d against it. Mr. Crittenden of Kentucky and Colonel
Benton were the leaders under whose joint efforts the work of
Calhoun was to be set at naught. But, in fact, the work of Calhoun
had already been effectually done and he could afford to disregard
the fate of the treaty. He had consolidated the Democratic delegates
from the slave-holding States against Mr. Van Buren, and the decree
had gone forth for his political destruction. Mr. Van Buren, with
the aid of the more populous North, had indeed secured a majority
of the convention, but an instrumentality was at hand to overcome
this apparent advantage. In the two preceding national conventions
of the Democratic party, the rule requiring a two-thirds vote of
all the delegates to make a nomination had been adopted at the
instance of Mr. Van Buren's friends in order to insure his victory.
It was now to be used for his defeat. Forseeing the result, the
same zealous and devoted friends of Mr. Van Buren resisted its
adoption. Romulus M. Sanders of North Carolina introduced the
rule, and was sustained with great vigor by Robert J. Walker of
Mississippi, and George W. Hopkins of Virginia. The leading
opponents of the rule were Marcus Morton of Massachusetts, Nathan
Clifford of Maine, and Daniel S. Dickinson of New York. The
discussion was conducted by Southern men on one side and by Northern
men on the other,--the first division of the kind in the Democratic
party. Slavery was the ominous cause! The South triumphed and
the rule was fastened upon the convention.

Immediately after this action Mr. Van Buren received a majority of
the votes on the first ballot, and it was not unnaturally charged
that many of those supporting him must have been insincere, inasmuch
as they had the full right, until self-restrained by the two-thirds
rule, to declare him the nominee. But this conclusion does not
necessarily follow. Mr. Van Buren had been nominated in the National
Democratic Conventions of 1835 and 1839 with the two-thirds rule
in operation; and now to force his nomination for a third time by
a mere slender majority was, in the judgment of wise and considerate
party leaders among his own friends, a dangerous experiment. They
instinctively feared to disregard a powerful and aggressive minority
stubbornly demanding that Mr. Van Buren should be subjected to the
same test which his friends had enforced in previous conventions.
Their argument was not satisfactorily answered, t