trick, and successfully
rushed through the convention the nomination of its presiding officer,
Horatio Seymour of New York, against his protest and to the discomfiture
of his associates. An able, accomplished man, but reckoned half-hearted
in the war, and not rising to statesmanlike proportions, he could not
outweigh the mischievous platform and the Vice-Presidential candidate,
the hot-headed Gen. Francis P. Blair of Missouri, who had just proposed
measures nothing short of revolutionary to override Congress. Against
this combination the Republicans advanced securely to victory. Meeting
in Chicago in May, they showed a temper more moderate than that of
Congress; they of course condemned the President, but they refused to
censure the seven independent senators; and upon Carl Schurz's motion
passed a resolution welcoming back all former enemies now become loyal,
and favoring the early and rapid removal of disabilities. As to the
Presidential nomination, there was no division,--it was given
unhesitatingly, unanimously, heartily, to General Grant. His
steadfastness and success in war had been matched by his magnanimity in
victory and his prudence in the troubled times that followed. Of manly
simplicity and solid worth, sagacious and successful wherever he had
been tried, he seemed at once an embodiment of past victory and an
assurance of future safety. Of the thirty-four States that voted, all
but eight were for Grant and Colfax. Seymour had New York, New Jersey,
Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, Oregon, Georgia, and Louisiana. The
popular vote was 3,012,000 for Grant and Colfax to 2,703,000 for Seymour
and Blair.

The Republican convention had shirked the question of negro suffrage at
the North by referring it to the individual States. Its refusal in many
of the Northern States was felt as a discredit after it had been
enforced throughout the South. The Republicans in Congress took courage
from the election. The Fifteenth Amendment, forbidding the States to
deny the right to vote "on account of race, color or previous condition
of servitude," was brought forward in Congress in December, and passed
February 28, 1869. It was ratified in rapid succession by thirty States
out of thirty-seven,--Tennessee not acting, and negative votes being
given by California, Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, New Jersey, and
Oregon,--and proclaimed as adopted, March 30, 1870.

With Grant's election, and the last touches of reconstruction sure to
f