name of Hannibal Hamlin, of Maine as a candidate for the Vice-Presidency, and the substitution of that of Andrew Johnson of Tennessee, was a strong recognition and approval of the policy of reconstruction. This action is said to have been urged by Mr. Lincoln's personal friends at his own private request.

According to custom, the Convention appointed its chairman, Governor Dennison, of Ohio, with a committee, to wait upon the President at Washington with a formal announcement of the action thus taken. He received them, listened to their address, and responded as follows:

"Having served four years in the depths of a great and yet unended national peril, I can view this call to a second term in nowise more flattering to myself than as an expression of the public judgment that I may better finish a difficult work in which I have labored from the first than could any one less severely schooled to the task. In this view, and with assured reliance on the Almighty Ruler who has graciously sustained us thus far, and with increased gratitude to the generous people for their continued confidence, I accept the renewed trust with its yet onerous and perplexing duties and responsibilities."

He was waited upon the same day by a similar committee from the Union League, but no report was made to him by them of the exact nature of the highly interesting session of that body.

In due time he received the written notification of the action of the Republican Convention, with a copy of the plat form, and to this he replied, on the 27th of June:

"GENTLEMEN: Your letter of the 14th inst., formally noti fying me that I have been nominated by the Convention you represent for the Presidency of the United States for four years from the fourth of March next, has been received. The

nomination is gratefully accepted, as the resolutions of the Convention called the platform are heartily approved. While the resolution in regard to the supplanting of republican governments on the Western Continent is fully concurred in, there might be misunderstanding were I not to say that the position of the government in relation to the action of France in Mexico, as assumed, through the State Department, and endorsed by the Convention among the measures and acts of the Executive, will be faithfully maintained so long as the state of facts shall leave that position pertinent and applicable. I am especially gratified that the soldier and seaman were not forgotten by the Convention, as they forever must and will be remembered by the grateful country for whose salvation they devoted their

lives.

Thanking you for the kind and complimentary terms in which you have communicated the nomination and other proceedings of the Convention, I subscribe myself

"Your obedient servant,

"ABRAHAM LINCOLN."

The platform and the entire action of the Convention, with the terms of their formal acceptance, combined to express one fact and idea; and this was, that the Republican party had determined to go before the people upon the record made by Mr. Lincoln as President, and to stand or fall with him. The Opposition, calling itself the Democratic party, took up the challenge so offered. It should not be necessary to remark in this connection, but it may be well to do so for the benefit of careless readers, that the parties of that day are not the parties of this, whatever may be some of the incidental inheritances of our existing political organisms. It is unavoidable to employ here the party names then in use; but it should be with the understanding that they do not necessarily describe or define anything now in existence.

Mr. Lincoln himself had long since ceased to be a partisan in any sense of that word. He was the representative and director of the great forces, moral, intellectual, and physical, devoted to the work of developing, shaping, defending, and perpetuating the new Nation, thenceforth to be known as the United States of America. As he himself expressed it in his Gettysburg speech, he had "highly resolved that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom ;" and that which is born again is no more the same, forever and ever.

BRAR

CHAPTER LII.

ON TRIAL.

The Campaign of Calumny-The Reconstruction Proclamation - Traps which Captured Nothing-Skirmishing Diplomacy-The Blunders of the Opposition-A Union General in Bad Company.

THE National Convention of the Democratic party had been called to meet at Chicago on the 27th of August. There remained, therefore, after Mr. Lincoln's second nomination, more than two full months during which his enemies might plot and plan and search for the weak spots in his armor and devise weapons wherewith to stab him. They had in this a great apparent advantage, with the concurrent privilege of misrepresenting whatever he or his might do, or fail to do, in the mean time. Their party press could describe every battle as more or less of a defeat and keep its columns open to the virulent expression of every possible form of criticism, discontent, or personal enmity. The Administration was on trial before the country as a tyranny and a failure, and all the witnesses against it were to be called, mostly swearing if not sworn, and they and their able advocates were to have a free, full, unhindered hearing. That which could pass unharmed through such an ordeal must have in it a great preponderance of such pure gold as need not to fear the fire.

The Opposition was not left altogether to the blundering devices of the second-rate demagogues and new ambitions which nominally controlled its present operations. The brains of the old pro-slavery Democracy had ever been supplied by the South, for the greater part, and the best inspiration and help of its campaign of 1864 came still from Richmond.

The very directness and simplicity with which the great political question of the day was propounded had in it something appalling to many men. All idea of change for the sake of change, so attractive to the restless and the weary, was shut out. The result was to be something as yet unknown, or else four years more of Abraham Lincoln. No man was greatly in doubt as to what the latter alternative included. He had made his purposes clearly understood, and his first public act after his nomination was taken unselfishly, without the slightest reference to its effect upon his personal popularity. Congress passed, in July and just before its adjournment, an Act embodying an elaborate plan of reconstruction for the seceded States, recovered and to be recovered. It provided a system of bonds and fetters for the Executive as well as for the regained areas, and the President refused his approval. It was necessary for him to explain his position to the country, and he did so, on the 8th of July, in a proclamation. In this he embodied the Act, as one of several admissible plans of reconstruction, but refused to commit himself, in advance, to that or any other specific mode of procedure, or to set aside the State governments already organized in Arkansas and Louisiana. His action called forth very bitter assaults from men who had been the active promoters of the Act, in the Senate and House of Representatives; but the acquiescence of the general public in the views of Mr. Lincoln was so plainly manifested that no great harm was done. The unkindly personal nature of some criticisms made by former friends galled him a little, but he was absorbed in watching movements of his politcal enemies which were of a much more perilous and threatening character.

It was manifest to the Richmond managers of the Democratic party that there was little hope of successfully opposing a renewal of power to the Lincoln Administration otherwise than by creating a division among its adherents. For this purpose, therefore, they plotted well and wisely. The trap they