rate soldiers, indignant at this second betrayal, had to
make their escape from the country.

It must not be supposed that this Democratic national convention was
made up altogether of Secessionists. The peace party was still, as
in the previous year, a strange complex, a mixture of all sorts and
conditions. Its cohesion was not so much due to its love of peace as to
its dislike of Lincoln and its hatred of his party. Vallandigham was
a member of the committee on resolutions. The permanent chairman was
Governor Seymour of New York. The Convention was called to order by
August Belmont, a foreigner by birth, the American representative of the
Rothschilds. He was the head and front of that body of Northern capital
which had so long financed the South and which had always opposed the
war. In opening the Convention he said: "Four years of misrule by a
sectional, fanatical, and corrupt party have brought our country to the
verge of ruin." In the platform Lincoln was accused of a list of crimes
which it had become the habit of the peace party to charge against
him. His administration was described as "four years of failure," and
McClellan was nominated for President.

The Republican managers called a convention at Baltimore in June, 1864,
with a view to organizing a composite Union Party in which the War
Democrats were to participate. Their plan was successful. The second
place on the Union ticket was accepted by a War Democrat, Andrew
Johnson, of Tennessee. Lincoln was renominated, though not without
opposition, and he was so keenly aware that he was not the unanimous
choice of the Union Party that he permitted the fact to appear in a
public utterance soon afterward. "I do not allow myself," he said, in
addressing a delegation of the National Union League, "to suppose that
either the Convention or the League have concluded to decide that I am
either the greatest or the best man in America, but rather they have
concluded it is not best to swap horses while crossing the river, and
have further concluded that I am not so poor a horse that they might not
make a botch of it in trying to swap."

But the Union Party was so far from being a unit that during the summer
factional quarrels developed within its ranks. All the elements
that were unfriendly to Lincoln took heart from a dispute between the
President and Congress with regard to reconstruction in Louisiana, over
a large part of which Federal troops had established a civil g