r delegates that
the Americans of New York would uphold the pro-slavery action at
Philadelphia, while the fervent heat of the conflict melted the zeal
of thousands of anti-Nebraska Know-Nothings, who soon found their way
into the Republican party.

But the main body of the Americans, crushed as were its hopes of
national unity, was still powerful. It put a ticket into the field,
headed by Joel T. Headley for secretary of state, and greatly
strengthened by George F. Comstock of Syracuse for judge of the Court
of Appeals. Headley was a popular and prolific writer. He had been
educated for the ministry at Union College and Auburn Theological
Seminary, but his pen paid better than the pulpit, and he soon settled
down into a writer of melodramatic biography, of which _Napoleon and
His Marshals_ attained, perhaps, the greatest popularity. Possibly
little interest now clings to his books, which ordinarily rest on the
high shelf with Abbott's _History of Napoleon_; but, in their day, it
was far pleasanter to read the entertaining and dramatic pages of
Headley, with their impassioned, stirring pictures of war and heroism,
than the tame, tedious biographies that then filled the libraries.
Headley's _History of the War of 1812_ immediately preceded his
entrance to the Assembly in 1854, where his cleverness attracted the
attention of his party and led to his selection for secretary of
state. George F. Comstock, now in his forty-first year, had already
won an enviable reputation at the Onondaga bar. Like Headley he was a
graduate of Union College. In 1847, Governor Young had appointed him
the first reporter for the Court of Appeals, and five years later
President Fillmore made him solicitor of the Treasury Department. He
belonged to the Hards, but he sympathised with the tenets of the young
American party.

There were other parties in the field. The Free Democracy met in
convention on August 7, and the Liberty party, assembling at Utica on
September 12, nominated Frederick Douglass of Monroe, then a young
coloured man of thirty-eight, for secretary of state, and Lewis Tappan
of New York for comptroller. Douglass' life had been full of romance.
Neither his white father nor coloured mother appears to have had any
idea of the prodigy they brought into the world; but it is certain his
Maryland master discovered in the little slave boy the great talents
that a hard life in Baltimore could not suppress. Douglass secretly
began teaching