Carl Schurz and Charles Sumner, Stanley Matthews being my
kinsman, George Hoadley and Cassius M. Clay next-door neighbors. But
they were not the men I had trained with--not my "crowd"--and it was a
question how far I might be able to reconcile myself, not to mention
my political associates, to such company, even conceding that they
proceeded under good fortune with a good plan, offering the South
extrication from its woes and the Democratic Party an entering wedge
into a solid and hitherto irresistible North.

Nevertheless, I resolved to go a little in advance to Cincinnati, to
have a look at the stalking horse there to be displayed, free to take it
or leave it as I liked, my bridges and lines of communication quite open
and intact.

III

A livelier and more variegated omnium-gatherum was never assembled. They
had already begun to straggle in when I arrived. There were long-haired
and spectacled doctrinaires from New England, spliced by short-haired
and stumpy emissaries from New York--mostly friends of Horace Greeley,
as it turned out. There were brisk Westerners from Chicago and
St. Louis. If Whitelaw Reid, who had come as Greeley's personal
representative, had his retinue, so had Horace White and Carl Schurz.
There were a few rather overdressed persons from New Orleans brought up
by Governor Warmouth, and a motely array of Southerners of every
sort, who were ready to clutch at any straw that promised relief to
intolerable conditions. The full contingent of Washington correspondents
was there, of course, with sharpened eyes and pens to make the most of
what they had already begun to christen a conclave of cranks.

Bowles and Halstead met me at the station, and we drove to the St.
Nicholas Hotel, where Schurz and White were awaiting us. Then and
there was organized a fellowship which in the succeeding campaign cut
a considerable figure and went by the name of the Quadrilateral. We
resolved to limit the Presidential nominations of the convention to
Charles Francis Adams, Bowles' candidate, and Lyman Trumbull, White's
candidate, omitting altogether, because of specific reasons urged by
White, the candidacy of B. Gratz Brown, who because of his Kentucky
connections had better suited my purpose.

The very next day the secret was abroad, and Whitelaw Reid came to me
to ask why in a newspaper combine of this sort the New York Tribune had
been left out.

To my mind it seemed preposterous that it had been or shoul