the-wisp, floundering through swamps and mire, disturbing corruption as they go. Nothing can cure them of this madness. You may see them at their rooms in Washington literally up to their eyes in public documents and pamphlet speeches, which two or three clerks are preparing for the mail, while their employer sits assiduously franking them to the uttermost parts of the land. Vain and ridiculous pursuit! If the history of our politics proves any thing, it proves that a public man who makes the presidency the first object of his endeavors will never be president-never! We might infer that this would be the case even if we did not know that it uniformly had been. We admit that one or two, or even three, seekers of the presidency have attained their object; but it could be demonstrated that, in each of these instances, the result was not owing to their own exertions, but to some one lucky and well-timed accident. A public man in the United States, whose first object is his own advancement, can not be a man of genuine and great ability, and can never be a man possessing the cast of character which wins universal regard. Stephen A. Douglas, disappointed in 1852, but determined to win in 1856, proposed a measure which he confidently supposed, and had reason to suppose, would unite the South as one man in his support. From tampering with the Missouri Compromise he now advanced to its repeal. This repeal, it is true, was merely a reassertion, in another form, of the old Cass and Douglas principle, that "the people should be everywhere free to form and regulate their domestic institutions in their own way." Not the less, however, did the measure alarm and excite the people of the North. It was one of those acts, unimportant in themselves, which strike powerfully the popular imagination, and it had the effect of making its author odious to all that portion of the people whose approbation confers honor. He had gone too far. In his own Chicago, which had formerly delighted to honor him, he was publicly hooted, refused a hearing, and the hotel in which he lived was surrounded by a multitude after midnight shouting execrations. Long had this man known that there was a South, and that the South governed the country: he was now astonished to discover that there was also a North. The Republican party sprang into being, formidable from birth, and destined to victory. Nor did Mr. Douglas really strengthen his ground with his own party. It has never been the policy of the Demo. cratic party in recent times to nominate its extremest man; the man peculiarly identified with the measures most distasteful to the opposition, and who has made himself personally odious to them. The Democratic Convention of 1856 met in Cincinnati. Its results should be a warning to all public men who are more ambitious for themselves than for their country. James Buchanan an aged politician of Jackson's day, whom Jackson had tolerated, but never liked or trusted; who had been absent from the country during the recent excitements; because he had been absent, received the nomination, and his young competitor was again disappointed. Upon the sixteenth ballot Buchanan received one hundred and sixty-eight votes; Douglas one hundred and twentyone; Cass six. This display of strength on the part of the aged functionary was preliminary to his unanimous nomination. Mr. Douglas, it must be confessed, had a part to play of extreme difficulty. In the minds of some of the Southern leaders there was always, perhaps, a lurking distrust of him. With all his apparent subserviency, he only stooped to conquer; he was not born to be a tool. Reared in free, intelligent Vermont, a man of force, ideas, and courage, he would go very far in pushing his own fortunes and in serving his party; but there was a point beyond which he would not have gone. The real object of the Southern politicians was disunion and the founding of a Southern confederacy. But, at the last moment, this son of Vermont would have recoiled from treason and joined in crushing the traitors. He was no coward. If he had been president in 1860 and in the spring of 1861, he would not have stood passive and permitted a fort of the United States, garrisoned by troops of the United States, to be surrounded by hostile works and menaced by hostile cannon. At the last moment he would have thrown himself without reserve on the side of his country, and, using the forces she had placed at his command, would have dealt with incipient treason as Andrew Jackson dealt with it thirty years before. If he had not done this from a sense of duty, he would from a sense of interest; for this man was as little of a fool as he was of a coward. Southern members felt this to be the case, and preferred a man of less calibre and less force. We can also assert that among Northern Democrats, especially among the gray-haired sires who' assumed to be the legitimate heirs of Andrew Jackson, the "Little Giant" had several powerful and determined enemies, some of whom were willing to sacri fice their party rather than consent to his elevation. Mr. Van Buren tells us, in his work lately published, that his candidate in 1852 was Chief-Justice Taney; and the reader may have noticed that Colonel Benton, in his Thirty Years' View, which relates events down to 1850, scarcely mentions the name of the "Little Giant," and never mentions it with honor. Indeed, the whole class of aged functionaries regarded this man of forty years as a youthful interloper, and considered his presidential aspirations in the light of an impertinence. This secret hostility was exceedingly bitter, and would probably always have prevented, or long postponed, the gratification of Mr. Douglas's ambition, even if he had not destroyed himself. A remarkable triumph of wire-pulling, pure and simple, was the selection of John C. Fremont as the first candidate of the Republican party. Outside of the little coterie of politicians