isted, and I went. It was largely
attended, and by men who had founded and long led the Freesoil party.
Ex-members of Lincoln's first Cabinet, Senators and members of the
Congress, editors of Republican newspapers (among whom was Henry J.
Raymond, the ablest political editor of the day and an eminent member of
Congress as well), Southern men who had fought for the Confederacy, were
there. Northern Republicans and Democrats, long estranged, buried the
political hatchet and met for a common purpose, to restore the Union.
Negro-worshipers from Massachusetts and slave-drivers from South
Carolina entered the vast hall arm in arm. The great meeting rose to its
feet, and walls and roof shook with applause. General John A. Dix of New
York called the Convention to order, and, in an eloquent and felicitous
speech, stated the objects of the assembly--to renew fraternal feeling
between the sections, heal the wounds of war, obliterate bitter
memories, and restore the Union of the fathers. Senator Doolittle of
Wisconsin was chosen permanent president, and patriotic resolutions were
adopted by acclamation. All this was of as little avail as the waving of
a lady's fan against a typhoon. Radical wrath uprose and swept these
Northern men out of political existence, and they were again taught the
lesson that is ever forgotten, namely, that it is an easy task to
inflame the passions of the multitude, an impossible one to arrest them.
From selfish ambition, from thoughtless zeal, from reckless
partisanship, from the low motives governing demagogues in a country of
universal suffrage, men are ever sowing the wind, thinking they can
control the whirlwind; and the story of the Gironde and the Mountain has
been related in vain.

The President was charmed with the Convention. Believing the people--his
god--to be with him, his crest rose, and he felt every inch a President.
Again I urged him to dismiss his War Secretary and replace Mr. Seward,
Secretary of State, now in disfavor with his own creation, the Radical
party, by General Dix, who was rewarded for his services at Philadelphia
by the appointment of Naval Officer at New York. He was an exception to
the rule above mentioned. A more cautious pilot than Palinurus, this
respectable person is the "Vicar of Bray" of American politics; and like
that eminent divine, his creeds sit so lightly as to permit him to take
office under all circumstances. Secretary of the Treasury in the closing
weeks of