The place of Mr. Chase was not easy to fill. Mr. Lincoln first nominated David Tod of Ohio. This was very ill received; but fortunately the difficulty which might have been caused by it was escaped, because Governor Tod promptly declined. The President then named William Pitt Fessenden, senator from Maine, and actually forced the office upon him against that gentleman's sincere wish to escape the honor. A better choice could

not have been made. Mr. Fessenden was chairman of the Committee on Finance, and had filled the position with conspicuous ability; every one esteemed him highly; the Senate instantly confirmed him, and during his incumbency in office he fully justified these flattering opinions.

There were other opponents of the President who were not so easily diverted from their purpose as the politicians had been. In Missouri an old feud was based upon his displacement of Fremont; the State had ever since been rent by fierce factional quarrels, and amid them this grievance had never been forgotten or forgiven. Emancipation by state action had been chief among the causes which had divided the Union citizens into Conservatives and Radicals. Their quarrel was bitter, and in vain did Mr. Lincoln repeatedly endeavor to reconcile them. The Radicals claimed his countenance as a matter of right, and Mr. Lincoln often privately admitted that between him and them there was close coincidence of feeling. Yet he found their specific demands inadmissible; especially he could not consent to please them by removing General Schofield. So they, being extremists, and therefore of the type of men who will have every one against them who is not for them, turned vindictively against him. They found sympathizers elsewhere in the country, sporadic instances of disaffection rather than indications of an epidemic; but in their frame of mind they easily gained faith in the existence of a

popular feeling which was, in fact, the phantasm of their own heated fancy. As spring drew on they cast out lines of affiliation. Their purpose was not only negatively against Lincoln, but positively for Fremont. Therefore they made connection with the Central Fremont Club, a small organization in New York, and issued a call for a mass convention at Cleveland on May 31. They expressed their disgust for the "imbecile and vacillating policy" of Mr. Lincoln, and desired the "immediate extinction of slavery ... by congressional action," contemning the fact that Congress had no power under the Constitution to extinguish slavery. Their call was reinforced by two or three others, of which one came from a "People's Committee" of St. Louis, representing Germans under the lead of B. Gratz Brown.

The movement also had the hearty approval of Wendell Phillips, who was very bitter and sweeping in his denunciations of an administration which he regarded "as a civil and military failure." Lincoln's reëlection, he said, "I shall consider the end of the Union in my day, or its reconstruction on terms worse than disunion." But Mr. Phillips's friendship ought to have been regarded by the Fremonters as ominous, for it was his custom always to act with a very small minority. Moreover he had long since ceased to give voice to the intelligence of his party or even fairly to represent it. How far it had ever been proper to call the Abolitionists a party may be doubted; before the

war they had been compressed into some solidity by encompassing hostility; but they would not have been Abolitionists at all had they not been men of exceptional independence both in temper and in intellect. They had often dared to differ from each other as well as from the mass of their fellow citizens, and they had never submitted to the domination of leaders in the ordinary political fashion. The career of Mr. Lincoln had of course been watched by them keenly, very critically, and with intense and various feeling. At times they had hopefully applauded him, and at times they had vehemently condemned what had seemed to them his halting, half-hearted, or timid action. As the individual members of the party had often changed their own minds about him, so also they had sometimes and freely disagreed with each other concerning his character, his intentions, his policies. In the winter and spring of 1864, however, it seemed that, by slow degrees, observation, their own good sense, and the development of events had at last won the great majority of the party to repose a considerable measure of confidence in him, both in respect of his capacity and of his real anti-slavery purposes. Accordingly in the present discussions such men as Owen Lovejoy,[[68]] William Lloyd Garrison, and Oliver Johnson came out fairly for him,—not, indeed, because he was altogether satisfactory to them, but because he was in great part so; also because they easily saw that

as matter of fact his personal triumph would probably lead to abolition, that he was the only candidate by whom the Democracy could be beaten, and that if the Democracy should not be beaten, abolition would be postponed beyond human vision. Lovejoy said that, to his personal knowledge, the President had "been just as radical as any of his cabinet," and in view of what the Abolitionists thought of Chase, this was a strong indorsement. The old-time charge of being impractical could not properly be renewed against these men, now that they saw that events which they could help to bring about were likely to bring their purpose to the point of real achievement in a near future. In this condition of things they were found entirely willing to recognize and accept the best practical means, and their belief was clear that the best practical means lay in the renomination and reëlection of Abraham Lincoln. Their adhesion brought to him a very useful assistance, and beyond this it also gave him the gratification of knowing that he had at last won the approval of men whose friendly sympathy he had always inwardly desired. Sustained by the best men in the party, he could afford to disregard the small body of irreconcilable and quarrelsome fault-finders, who went over to Fremont, factious men, who were perhaps unconsciously controlled more by mere contradictoriness of temperament than by the higher motives which they proclaimed.

At Cleveland on the appointed day the "mass

convention" assembled, only the mass was wanting. It nominated Fremont for the presidency and General John Cochrane for the vice-presidency; and thus again the Constitution was ignored by these malcontents; for both these gentlemen were citizens of New York, and therefore the important delegation from that State could lawfully vote for only one of them. Really the best result which the convention achieved was that it called forth a bit of wit from the President. Some one remarked to him that, instead of the expected thousands, only about four hundred persons had assembled. He turned to the Bible which, say Nicolay and Hay, "commonly lay on his desk,"[[69]] and read the verse: "And every one that was in distress, and every one that was in debt, and every one that was discontented, gathered themselves unto him; and he became a captain over them: and there were with him about four hundred men."[[70]]

The Fremonters struck no responsive chord among the people. The nomination was received by every one with the same tranquil indifference, tinged with ridicule, which the President had shown. In vain did Fremont seek to give to his candidacy a serious and dignified character. Very few persons cared anything about it, except the Democrats, and their clamorous approval was as unwelcome as it was significant. Under this humiliation the unfortunate candidate at last decided to withdraw, and so notified his committee about