popular
action.

The first was called by the friends of President Johnson to meet in
Philadelphia on the 14th of August. The object was to effect a
complete consolidation of the Administration Republicans and the
Democratic party, under the claim that they were the true conservators
of the Union, and that the mass of the Republican party, in opposing
President Johnson, were endangering the stability of the Government.
A large majority of the delegates composing the convention were
well-known Democrats, and they were re-enforced by some prominent
Republicans, who had left their party and followed the personal
fortunes of President Johnson. The most conspicuous of these were
Montgomery Blair (who for some years had been acting with the
Republicans), Thurlow Weed, Marshall O. Roberts, Henry J. Raymond,
John A. Dix and Robert S. Hale in New York, Edgar Cowan of
Pennsylvania, James R. Doolittle and Alexander W. Randall of Wisconsin,
O. H. Browning of Illinois, and James Dixon of Connecticut. The
Democrats were not only overwhelmingly in the majority, but they had a
very large representation of the leaders of the party in several
States. So considerable a proportion of the whole number were men who
had been noticeably active as opponents of Mr. Lincoln's
Administration, that the convention was popularly described as a
gathering of malignant copperheads, who, during the war, could not have
assembled in the city where they were now hospitably received, without
creating a riot. Among the most conspicuous and most offensive of this
latter class,--those who had especially distinguished themselves for
the bitterness, and in some cases for the vulgarity, of their personal
assaults upon Mr. Lincoln,--were Mr. Vallandingham of Ohio, Fernando
Wood, Benjamin Wood and James Brooks of New York, Edmund Burke and John
G. Sinclair of New Hampshire, Edward J. Phelps of Vermont, George W.
Woodward, Francis W. Hughes and James Campbell of Pennsylvania, and
R. B. Carmichael of Maryland. Among the leading Democrats, less noted
for virulent utterances against the President, were Samuel J. Tilden,
Dean Richmond and Sanford E. Church of New York, John P. Stockton and
Joel Parker of New Jersey, David R. Porter, William Bigler and Asa
Packer of Pennsylvania, James E. English of Connecticut, Robert C.
Winthrop and Josiah G. Abbott of Massachusetts, William Beach
Lawrence of Rhode Island, and Reverdy Johnson of Maryland.

Mr. Vallandingham's p