention, and chose John Bell, of Tennessee, as their candidate. Thus were four political standards raised in the field to excite the country.

The Republicans now gained by their compactness and the distinctness of their utterances on the slavery question. Most of the old Abolitionists, though by far more radical than the Republicans, cast in their fortunes with the latter, and supported Lincoln. The result was the triumphant election of the Republican candidate, by the electoral votes of nearly all the Northern States. The support of the Southern States was for the most part given to Breckinridge. The States of Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee cast their ballots, thirty-nine in number, for Bell. Douglas received a large popular, but small electoral, vote, his supporters being scattered through all the States, without the concentration necessary to carry any. Thus, after having controlled the destinies of the Republic for sixty years, with only temporary overthrows in 1840 and 1848, the Democratic party was broken into fragments and driven from the field. The issue of the election had been clearly foreseen, and the result anticipated, at least in the South. The Southern leaders had not hesitated to declare that the choice of Lincoln would be regarded as a just cause for a dissolution of the Union. Threats of secession had been heard on every hand; but in the North such expressions were regarded as mere political bravado, having little foundation in the actual purposes of the Southern people. At any rate, the Republicans of the populous North were not to be deterred from voting according to their political convictions. They crowded to the polls, and their favorite received a plurality of the electoral votes.

At this time the Government, so far as Congress and the Executive were concerned, was under the control of loyal Democrats and Republicans. A majority of the members of the Cabinet, however, and many Senators and Representatives belonged to the Breckinridge party, and had imbibed from a pro-slavery education all of the fire-eating propensities of the extreme South. Such members of Congress did not hesitate openly to advocate the principles of secession as a remedy for the election of Lincoln. In the interim between the fall of 1860 and the expiration of Mr. Buchanan's term of office, the animosity of the Southern leaders reached a climax. It was foreseen by them that with the ensuing spring all the departments of the Government would pass under Republican control. The times were full of passion, animosity, and rashness. It was seen that, for the present, disunion-the secession of the Southern States-was possible; but that if the matter should be postponed until the incoming Administration should be fully established, disunion would be impossible. The attitude of the President favored the measure. He was not himself, in principle or profession, a disunionist. On the contrary, he denied the right of a State to secede, but at the same time he declared himself not armed with the Constitutional power necessary to prevent secession by force. Such a theory of government was sufficient of itself to paralyze the remaining energies of the Executive-to make him helpless in the presence of the emergency. The interval, therefore, between the Presidential election in November