renomination and reelection of Abraham Lincoln.  Their adhesion brought to him a very useful assistance, and beyond this it also gave him the gratification of knowing that he had at last won the approval of men whose friendly sympathy he had always inwardly desired.  Sustained by the best men in the party, he could afford to disregard the small body of irreconcilable and quarrelsome fault-finders, who went over to Fremont, factious men, who were perhaps unconsciously controlled more by mere contradictoriness of temperament than by the higher motives which they proclaimed.

At Cleveland on the appointed day the “mass convention” assembled, only the mass was wanting.  It nominated Fremont for the presidency and General John Cochrane for the vice-presidency; and thus again the Constitution was ignored by these malcontents; for both these gentlemen were citizens of New York, and therefore the important delegation from that State could lawfully vote for only one of them.  Really the best result which the convention achieved was that it called forth a bit of wit from the President.  Some one remarked to him that, instead of the expected thousands, only about four hundred persons had assembled.  He turned to the Bible which, say Nicolay and Hay, “commonly lay on his desk,"[69] and read the verse:  “And every one that was in distress, and every one that was in debt, and every one that was discontented, gathered themselves unto him; and he became a captain over them:  and there were with him about four hundred men."[70]

The Fremonters struck no responsive chord among the people.  The nomination was received by every one with the same tranquil indifference, tinged with ridicule, which the President had shown.  In vain did Fremont seek to give to his candidacy a serious and dignified character.  Very few persons cared anything about it, except the Democrats, and their clamorous approval was as unwelcome as it was significant.  Under this humiliation the unfortunate candidate at last decided to withdraw, and so notified his committee about the middle of September.  He still stood by his principles, however, and asserted that Mr. Lincoln’s administration had been “politically, militarily, and financially a failure;” that the President had paralyzed the generous unanimity of the North; and that, by declaring that “slavery should be protected,” he had “built up for the South a strength which otherwise they could have never attained.”  The nation received the statement placidly and without alarm.

A feeble movement in New York to nominate General Grant deserves mention, chiefly for the purpose of also mentioning the generous manner in which the general decisively brushed it aside.  Mr. Lincoln quietly said that if Grant would take Richmond he might also have the presidency.  But it was, of course, plain to every one that for the present it would be ridiculous folly to take Grant out of his tent in order to put him into the White House.