ennessee, Delaware,
Maryland, Kentucky, and California withdrew wholly or in part to join
the States which had gone out at Charleston.

For the time the disunion extremists were keeping their scheme too
well masked for us to establish clearly its historical record. But
the signs and footprints of their underplot are evident. Here at
Baltimore, as at Charleston, and as on every critical occasion, Mr.
Yancey was conspicuously present. Here, as elsewhere, he was no doubt
persistently intriguing for disunion in secret while ostentatiously
denying disunion purposes in public.

[Sidenote] Halstead, "Conventions of 1860."

But little remained to do after the disruption at Baltimore, and that
little was quickly done. The fragments of the original convention
continued their session in the Front-street Theater, where they had
met, and on the first ballot nominated Stephen A. Douglas for
President by an almost unanimous vote. The seceders organized, under
the chairmanship of Caleb Cushing, in Maryland Institute Hall, and
also by a nearly unanimous ballot nominated as their candidate for
President, John C. Breckinridge, of Kentucky. Then Mr. Yancey, who in
a street mass-meeting had declared that he was neither for the Union
_per se_ nor for disunion _per se_, but for the Constitution, announced
that the Democracy, the Constitution, and, through them, the were yet
safe.

A month prior to the reassembling of the Charleston "Rumps" above
described, Baltimore had already witnessed another Presidential
convention and nomination, calling itself peculiarly "National," in
contradistinction to the "sectional" character which it charged upon
the Democratic and Republican parties alike. This was a third party,
made up mainly of former Whigs whose long-cherished party antagonisms
kept them aloof from the Democrats in the South and the Republicans in
the North. In the South, they had been men whose moderate anti-slavery
feelings were outraged by the repeal of the Missouri Compromise and
the Lecompton trick. In the North, they were those whose traditions and
affiliations revolted at the extreme utterances of avowed abolitionists.
In both regions many of them had embraced Know-Nothingism, more as an
alternative than from original choice. The Whig party was dissolved;
Know-Nothingism had utterly failed--their only resource was to form a
new party.

In the various States they had, since the defeat of Fillmore in 1856,
held together a minor