e Administration or
Breckinridge-Democratic wing--seemed an almost hopeless fight. In the
South, the Democracy was almost a unit in opposition to Douglas,
holding, as they did, that "Douglas Free-Soilism" was "far more
dangerous to the South than the election of Lincoln; because it seeks to
create a Free-Soil Party there; while, if Lincoln triumphs, the result
cannot fail to be a South united in her own defense;" while the old Whig
element of the South was as unitedly for Bell. In the North, the
Democracy were split in twain, three-fourths of them upholding Douglas,
and the balance, powerful beyond their numbers in the possession of
Federal Offices, bitterly hostile to him, and anxious to beat him, even
at the expense of securing the election of Lincoln.

Douglas's fight was that the candidacy and platform of Bell were
meaningless, those of both Lincoln and Breckinridge, Sectional, and that
he alone bore aloft the standard of the entire Union; while, on the
other hand, the supporters of Lincoln, his chief antagonist, claimed
that--as the burden of the song from the lips of Douglas men, Bell men,
and Breckinridge men alike, was the expression of a "fear that," in the
language of Mr. Seward, "if the people elected Mr. Lincoln to the
Presidency, they would wake up and find that they had no Country for him
to preside over"--"therefore, all three of the parties opposing Mr.
Lincoln were in the same boat, and hence the only true Union party, was
the party which made no threats of Disunion, to wit, the Republican
party."

The October elections of 1860 made it plain that Mr. Lincoln would be
elected. South Carolina began to "feel good" over the almost certainty
that the pretext for Secession for which her leaders had been hoping in
vain for thirty years, was at hand. On the 25th of October, at Augusta,
South Carolina, the Governor, the Congressional delegation, and other
leading South Carolinians, met, and decided that in the event of Mr.
Lincoln's election, that State would secede. Similar meetings, to the
same end, were also held about the same time, in others of the Southern
States. On the 5th of November--the day before the Presidential
election--the Legislature of South Carolina met at the special call of
Governor Gist, and, having organized, received a Message from the
Governor, in which, after stating that he had convened that Body in
order that they might on the morrow "appoint the number of electors of
Presiden