ominated for vice-president.

On June 28, also at Baltimore, there came together a collection composed
of original seceders at Charleston, and of some who had been rejected
and others who had seceded at Baltimore. Very few Northern men were
present, and the body in fact represented the Southern wing of the
Democracy. Having, like its competitor, the merit of knowing its own
mind, it promptly nominated John C. Breckenridge of Kentucky and Joseph
Lane of Oregon, and adopted the radical platform which had been reported
at Charleston.

These doings opened, so that it could never be closed, that seam of
which the thread had long been visible athwart the surface of the old
Democratic party. The great record of discipline and of triumph, which
the party had made when united beneath the dominion of imperious
leaders, was over, and forever. Those questions which Lincoln
obstinately and against advice had insisted upon pushing in 1858 had
forced this disastrous development of irreconcilable differences. The
answers, which Douglas could not shirk, had alienated the most
implacable of men, the dictators of the Southern Democracy. His
"looking-both-ways" theory would not fit with their policy, and their
policy was and must be immutable; modification was in itself defeat. On
the other hand, what he said constituted the doctrine to which the mass
of the Northern Democracy firmly held. So now, although Republicans
admitted that it was "morally certain" that the Democratic party,
holding together, could carry the election,[98] yet these men from the
Cotton States could not take victory and Douglas together.[99] It had
actually come to this, that, in spite of all that Douglas had done for
the slaveholders, they now marked him for destruction at any cost. Many
also believe that they had another motive; that they had matured their
plans for secession; and that they did not mean to have the scheme
disturbed or postponed by an ostensibly Democratic triumph in the shape
of the election of Douglas.

In May the convention of the Constitutional Union party met, also at
Baltimore. This organization was a sudden outgrowth designed only to
meet the present emergency. Its whole political doctrine lay in the
opening words of the one resolution which constituted its platform:
"That it is both the part of patriotism and of duty to recognize no
political principle other than the Constitution of the country, the
union of the States, and the enforcemen