On the 16th of May, 1860, the National Republican convention met at Chicago.  An immense building called “The Wigwam,” erected for the occasion, was filled with an excited throng numbering fully twelve thousand.  After the usual preliminaries the convention settled down to the serious work of nominating a candidate for the Presidency.  From the outset the contest was clearly between Abraham Lincoln of Illinois and William H. Seward of New York.  On the first ballot, Seward’s vote of 173-1/2 was followed by Lincoln with 102—­the latter having more than double the vote of his next competitor, Simon Cameron of Pennsylvania (51 votes), who was followed by Salmon P. Chase of Ohio (49 votes) and Edward Bates of Missouri (48 votes).  A contrast between these two remarkable men, Seward and Lincoln, now political antagonists but soon to be intimately associated at the head of the Government—­one as President and the other as his prime minister—­is most interesting and instructive.  Seward was a trained statesman and experienced politician of ripe culture and great sagacity, the acknowledged leader of the Republican party, New York’s ex-Governor and now its most distinguished Senator.  His position and career were therefore far more conspicuous than those of Lincoln.  His supporters in the convention were well-organized, bold, confident, and expected that he would be nominated by acclamation.  Lincoln, on the other hand, was still essentially a country lawyer, who had come into prominence mainly as the competitor of Senator Douglas in Illinois in 1858.  With all his native strength of mind and force of character, he was, compared with the polished Seward, a rude backwoodsman, unskilled in handling the reins of government, unfamiliar with the wiles of statecraft, and unused to the company of diplomats and social leaders.  His political reputation, and his support in the convention, were chiefly Western.  Yet his Cooper Institute speech, delivered three months before the convention met, had done much for him in the East; and the homely title of “Honest Old Abe” had extended throughout the free States.  Unlike Seward, he had no political enemies, and was the second choice of most of the delegates whose first choice was some other candidate.

In political management and strategy the Western men at the convention soon showed that they were at best a match for those from the East.  Soon after the opening of the convention, Lincoln’s friends saw that there was an organized body of men in the crowd who cheered vociferously whenever Seward’s name was mentioned.  “At a meeting of the Illinois delegation at the Tremont House,” says Mr. Arnold, “on the evening of the first day, at which Judd, Davis, Cook and others were present, it was decided that on the second day Illinois and the West should be heard.  There was then living in Chicago a man whose voice could drown the roar of Lake Michigan in its wildest fury; nay, it was said that his shout could be heard on a calm day across