plied, with great feeling: "Well, that would
be good fun."

So while, as I have said, the Massachusetts delegates, most
of them, supported Mr. Edmunds as a person likely to hold
some votes until the opposition to Grant might be concentrated
on some other candidate to be agreed on as the proceedings
of the convention went on, and while I think he would have
made an excellent President if he had been chosen, his candidacy
was never a very strong one.

This convention was menaced by a very serious peril. A plan
was devised which, if it had been successful, would, in my
judgment, have caused a rupture in the convention and the
defeat of the Republican Party in the election. The Chairman
of the Republican National Committee was Don Cameron of Pennsylvania,
then and for some years afterward a Senator of the United
States from that State. He was an ardent supporter of President
Grant and had been Secretary of War in his Cabinet, as his
father had been in the Cabinet of President Lincoln. Like
his father before him, he had ruled the Republican Party of
Pennsylvania with a strong hand. He was not given to much
speaking. He was an admirable executive officer, self-reliant,
powerful, courageous and enterprising, with little respect
for the discontent of subordinates. He was supported by a
majority of the delegates from Pennsylvania, although Blaine,
who was a native of that State, had a large following there.
The New York delegation was headed by Roscoe Conkling, who
had great influence over Grant when he was President, and
expected to retain that influence if he became President
again. The Maryland delegation was headed by J. A. J. Creswell,
who had been Postmaster-General more than five years in Grant's
two Administrations. On the Massachusetts delegation, as
I have said, was Governor Boutwell, Grant's Secretary of the
Treasury during nearly the whole of his first term, and on
that from Illinois John A. Logan. These men had a large following
over the whole country. There were three hundred and eight
persons in the convention who could be counted on to support
Grant from beginning to end, and about a dozen more were exceedingly
disposed to his candidacy. The State Conventions of the
three largest and most powerful States, New York, Pennsylvania
and Illinois, and possibly one or two others, that I do not
now remember, had instructed their delegates to vote as a
unit for the candidate who should be agreed upon by