The agitation, however, swept on, and further hesitation became impossible.  Early in 1856 Mr. Lincoln began to take an active part in organizing the Republican party.  He attended a small gathering of Anti-Nebraska editors in February, at Decatur, who issued a call for a mass convention which met at Bloomington in May, at which the Republican party of Illinois was formally constituted by an enthusiastic gathering of local leaders who had formerly been bitter antagonists, but who now joined their efforts to resist slavery extension.  They formulated an emphatic but not radical platform, and through a committee selected a composite ticket of candidates for State offices, which the convention approved by acclamation.  The occasion remains memorable because of the closing address made by Mr. Lincoln in one of his most impressive oratorical moods.  So completely were his auditors carried away by the force of his denunciation of existing political evils, and by the eloquence of his appeal for harmony and union to redress them, that neither a verbatim report nor even an authentic abstract was made during its delivery:  but the lifting inspiration of its periods will never fade from the memory of those who heard it.

About three weeks later, the first national convention of the Republican party met at Philadelphia, and nominated John C. Fremont of California for President.  There was a certain fitness in this selection, from the fact that he had been elected to the United States Senate when California applied for admission as a free State, and that the resistance of the South to her admission had been the entering wedge of the slavery agitation of 1850.  This, however, was in reality a minor consideration.  It was rather his romantic fame as a daring Rocky Mountain explorer, appealing strongly to popular imagination and sympathy, which gave him prestige as a presidential candidate.

It was at this point that the career of Abraham Lincoln had a narrow and fortunate escape from a premature and fatal prominence.  The Illinois Bloomington convention had sent him as a delegate to the Philadelphia convention; and, no doubt very unexpectedly to himself, on the first ballot for a candidate for Vice-President he received one hundred and ten votes against two hundred and fifty-nine votes for William L. Dayton of New Jersey, upon which the choice of Mr. Dayton was at once made unanimous.  But the incident proves that Mr. Lincoln was already gaining a national fame among the advanced leaders of political thought.  Happily, a mysterious Providence reserved him for larger and nobler uses.