; but about Christmas 1859, an influential caucus of his
strongest Illinois adherents made a personal request that he would
permit them to use his name, and he gave his consent, not so much in any
hope of becoming the nominee for President, as in possibly reaching the
second place on the ticket; or at least of making such a showing of
strength before the convention as would aid him in his future senatorial
ambition at home, or perhaps carry him into the cabinet of the
Republican President, should one succeed. He had not been eager to enter
the lists, but once having agreed to do so, it was but natural that he
should manifest a becoming interest, subject, however, now as always, to
his inflexible rule of fair dealing and honorable faith to all his party
friends.

"I do not understand Trumbull and myself to be rivals," he wrote
December 9, 1859. "You know I am pledged not to enter a struggle with
him for the seat in the Senate now occupied by him; and yet I would
rather have a full term in the Senate than in the presidency."

And on February 9 he wrote to the same Illinois friend:

"I am not in a position where it would hurt much for me not to be
nominated on the national ticket; but I am where it would hurt some for
me not to get the Illinois delegates. What I expected when I wrote the
the letter to Messrs. Dole and others is now happening. Your discomfited
assailants are most bitter against me; and they will, for revenge upon
me, lay to the Bates egg in the South, and to the Seward egg in the
North, and go far toward squeezing me out in the middle with nothing.
Can you not help me a little in this matter in your end of the
vineyard?"

It turned out that the delegates whom the Illinois State convention sent
to the national convention at Chicago were men not only of exceptional
standing and ability, but filled with the warmest zeal for Mr. Lincoln's
success; and they were able at once to impress upon delegates from other
States his sterling personal worth and fitness, and his superior
availability. It needed but little political arithmetic to work out the
sum of existing political chances. It was almost self-evident that in
the coming November election victory or defeat would hang upon the
result in the four pivotal States of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Indiana,
and Illinois. It was quite certain that no Republican candidate could
carry a single one of the fifteen slave States; and equally sure that
Breckinridge, on his