=The Republican Convention.=—­With the Whigs definitely forced into a separate group, the Republican convention at Chicago was fated to be sectional in character, although five slave states did send delegates.  As the Democrats were split, the party that had led a forlorn hope four years before was on the high road to success at last.  New and powerful recruits were found.  The advocates of a high protective tariff and the friends of free homesteads for farmers and workingmen mingled with enthusiastic foes of slavery.  While still firm in their opposition to slavery in the territories, the Republicans went on record in favor of a homestead law granting free lands to settlers and approved customs duties designed “to encourage the development of the industrial interests of the whole country.”  The platform was greeted with cheers which, according to the stenographic report of the convention, became loud and prolonged as the protective tariff and homestead planks were read.

Having skillfully drawn a platform to unite the North in opposition to slavery and the planting system, the Republicans were also adroit in their selection of a candidate.  The tariff plank might carry Pennsylvania, a Democratic state; but Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois were equally essential to success at the polls.  The southern counties of these states were filled with settlers from Virginia, North Carolina, and Kentucky who, even if they had no love for slavery, were no friends of abolition.  Moreover, remembering the old fight on the United States Bank in Andrew Jackson’s day, they were suspicious of men from the East.  Accordingly, they did not favor the candidacy of Seward, the leading Republican statesman and “favorite son” of New York.

After much trading and discussing, the convention came to the conclusion that Abraham Lincoln of Illinois was the most “available” candidate.  He was of Southern origin, born in Kentucky in 1809, a fact that told heavily in the campaign in the Ohio Valley.  He was a man of the soil, the son of poor frontier parents, a pioneer who in his youth had labored in the fields and forests, celebrated far and wide as “honest Abe, the rail-splitter.”  It was well-known that he disliked slavery, but was no abolitionist.  He had come dangerously near to Seward’s radicalism in his “house-divided-against-itself” speech but he had never committed himself to the reckless doctrine that there was a “higher law” than the Constitution.  Slavery in the South he tolerated as a bitter fact; slavery in the territories he opposed with all his strength.  Of his sincerity there could be no doubt.  He was a speaker and writer of singular power, commanding, by the use of simple and homely language, the hearts and minds of those who heard him speak or read his printed words.  He had gone far enough in his opposition to slavery; but not too far.  He was the man of the hour!  Amid lusty cheers from ten thousand throats, Lincoln was nominated for the presidency by the Republicans.  In the ensuing election, he carried all the free states except New Jersey.