to this extreme position. General Preston of Kentucky, who had won
his stars in the Confederate army, presented General Blair for
Vice-President. General Wade Hampton, distinguished in the same cause,
seconded it, and the nomination was made of acclamation.

The Democratic party thus determined, through its platform and
partially through its candidates, to fight its battle on the two issues
of paying the debt in depreciated paper currency and overthrowing
Reconstruction. Other questions practically dropped out. The whole
discussion of the canvass turned on these two controlling propositions.
No violence of design which the Republicans imputed to their
adversaries exceeded their open avowals. The greater positiveness of
General Blair, the keener popular interest in the Southern question
and the broader realization of its possible dangers, made the issue on
Reconstruction overshadow the other. The utterances of Southern
leaders confirmed its superior importance in the public estimate. The
jubilant expressions of Wade Hampton at Charleston have already been
given. In a speech at Atlanta, Robert Toombs declared that "all these
Reconstruction Acts, as they are called, these schemes of dissolution,
of violence and of tyranny, shall no longer curse the statute-book
nor oppress the free people of the country; these so-called governments
and legislatures which have been established in our midst shall at once
be made to vacate. The convention at New York appointed Frank Blair
specially to oust them." Howell Cobb and Benjamin H. Hill also made
incendiary speeches during the canvass, proclaiming their confidence
in the practical victory of those who had waged the Rebellion; and
Governor Vance of North Carolina boasted that all they had lost when
defeated by Grant they would regain when they triumphed with Seymour.

It is not probable that the Democrats could, by any policy, have
achieved success in this contest. The prestige of Grant's great fame
and the momentum given to the Republican party by his achievements
during and immediately after the war, would have defeated any
opposition, however skillful. But had Governor Seymour himself framed
the platform on which he was to stand, and had he been free from the
burden and the embarrassment of Blair's imprudent and alarming
utterances, his greater sagacity and adroitness would have insured a
more formidable battle. As it was, the rash action of the Democratic
Convention