the Governorship only to be promoted at once to the United-States
Senate. The political revolution was as remarkable in character as it
was sudden in time. Ohio had shown profound loyalty to the Union and
an enthusiastic support of all measures for its preservation. Mr.
Thurman had run counter to the principles and prejudices of a large
number of the people of Ohio by his bitter hostility to the war, and
yet he now received a larger popular vote than had ever before been
given even to a Republican candidate, except in the year 1863 when so
many Democrats repudiated Vallandingham.

It was at the full maturity of his powers, in the fifty-sixth year of
his age, that Mr. Thurman took his seat in the Senate, March 4, 1869.
He had been chosen a representative in Congress for a single term
twenty-five years before, and had afterwards served a full term on the
Supreme Bench of Ohio, the last two years as Chief Justice of the
court. He was not therefore an untried man, but had an established
reputation for learning in the law, for experience in affairs, for
intellectual qualities of a high order. During the long interval
between his service in the House and his installment in the Senate
the relation of political parties had essentially changed. Mr. Thurman
had changed with the times and with his associates. When he took his
seat in the Twenty-ninth Congress the issue in regard to the extension
of slavery in the Territories was beginning to enlist public interest.
The first impulse of all the representatives from that extensive and
opulent domain, which had been saved from the blight of slavery by the
Ordinance of 1787, was to aid in extending a similar blessing to all
other Territories of the United States. With the exception of Stephen
A. Douglas and John A. McClernand of Illinois, and John Pettit of
Indiana, all the Democratic representatives from the four North-western
States (Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan) voted for the
anti-slavery proviso offered by Mr. Wilmot. Mr. Douglas, discerning
the future more clearly than his party associates, realized that the
chief strength of the Democracy must continue to lie in the South, and
that an anti-slavery attitude on the part of the North-western
Democrats would destroy the National prestige of the party and lead to
its defeat. The Democratic supporters of the Wilmot Proviso had
therefore choice of two paths: they must abandon their anti-slavery
attitude or they must