s afterward, in Philadelphia, the Republicans held their
first national convention. Only a few years previous its members
had called themselves by various names--Democrats, Free-Soilers,
Know-Nothings, Whigs. The old hostilities of these different groups had
not yet died out. Consequently, though Seward was far and away the most
eminent member of the new party, he was not nominated for President.
That dangerous honor was bestowed upon a dashing soldier and explorer of
the Rocky Mountains and the Far West, John C. Fremont.*

*For an account of Fremont, see Stewart Edward White, "The
Forty-Niners" (in "The Chronicles of America"), Chapter II.

The key to the political situation in the North, during that momentous
year, was to be found in the great number of able Whigs who, seeing
that their own party was lost but refusing to be sidetracked by the
make-believe issue of the Know-Nothings, were now hesitating what to do.
Though the ordinary politicians among the Republicans doubtless wished
to conciliate these unattached Whigs, the astuteness of the leaders was
too great to allow them to succumb to that temptation. They seem to have
feared the possible effect of immediately incorporating in their ranks,
while their new organization was still so plastic, the bulk of those
conservative classes which were, after all, the backbone of this
irreducible Whig minimum.

The Republican campaign was conducted with a degree of passion that had
scarcely been equaled in America before that day. To the well-ordered
spirit of the conservative classes the tone which the Republicans
assumed appeared shocking. Boldly sectional in their language, sweeping
in their denunciation of slavery, the leaders of the campaign made
bitter and effective use of a number of recent events. "Uncle Tom's
Cabin", published in 1852, and already immensely popular, was used as a
political tract to arouse, by its gruesome picture of slavery, a hatred
of slaveholders. Returned settlers from Kansas went about the North
telling horrible stories of guerrilla warfare, so colored as to throw
the odium all on one side. The scandal of the moment was the attack made
by Preston Brooks on Sumner, after the latter's furious diatribe in the
Senate, which was published as "The Crime Against Kansas". With double
skill the Republicans made equal capital out of the intellectual
violence of the speech and the physical violence of the retort. In
addition to this, there was