erly assailed him, the resolutions
of the latter were passed, affirming the "_property_" theory, with
the new doctrine of constitutional protection of it in the Territories
added.

The convention reassembled, and at the end of five days' wrangle
and recrimination, during which the members called each other
"disorganizers," "bolters," "traitors," "disunionists," "abolitionists,"
accompanied by violent threats, it disrupted again, its chairman,
Caleb Cushing, of Massachusetts, led the bolters and was followed
by the delegates generally from the Southern States. They organized
at once a separate convention.

Douglas was nominated by the originally organized convention, and
John C. Breckinridge by the bolters, each on the sharply defined
platform relating to slavery, mentioned above.

Still another political body assembled in Baltimore in 1860, to
wit: "The Constitutional Union Convention." It met May 9th. Its
platform was intended to be comprehensive and so simple and patriotic
that everybody might endorse it. It declared against recognizing
any principle other than

"_The Constitution of the Country, the Union of the States, and
the Enforcement of the Laws._"

John Bell of Tennessee was nominated on this broad platform for
President, with Edward Everett of Massachusetts for Vice-President,
both eminently respectable statesmen, but the times were not
auspicious for mere generalized principles or mere respectability.

The great Wigwam - Republican Convention met at Chicago, May 16,
1860, with delegates from all the free States, the Territories of
Kansas and Nebraska, and from Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky,
and Missouri.

Its platform was long, and affirmed the principles of the Declaration
of Independence, pronounced against interfering with slavery in
the States, denounced the John Brown raid as "among the gravest of
crimes," and, in the main, was temperate and conservative.

On the question of slavery in the Territories it was radical:

"That the new dogma that the Constitution, of its own force, carries
slavery in to any or all of the Territories of the United States,
is a dangerous political heresy, at variance with the explicit
provisions of that instrument itself," etc.

"That the normal condition of all the territory of the United States
is that of freedom, . . . and we deny the authority of Congress,
or a Territorial Legislature, or of any individuals, to give legal
existence to slavery i