It made General Joseph R. Hawley, of Connecticut, its presiding officer; adopted a platform, a large part of which was devoted to
Platform and nominees
of the Republican party.
In pronouncing for the guaranty of negro suffrage at the South by Congressional law, the platform attempted to steer clear of the prejudices against negro suffrage at the North by a sort of proviso, which read, "While the question of suffrage in all the loyal States properly belongs to the people of those States." This was certainly inconsistent, not to say hypocritical. Negro suffrage at the North would have been a comparatively harmless thing on account of the fewness of the negroes as compared with the whites in that section, and on account of the superior average intelligence of the negroes of the North when compared with that of those of the South. There was no sound principle in this article of the platform. It was a mean, shuffling bit of partisan politics. The party itself felt it to be so in the course of the campaign, and came out finally for the settlement of the whole question of negro suffrage upon the same basis for the whole country and by means of a constitutional amendment.
The nominees immediately accepted their nominations in characteristic letters, that of General Grant being short, crisp, modest and ending with the now famous sentence: "Let us have peace," and that of Colfax being more lengthy and wordy and containing a rhetorical defence of some of the more questionable parts of the platform.
The Democratic convention assembled in New York on the 4th day of July. It was confronted at the start with the Greenback heresy, and the
Democratic
platform and
nominees.
There is no question that the platform of the Democrats, with its paper money doctrine, and its hostility to Reconstruction and universal
Weakness of
the platform.