d with the howling and
drinking crowds of the intelligent promoters of one of the great moral
crusades of the human race.

Lamon says that the committee deputed to wait upon Lincoln at
Springfield found him "sad and dejected. The reaction from excessive joy
to deep despondency--a process peculiar to his constitution--had already
set in."[102] His remarks to these gentlemen were brief and colorless.
His letter afterward was little more than a simple acceptance of the
platform.

* * * * *

Since white men first landed on this continent, the selection of
Washington to lead the army of the Revolution is the only event to be
compared in good fortune with this nomination of Abraham Lincoln. Yet
the convention deserved no credit for its action. It did not know the
true ratio between Seward and Lincoln, which only the future was to make
plain. By all that it did know, it ought to have given the honor to
Seward, who merited it by the high offices which he had held with
distinction and without blemish, by the leadership which he had acquired
in the party through long-continued constancy and courage, by the force
and clearness with which he had maintained its principles, by his
experience and supposed natural aptitude in the higher walks of
statesmanship. Yet actually by reason of these very qualifications[103]
it was now admitted that the all-important "October States" of Indiana
and Pennsylvania could not be carried by the Republicans if Seward were
nominated; while Greeley, sitting in the convention as a substitute for
a delegate from Oregon, cast as much of the weight of New York as he
could lift into the anti-Seward scale. In plain fact, the convention, by
its choice, paid no compliment either to Lincoln or to the voters of the
party. They took him because he was "available," and the reason that he
was "available" lay not in any popular appreciation of his merits, but
in the contrary truth,--that the mass of people could place no
intelligent estimate upon him at all, either for good or for ill.
Outside of Illinois a few men, who had studied his speeches, esteemed
him an able man in debate; more had a vague notion of him as an
effective stump speaker of the West; far the greatest number had to find
out about him.[104] In a word, Mr. Lincoln gained the nomination because
Mr. Seward had been "too conspicuous," whereas he himself was so little
known that it was possible for Wendell Phillips to in