Meantime, the seceders went to another hall, adopted a platform that suited them on the slavery matter, and nominated John C. Breckenridge.
I did not go up to Baltimore to see the end of this melancholy business. I followed the proceedings in the press. Delegates from the state delegations which had seceded appeared there on the scene to gain admission. They were admitted where pledged to Douglas; upon this decision a second secession took place. Then they nominated Douglas; but he was now like a runner who has been tripped along the way, and who stumbles spent and breathless over the goal. He had conjured the West. It was strong enough to adopt his principles, but it could not prevent the convention from dividing. It could nominate him, but could not hold to him the states he needed in this, his greatest trial. And among his bitterest enemies was that Jefferson Davis whom I had seen in the Mexican War and who was now Senator from Mississippi. My hatred of the South nearly reached self-contempt for the way in which my life had been united to its feeling. All my thinking of the country and the terrible events which followed the monumental folly of not giving Douglas a united nomination dates from these days.
On my way west I read in the press of the verbal clash between this Jefferson Davis and Douglas in the Senate. With an insulting inflection Davis had said: "I have a declining respect for platforms. I would sooner have an honest man on any sort of a rickety platform you could construct than to have a man I did not trust, on the best platform which could be made."
Douglas had retorted with telling effect: "If the platform is not a matter of much consequence, why press that question to the disruption of the party?"
Why? But the South had done it. And Davis had done it.
CHAPTER LX
Who should call upon me the next morning after my arrival in Chicago but Yarnell? I had not seen him now for several years. And he was a delegate to the Republican convention.
"How is this?" I asked him. "I remember yet what you said to me about slavery when we came to America more than twenty-five years ago." "Oh," he replied, "that makes no difference. The Republican party is not going to disturb slavery where it is. It only proposes to keep it out from what it isn't. The platform will refer to the Declaration of Independence, and all that. But it will also have a tariff plank. The Democrats have beaten the Morrill tariff bill; and we want a tariff—Pennsylvania wants a tariff for iron. And we will nominate Seward and elect him."
"What if the Southern States secede?"