re such knaves that we cannot trust one another--we
had better scatter at once, and cease to make any effort to bind each
other."[559] Speaking on similar lines, Ewing of Tennessee asked what
was meant. "Have you no enemy in front? Have you any States to spare?
We are pursued by a remorseless enemy, and yet from all quarters of
this convention come exclamations of bitterness and words that burn,
with a view to open the breach in our ranks wider and wider, until at
last, Curtius-like, we will be compelled to leap into it to close it
up."

[Footnote 559: M. Halstead, _National Political Conventions of 1860_,
p. 168.]

But it remained for Montgomery of Pennsylvania, in spite of Cochrane's
conciliatory words, to raise the political atmosphere to the
temperature at Charleston just before the secession. "For the first
time in the history of the Democratic party," he said, "a number of
delegations of sovereign States, by a solemn instrument in writing,
resigned their places upon the floor of the convention. They went out
with a protest, not against a candidate, but against the principles of
a party, declaring they did not hold and would not support them. And
not only that, but they called a hostile convention, and sat side by
side with us, deliberating upon a candidate and the adoption of a
platform. Principles hostile to ours were asserted and a nomination
hostile to ours was threatened. Our convention was compelled to
adjourn in order to have these sovereign States represented. What
became of the gentlemen who seceded? They adjourned to meet at
Richmond. Now they seek to come back and sit upon this floor with us,
and to-day they threaten us if we do not come to their terms. God
knows I love the star spangled banner of my country, and it is because
I love the Union that I am determined that any man who arrays himself
in hostility to it shall not, with my consent, take a seat in this
convention. I am opposed to secession either from this Union or from
the Democratic convention, and when men declare the principles of the
party are not their principles, and that they will neither support
them nor stay in a convention that promulgates them, then I say it is
high time, if they ask to come back, that they shall declare they have
changed their minds."[560]

[Footnote 560: M. Halstead, _National Political Conventions of 1860_,
pp. 168-171.]

This swung the door of vituperative debate wide open, and after an
adjournment had clos