a movement was afoot among his friends in Illinois to secure
his nomination for the Presidency at the Convention of the Republican
party which was to be held in Chicago in May. Before that Convention
could assemble it had become fairly certain that whoever might be
chosen as the Republican candidate would be President of the United
States, and signs were not wanting that he would be faced with grave
peril to the Union. For the Democratic party, which had met in
Convention at Charleston in April, had proceeded to split into two
sections, Northern and Southern. This memorable Convention was a
dignified assembly gathered in a serious mood in a city of some
antiquity and social charm. From the first, however, a latent
antipathy between the Northern and the Southern delegates made itself
felt. The Northerners, predisposed to a certain deference towards the
South and prepared to appreciate its graceful hospitality, experienced
an uneasy sense that they were regarded as social inferiors. Worse
trouble than this appeared when the Convention met for its first
business, the framing of the party platform. Whether the position
which Lincoln had forced Douglas to take up had precipitated this
result or not, dissension between Northern and Southern Democrats on
the subject of slavery had already manifested itself in Congress, and
in the party Convention the division became irreparable. Douglas, it
will be remembered, had started with the principle that slavery in the
Territories formed a question for the people of each territory to
decide; he had felt bound to accept the doctrine underlying the Dred
Scott judgments, according to which slavery was by the Constitution
lawful in all territories; pressed by Lincoln, he had tried to
reconcile his original position with this doctrine by maintaining that
while slavery was by the Constitution lawful in every Territory it was
nevertheless lawful for a Territorial Legislature to make slave-owning
practically impossible. In framing a declaration of the party
principles as to slavery the Southern delegates in the Democratic
Convention aimed at meeting this evasion. With considerable show of
logic they asserted, in the party platform which they proposed, not
merely the abstract rightfulness and lawfulness of slavery, but the
duty of Congress itself to make any provision that might be necessary
to protect it in the Territories. To this the Northern majority of the
delegates could not co