. The remaining
history of the Democratic nominations is a matter of detail. The
Charleston convention adjourned without making nominations. Each of
its fragments reorganized as a separate convention, and ultimately
two Democratic tickets were put into the field, with Breckinridge of
Kentucky as the candidate on the Yancey ticket and Douglas on the other.

While the Democrats were thus making history through their fateful
break-up into separate parties, a considerable number of the so-called
best people of the country determined that they had nowhere politically
to lay their heads. A few of the old Whigs were still unable to
consort either with Republicans or with Democrats, old or new. The
Know-Nothings, likewise, though their number had been steadily melting
away, had not entirely disappeared. To unite these political remnants
in any definite political whole seemed beyond human ingenuity. A common
sentiment, however, they did have--a real love of the Union and a
real unhappiness, because its existence appeared to be threatened.
The outcome was that they organized the Constitutional Union Party,
nominating for President John Bell of Tennessee, and for Vice President
Edward Everett of Massachusetts. Their platform was little more than
a profession of love of the Union and a condemnation of sectional
selfishness.

This Bell and Everett ticket has a deeper significance than has
generally been admitted. It reveals the fact that the sentiment of
Union, in distinction from the belief in the Union, had become a real
force in American life. There could be no clearer testimony to the
strength of this feeling than this spectacle of a great congregation of
moderate people, unable to agree upon anything except this sentiment,
stepping between the sectional parties like a resolute wayfarer going
forward into darkness along a perilous strand between two raging seas.
That this feeling of Union was the same thing as the eager determination
of the Republicans, in 1860, to control the Government is one of those
historical fallacies that have had their day. The Republican party
became, in time and under stress of war, the refuge of this sentiment
and proved sufficiently far-sighted to merge its identity temporarily in
the composite Union party of 1864. But in 1860 it was still a sectional
party. Among its leaders Lincoln was perhaps the only Unionist in the
same sense as Bell and Everett.

Perhaps the truest Unionists of the North, ou