ls, wrote a vehement letter to
Lincoln, telling him of a "patriotic organisation in all the free and
border States, containing to-day over one million of voters, every man
of whom is your friend upon radical measures of your administration;
but there is not a Seward or a Weed man among them all. These men are
a millstone about your neck. You drop them and they are politically
ended forever.... Conservatives and traitors are buried together. For
God's sake don't exhume their remains in your message. They will smell
worse than Lazarus did after he had been buried three days."[945]

[Footnote 945: Nicolay-Hay, _Abraham Lincoln_, Vol. 7, p. 389.]

Although Weed had left the President with the promise of aiding him,
he could accomplish nothing. The Legislature refused to act, demands
for the postponement of the national convention continued to appear,
and men everywhere resented conservative leadership. This was
especially true of Greeley and the _Tribune_, Bryant and the _Evening
Post_, and Beecher and the _Independent_, not to mention other
Radicals and radical papers throughout the State, whose opposition
represented a formidable combination. Except for this discontent the
Cleveland convention would scarcely have been summoned into existence.
Of the three calls issued for its assembling two had their birth in
New York, one headed by George B. Cheever, the eminent divine, who had
recently toured England in behalf of the Union,--the other by Lucius
Robinson, State comptroller, and John Cochrane, attorney-general.
Cheever's call denounced "the imbecile and vacillating policy of the
present Administration in the conduct of the war,"[946] while Robinson
and Cochrane emphasised the need of a President who "can suppress
rebellion without infringing the rights of individual or State."[947]

[Footnote 946: Nicolay-Hay, _Abraham Lincoln_, Vol. 9, p. 20.]

[Footnote 947: Appleton's _Cyclopaedia_, 1864, p. 786.]

That Weed no longer possessed the wand of a Warwick was clearly
demonstrated at the Republican State convention, held at Syracuse on
May 26, to select delegates to Baltimore. Each faction, led in person
by Greeley and Weed, professed to favour the President's renomination,
but the fierce and bitter contest over the admission of delegates from
New York City widened the breach. The Weed machine, following the
custom of previous years, selected an equal number of delegates from
each ward. The Radicals, who denounced this sy