r. Johnson
by reason of Mr. Seward's magnanimous interposition. But once
established they had been able, from motives adverted to in the
previous chapter, to fasten their hold upon Mr. Johnson even to the
exclusion of Mr. Seward. When Mr. Seward was beaten for the
Presidential nomination in a convention composed of anti-slavery men
who had learned their creed from him, Senator Toombs, in a tone full of
exultation but not remarkable for delicacy, declared that "Actaeon had
been devoured by his own dogs." The fable would be equally applicable
in describing the manner in which the Southern men, who owed their
forgiveness and their immunity to Mr. Seward, turned upon him with
hatred and with imprecation. They were graciously willing to accept
benefits and favors at his hands so long as he would dispense them, but
they never forgave him for the work of that grand period of his life,
between his election to the Senate and the outbreak of the civil war,
when he wrought most nobly for humanity and established a fame which no
error of later life could blot from the minds of a grateful people.

Mr. Seward could not have been surprised at the treatment he thus
received. He had for nearly half a century been an intelligent
observer of the political field, and he could not recall a single
Northern man who had risked his popularity at home in defense of what
were termed the rights of the South who had not in the supreme crisis
of his public life been deserted by the South. Mr. Webster, General
Cass, William L. Marcy, Mr. Douglas, and President Pierce were among
the most conspicuous of those who had been thus sacrificed. The last
sixty days of Mr. Buchanan's Presidency furnished the most noted of all
the victims of Southern ingratitude. Men of lower rank but similar
experience were to be found in the years preceding the war in nearly
every Norther State--men who had ventured to run counter to the
principles and prejudices of their own constituency to serve those who
always abandoned a political leader when they feared he might have lost
the power to be useful to them. The pro-slavery men of the South, in
following this course, presented a striking contrast to the anti-slavery
men of the North who, under all circumstances and against all
temptation, were faithful to the leaders who proved faithful to their
cause.

CHAPTER VI.

During the progress of events in the South, briefly outlined in the
preceding chapter, the Thir