Victory could be secured only by help of the electoral votes of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Indiana, and Illinois.  It was therefore a simple problem:  What candidate could carry these States?  None could answer this question so well as their own delegates, and these, when interrogated, still further reduced the problem by the reply that Seward certainly could not.  These four States lay on the border land next to the South and to slavery.  Institutions inevitably mold public sentiment; and a certain tenderness towards the “property” of neighbors and friends infected their people.  They shrunk from the reproach of being “abolitionized.”  They would vote for a conservative Republican; but Seward and radicalism and “higher law” would bring them inevitable defeat.

  [Sidenote] N.Y.  “Tribune,” May 18, 1860.

Who, then, could carry these doubtful and pivotal States?  This second branch of the question also found its ready answer.  The contest in these States would be not against a Territorial slave code, but against “popular sovereignty “; not with Buchanan’s candidate, but with Douglas; and for Douglas there was only a single antagonist, tried and true—­Abraham Lincoln.  Such, we may reasonably infer, was the substance of the discussion and argument which ran through the caucus-rooms of the delegates, day and night, during the 16th and 17th of May.  Meanwhile the Seward men were not idle; having the large New York delegation to begin with, and counting the many positive committals from other States, their strength and organization seemed impregnable.  The opposing delegations, each still nursing the chances of its own candidate, hesitated to give any positive promises to each other.  At midnight of May 17, Horace Greeley,[3] one of Seward’s strongest opponents, and perhaps better informed than any other single delegate, telegraphed his conclusion “that the opposition to Governor Seward cannot concentrate on any candidate, and that he will be nominated.”

Chicago was already a city of a hundred thousand souls.  Thirty to forty thousand visitors, full of life, hope, ambition, most of them from the progressive group of encircling North-western States, and strung to the highest tension of political excitement had come to attend the convention.  Charleston had shown a great party in the ebbtide of disintegration, tainted by the spirit of disunion.  Chicago exhibited a great party springing to life and power, every motive and force compelling cooeperation and growth.  The rush and spirit of the great city, and the enthusiasm and hope of its visitors, blended and reacted upon each other as if by laws of chemical affinity.  Something of the freshness and sweep of the prairie winds exhilarated the delegates and animated the convention.

No building in the city of Chicago at that time contained a hall with sufficient room for the sittings of the great assemblage.  A temporary frame structure, which the committee of arrangements christened “The Wigwam,” was therefore designed and erected for this special use.  It was said to be large enough to hold ten thousand persons, and whether or not that estimate was entirely accurate, a prodigious concourse certainly gathered each day within its walls.