eetest smiles
and with an occasional clapping of hands."[526]

[Footnote 526: _Ibid._, p. 68.]

All this was telling hard upon the New York delegation.[527] It wanted
harmony more than Douglas. Dickinson aspired to bring Southern friends
to his support,[528] while Dean Richmond was believed secretly to
indulge the hope that ultimately Horatio Seymour might be nominated;
and, under the plausible and patriotic guise of harmonising the party,
the delegation had laboured hard to secure a compromise. It was shown
that Douglas need not be nominated; that with the South present he
could not receive a two-thirds majority; that with another candidate
the Southern States would continue in control. It was known that a
majority of the delegation stood ready even to vote for a conciliatory
resolution, a mild slave code plank, declaring that all citizens of
the United States have an equal right to settle, with their property,
in the territories, and that under the Supreme Court's decisions
neither rights of person nor property could be destroyed or impaired
by congressional or territorial legislation. This was Richmond's last
card. In playing it he took desperate chances, but he was tired of the
strain of maintaining the leadership of one faction, and of avoiding a
total disruption with the other.

[Footnote 527: "There was a Fourth of July feeling in Charleston that
night--a jubilee. The public sentiment was overwhelmingly and
enthusiastically in favour of the seceders. The Douglas men looked
badly, as though they had been troubled with bad dreams. The
disruption is too serious for them. They find themselves in the
position of a semi-Free Soil sectional party, and the poor fellows
take it hard. The ultra South sectionalists accuse them of cleaving
unto heresies as bad as Sewardism."--M. Halstead, _National Political
Conventions of 1860_, p. 76.]

[Footnote 528: "Dickinson has ten votes in the New York delegation and
no more."--New York _Tribune's_ report from Charleston, April 24,
1860.]

To the Southern extremists, marshalled by Mason and Slidell, the
platform was of secondary importance. They wanted to destroy Guthrie,
a personal enemy of Slidell, as well as to defeat Douglas, and,
although it was apparent that the latter could not secure a two-thirds
majority, it was no less evident that the Douglas vote could nominate
Guthrie. To break up this combination, therefore, the ultras saw no
way open except to break up the conve