ally of
the Democrats at Chicago were months of good omen for a party which,
however little the many honourable men in its ranks were willing to face
the fact, must base its only hope upon the weakening of the national
will. For public attention was turned away from other fields of war and
fixed upon the Army of the Potomac. Sherman drove back Johnston, and
routed Hood; Farragut at Mobile enriched the annals of the sea; but what
told upon the imagination of the North was that Grant's earlier progress
was followed by the definite failure of his original enterprise against
Lee's army, by Northern defeats on the Shenandoah and an actual dash by
the South against Washington, by the further failure of Grant's first
assault upon Petersburg, and by hideous losses and some demoralisation in
his army. The candidate that the Democrats would put forward and the
general principle of their political strategy were well known many weeks
before their Convention met; and the Republicans already despaired of
defeating them. In the Chicago Convention there were men, apparently
less reputable in character than their frank attitude suggests, who were
outspoken against the war; their leader was Vallandigham. There were men
who spoke boldly for the war, but more boldly against emancipation and
the faults of the Government; their leader was Seymour, talking with the
accent of dignity and of patriotism. Seymour, for the war, presided over
the Convention; Vallandigham, against the war, was the master spirit in
its debates. It was hard for such men, with any saving of conscience, to
combine. The mode of combination which they discovered is memorable in
the history of faction. First they adopted a platform which meant peace;
then they adopted a candidate intended to symbolise successful war. They
resolved "that this Convention does explicitly declare, as the sense of
the American people, that after four years of failure to restore the
Union by the experiment of war . . . justice, humanity, liberty, and the
public welfare demand that immediate efforts be made for a cessation of
hostilities, with a view to an ultimate convention of the States or other
peaceable means, to the end that at the earliest practicable moment peace
may be restored on the basis of the Federal Union of the States." The
fallacy which named the Union as the end while demanding as a means the
immediate cessation of hostilities needs no demonstration. The
resolution was