stir up sore and wounded hearts to bitterness requires no skill or
power of oratory. To address the minds of men sickened by disaster,
wearied by long trial, heated by passion, bewildered by uncertainty,
heavy with grief, and cunningly to turn them into one vindictive
channel, into one blind rush of senseless fury requires no great power
of oratory and no great mastery of the truth. It may be the trick of a
charlatan!"

He paused and gazed with deliberate and offensive insolence into the
faces of the men who had spoken. Their eyes blazed with wrath, and a
fierce thrill of excitement swept the crowd.

"For a man to address himself to an assembly like this, however, goaded
to madness by suffering, sorrow, humiliation, perplexity--and now roused
by venomous arts to an almost unanimous condemnation of the innocent--I
say to address you, turn you in your tracks and force you to go the
other way--that would indeed be a feat of transcendent oratorical power.
I am no orator--but I am going to tell you the truth and the truth will
make you do that thing!"

Men began to lean forward in their seats now as with impassioned faith
he told the story of the matchless work the great lonely spirit had
wrought for his people in the White House during the past passion-torn
years. His last sentence rang like the clarion peal of a trumpet:

"Desert him now and the election of _George B. McClellan_ on a
'Peace-at-any-Price' platform is a certainty--the Union is dissevered,
the Confederacy established, the slaves reshackled, the dead dishonored
and the living disgraced!"

His last sentence was an angry shout whose passion swept the crowd to
its feet. The resolution was passed and Lincoln's nomination became a
mere formality.

But Senator Winter had only begun to fight. His whole life as an
Abolitionist had been spent in opposition to majorities. He had no
constructive power and no constructive imagination. His genius was
purely destructive, but it was genius. Without a moment's delay he began
his plans to force the President to withdraw from his own ticket in the
midst of his campaign.

The one ominous sign which the man in the White House saw with dread was
the rapid growth through these dark days of a "Peace-at-any-Price"
sentiment within his own party lines in the heart of the loyal North.
Again Horace Greeley and his great paper voiced this cry of despair.

The mischief he was doing was incalculable because he persisted in
teachi