a high order of ability, and an accomplished and forceful
public speaker, whose sonorous voice, imposing manner, and skilful
tactics made him at home in a parliamentary fight. "Cochrane is a
large but not a big man," said a correspondent of the day, "full in
the region of the vest, and wears his beard, which is coarse and
sandy, trimmed short. His head is bald, and his countenance bold, and
there are assurances in his complexion that he is a generous liver. He
is a fair type of the fast man of intellect and culture, whose
ambition is to figure in politics. He is in Congress and can command
the ear of the House at any time. His great trouble is his Free-soil
record. He took Free-soilism like a distemper and mounted the Buffalo
platform. He is well over it now, however, with the exception of a
single heresy--the homestead law. He is for giving homesteads to the
actual settlers upon the public land."[522]

[Footnote 522: M. Halstead, _National Political Conventions of 1860_,
p. 20.]

Douglas had a majority of the delegates in the Charleston convention.
But, with the aid of California and Oregon, the South had seventeen of
the thirty-three States. This gave it a majority of the committee on
resolutions, and, after five anxious days of protracted and earnest
debate, that committee reported a platform declaring it the duty of
the federal government to protect slavery in the territories, and
denying the power of a territory either to abolish slavery or to
destroy the rights of property in slaves by any legislation whatever.
The minority reaffirmed the Cincinnati platform of 1856, with the
following preamble and resolution: "Inasmuch as differences of opinion
exist in the Democratic party as to the nature and extent of the
powers of a territorial legislature, and as to the powers and duties
of Congress over the institution of slavery within the territories;
Resolved, that the Democratic party will abide by the decisions of the
Supreme Court on the questions of constitutional law."

It was quickly evident that the disagreement which had plunged the
committee into trouble extended to the convention. The debate became
hot and bitter. In a speech of remarkable power, William L. Yancey of
Alabama upbraided the Northern delegates for truckling to the
Free-soil spirit. "You acknowledged," he said, "that slavery did not
exist by the law of nature or by the law of God--that it only existed
by state law; that it was wrong, but that y