the better sort believed, or could easily learn, that his great qualities were great enough to compensate easily for the many things he lacked.  This specially grotesque specimen of the wild West was soon seen not to be of the charlatan type; as a natural alternative he was assumed to be something of a simpleton.  Many intelligent men retained this view of him throughout the years of his trial, and, only when his triumph and tragic death set going a sort of Lincoln myth, began to recollect that “I came to love and trust him even before I knew him,” or the like.  A single speech like this at the Cooper Institute might be enough to show a later time that Lincoln was a man of great intellect, but it could really do little to prepare men in the East for what they next heard of him.

Already a movement was afoot among his friends in Illinois to secure his nomination for the Presidency at the Convention of the Republican party which was to be held in Chicago in May.  Before that Convention could assemble it had become fairly certain that whoever might be chosen as the Republican candidate would be President of the United States, and signs were not wanting that he would be faced with grave peril to the Union.  For the Democratic party, which had met in Convention at Charleston in April, had proceeded to split into two sections, Northern and Southern.  This memorable Convention was a dignified assembly gathered in a serious mood in a city of some antiquity and social charm.  From the first, however, a latent antipathy between the Northern and the Southern delegates made itself felt.  The Northerners, predisposed to a certain deference towards the South and prepared to appreciate its graceful hospitality, experienced an uneasy sense that they were regarded as social inferiors.  Worse trouble than this appeared when the Convention met for its first business, the framing of the party platform.  Whether the position which Lincoln had forced Douglas to take up had precipitated this result or not, dissension between Northern and Southern Democrats on the subject of slavery had already manifested itself in Congress, and in the party Convention the division became irreparable.  Douglas, it will be remembered, had started with the principle that slavery in the Territories formed a question for the people of each territory to decide; he had felt bound to accept the doctrine underlying the Dred Scott judgments, according to which slavery was by the Constitution lawful in all territories; pressed by Lincoln, he had tried to reconcile his original position with this doctrine by maintaining that while slavery was by the Constitution lawful in every Territory it was nevertheless lawful for a Territorial Legislature to make slave-owning practically impossible.  In framing a declaration of the party principles as to slavery the Southern delegates in the Democratic Convention aimed at meeting this evasion.  With considerable show of logic they asserted, in