choice of a candidate for the Vice-Presidency.  He was right, but the result was most unhappy in the end.  The Convention chose Andrew Johnson.  Johnson, whom Lincoln could hardly endure, began life as a journeyman tailor.  He had raised himself like Lincoln, and had performed a great part in rallying the Unionists of Tennessee.  But—­not to dwell upon the fact that he was drunk when he was sworn in as Vice-President—­his political creed was that of bitter class-hatred, and his character degenerated into a weak and brutal obstinacy.  This man was to succeed Lincoln.  Lincoln, in his letter to accept the nomination, wrote modestly, refusing to take the decision of the Convention as a tribute to his peculiar fitness for his post, but was “reminded in this connection of a story of an old Dutch farmer, who remarked to a companion that it was not best to swap horses when crossing a stream.”

It remained possible that the dissatisfied Republicans would revolt later and put another champion in the field.  But now attention turned to the Democrats.  Their Convention was to meet at Chicago at the end of August, and in the interval the North entered upon the period of deepest mental depression that came to it during the war.  It is startling to learn now that in the course of that year, when the Confederacy lay like a nut in the nutcrackers, when the crushing of its resistance might indeed require a little stronger pressure than was expected, and the first splitting in its hard substance might not come on the side on which it was looked for, but when no wise man could have a doubt as to the end, the victorious people were inclined to think that the moment had come for giving in.  “In this purpose to save the country and its liberties,” said Lincoln, “no class of people seem so nearly unanimous as the soldiers in the field and the sailors afloat.  Do they not have the hardest of it?  Who should quail while they do not?” Yet there is conclusive authority for saying that there was now more quailing in the North than there had ever been before.  When the war had gone on long, checks to the course of victory shook the nerves of people at home more than crushing defeats had shaken them in the first two years of the struggle, and men who would have wrapped the word “surrender” in periphrasis went about with surrender in their hearts.  Thus the two months that went before the great rally of the Democrats at Chicago were months of good omen for a party which, however little the many honourable men in its ranks were willing to face the fact, must base its only hope upon the weakening of the national will.  For public attention was turned away from other fields of war and fixed upon the Army of the Potomac.  Sherman drove back Johnston, and routed Hood; Farragut at Mobile enriched the annals of the sea; but what told upon the imagination of the North was that Grant’s earlier progress was followed by the definite failure of his original enterprise