mbering fully twelve
thousand. After the usual preliminaries the convention settled down to
the serious work of nominating a candidate for the Presidency. From the
outset the contest was clearly between Abraham Lincoln of Illinois and
William H. Seward of New York. On the first ballot, Seward's vote of
173-1/2 was followed by Lincoln with 102--the latter having more than
double the vote of his next competitor, Simon Cameron of Pennsylvania
(51 votes), who was followed by Salmon P. Chase of Ohio (49 votes) and
Edward Bates of Missouri (48 votes). A contrast between these two
remarkable men, Seward and Lincoln, now political antagonists but soon
to be intimately associated at the head of the Government--one as
President and the other as his prime minister--is most interesting and
instructive. Seward was a trained statesman and experienced politician
of ripe culture and great sagacity, the acknowledged leader of the
Republican party, New York's ex-Governor and now its most distinguished
Senator. His position and career were therefore far more conspicuous
than those of Lincoln. His supporters in the convention were
well-organized, bold, confident, and expected that he would be nominated
by acclamation. Lincoln, on the other hand, was still essentially a
country lawyer, who had come into prominence mainly as the competitor of
Senator Douglas in Illinois in 1858. With all his native strength of
mind and force of character, he was, compared with the polished Seward,
a rude backwoodsman, unskilled in handling the reins of government,
unfamiliar with the wiles of statecraft, and unused to the company of
diplomats and social leaders. His political reputation, and his support
in the convention, were chiefly Western. Yet his Cooper Institute
speech, delivered three months before the convention met, had done much
for him in the East; and the homely title of "Honest Old Abe" had
extended throughout the free States. Unlike Seward, he had no political
enemies, and was the second choice of most of the delegates whose first
choice was some other candidate.

In political management and strategy the Western men at the convention
soon showed that they were at best a match for those from the East. Soon
after the opening of the convention, Lincoln's friends saw that there
was an organized body of men in the crowd who cheered vociferously
whenever Seward's name was mentioned. "At a meeting of the Illinois
delegation at the Tremont House," says