who placed him in nomination, not one human being in the United States had ever so much as thought of him in connection with the presidency. As a lieutenant-colonel in the army he had won some distinction as an explorer, but was absolutely unknown in politics. For precisely these reasons he was chosen in preference to the many able and eminent men who were in full sympathy with the new party, and who in reality had no expectation of electing their candidate. It was, perhaps, a wise selection, because the object of the movement was not to elect a president, but to form, strengthen, and educate a party, and the selection of an unknown name tended to confine the attention of voters to the principles involved in the contest. Colonel Benton, the father-in-law of the Republican candidate, was too old a politician not to understand that his daughter's husband was to be used, not elevated, and he strenuously objected to Colonel Fremont's acceptance of the role. Colonel Fremont, however, did accept it, and issued unscathed from the fiery ordeal of a presidential canvass. If the Republican chiefs had really wished him to be president, they would have pressed his nomination in 1860. But his name was not mentioned in the Chicago Convention. To return to Mr. Douglas, who was incomparably the most important person during the years immediately preceding the war. It was his impatient ambition which split the Democratic party and permitted the election of Abraham Lincoln. When he discovered in 1856 that there was a North, he became also aware that his position as a senator representing Illinois was in imminent peril. Then it was that he placed himself in opposi tion to the Democratic administration on the test question of its whole career-the Lecompton Constitution-and he opposed it on just and unanswerable grounds. By so doing he restored, in some degree, his position at the North, but eternally estranged the South. How curiously the ambition of politicians sometimes defeats itself, and what unexpected obstacles it sometimes itself evokes! Going home to Illinois to look after his election to the Senate, he there encountered upon the stump Abraham Lincoln, a man unknown beyond the boundaries of his own State, to whom this open-air debate of months' continuance gave such celebrity and honor as to place him, with no very arduous effort of his own, in the place for which Douglas had vainly toiled for fifteen years. Mr. Douglas obtained his reëlection to the Senate, and it was then to be seen whether the strength he had gained in the Northern States would suffice to neutralize the distrust and odium under which he rested at the South. The Democratic Convention of 1860 met in the city of Charleston. No one can understand it who reads merely the verbatim report of the debates published daily in the newspapers. The entire secret of its proceedings consisted in the invincible resolve of many Southern politicians, and a few Northern, to frustrate the ambition of Stephen A. Douglas, and in the determination, equally invincible, of Stephen A. Douglas not to be set aside by them, even at the cost of dividing the party. The device by which it was intended to secure his defeat was, the making of a platform upon which he could not and would not stand. Ever rising higher in their demands, the disunionists now required the insertion of resolutions declaring that a territorial legislature had no power to exclude slavery; that the federal government was bound to protect by its naval force the reopening slavetrade; and that the island of Cuba should be acquired at "the earliest practicable period." When this new platform, by the adroit and vigorous opposition of Benjamin F. Butler, of Massachusetts, was voted down, and when the nomination of Douglas appeared to be impending, the delegates representing eight of the Southern States withdrew from the convention. The party then seemed divided beyond hope; but it could have been instantly reunited if the name of Mr. Douglas had been withdrawn. According to the traditions and established usages of the Democratic party, he ought then to have withdrawn his name, and in other days he would have promptly done it. By his positive refusal to take this course the division of the party was complete, and two candidates were presented. It has often been asserted that Mr. Breckinridge, of Kentucky, was in league with the disunionists, and accepted the nomination with the express understanding that, in case of the election of the Republican candidate, which his friends considered almost certain, he would take the lead in the movement for breaking up the Union. This was not the case. In selecting so young and unimportant a person as their candidate, the "regular" Democrats took a hint from the conduct of their opponents in nominating Colonel Fremont. "He is a young man," they said to one another: "in all probability he will be defeated; Douglas also will be defeated; and the division of the party being distinctly seen to be his work, his standing as a Democratic politician will be forever destroyed. The Republicans, inexperienced in the administration of the government, and inheriting peculiar difficulties, without precedents to guide them, will make mistakes, will cover themselves with odium, and prepare the way for the triumph of the Democratic party in 1865. Our candidate will then still be in the flower of his days, and we can easily elect him." Such was the language of the leaders of the Democracy who were untainted with treason, and who attributed the disunion threats of some of their allies to Southern bluster. In this light, too, Mr. Breckinridge contemplated his nomination, and his subsequent desertion of his country in her hour of need was solely due to his weakness as an individual. TO MY SISTER. If love were power, I'd give to thee I'd shelter thee from every ill, If love were light, thy earthly path If love were music, every sound |