scious of any process
of dissolution going on among us or around us. We have never been more
patient, and never loved the representatives of other sections more
than now. We bear the same testimony for the people around us here. We
bear the same testimony for all the districts and States we
represent."

This did not sound like the terrible "irrepressible conflict" pictured
at Rochester. Wendell Phillips' famous epigram that "Seward makes a
speech in Washington on the tactics of the Republican party, but
phrases it to suit Wall street,"[516] voiced the sentiment of his
critics. Garrison was not less severe. "The temptation which proved
too powerful for Webster," he wrote, "is seducing Seward to take the
same downward course."[517] Greeley did not vigorously combat this
idea. "Governor Seward," he said, "has so long been stigmatised as a
radical that those who now first study his inculcations carefully will
be astonished to find him so eminently pacific and conservative.
Future generations will be puzzled to comprehend how such sentiments
as his, couched in the language of courtesy and suavity which no
provocation can induce him to discard, should ever have been denounced
as incendiary."[518]

[Footnote 516: New York _Tribune_, March 22, 1860.]

[Footnote 517: _The Liberator_, March 9, 1860.]

[Footnote 518: New York _Tribune_, March 2, 1860.]

No doubt much of this criticism was due to personal jealousy, or to
the old prejudice against him as a Whig leader who had kept himself in
accord with the changing tendencies of a progressive people,
alternately exciting them with irrepressible conflicts and soothing
them with sentences of conservative wisdom; but Bowles, in approving
the speech because it had brought ultra old Whigs of Boston to
Seward's support, exposed the real reason for the adverse criticism,
since an address that would capture an old-line Whig, who indorsed
Fillmore in 1856, could scarcely satisfy the type of Republicans who
believed, with John A. Andrew, that whether the Harper's Ferry
enterprise was wise or foolish, "John Brown himself is right." It is
little wonder, perhaps, that these people began to doubt whether
Seward had strong convictions.

CHAPTER XX

DEAN RICHMOND'S LEADERSHIP AT CHARLESTON

1860

When the Democratic national convention opened at Charleston, South
Carolina, on April 23, 1860, Fernando Wood insisted upon the admission
of his delegation on equal terms with Tamman