Read Online Coming Fury, Volume 1 by Bruce Catton - Free Book Online

States,’ ” he wrote. “And I have heard this remark several times from South Carolinians: ‘I’ll be damned if I don’t believe Seward will make a good president.’ The fact is, there is a large class to whom the idea of Douglas is absolutely more offensive than Seward.”
    If the Southerners were growing more set in their anger against Douglas, the wrath of the Northwesterners was rising, also. It was a wrath against the party and against the Southerners who had exercised a veto power in the party, and Halstead heard Northern delegates mutter that they would “go home and join the black Republicans.” He added: “I never heard Abolitionists talk more uncharitably and rancorously of the people of the South than the Douglas men here.… Their exasperation and bitterness toward the South that has insisted upon such a gross repudiation of the only ground upon which they could stand in the North, can hardly be described.… They say they do not care a d—n where the South goes, or what becomes of her.” 2
    To make things even more vexing, this was no longer the only convention in town. On May 1, while the convention was dolefully haggling over rules, placing names in nomination and balloting so fruitlessly, the die-hard Southerners who had seceded from it held an organization meeting in Military Hall and denominated themselves the real Democratic convention; the majority group which they had deserted was, as Yancey contemptuously insisted, the “rump convention.” The new convention appointed a platform committee and selected as its chairman a Buchanan administration stalwart, Senator James Bayard, of Delaware, and on Tuesday morning, May 2, when the original convention resumed its attempt to make a nomination, the opposition drew itself together in the Charleston Theater and got down to business. The ladies of Charleston had concluded that this was the real attraction, and they filled the galleries, leaving those at Institute Hall half empty; and on the stage, calling the convention to order, was courtly Senator Bayard—romantic in his name and ancestry, brightly dressed, wearing long brown curls parted in the middle. Behind him was a stage backdropwhich, without political significance, depicted the Palace of the Borgias.
    The platform committee reported promptly, recommending readoption of the by now shopworn Cincinnati platform of 1856, with a postscript which defined that platform’s meaning in unmistakable terms. The postscript explained that neither Congress nor a territorial legislature could impair any citizen’s rights to his property in a territory, and stipulated that it was the Federal government’s duty to protect such rights with all its power. Only when a territory became a state could slavery therein be outlawed. This platform was unanimously adopted and the delegates then sat back to see what the “rump convention” was going to do—the idea being that the new convention would either nominate its own candidate or, in case Douglas should be beaten by someone acceptable to the cotton states, endorse the nomination made at Institute Hall. 3
    At Institute Hall nobody was getting anywhere. A brass band that came down with the Massachusetts delegation got into the gallery and played several national airs, after which Delegate Flournoy, of Arkansas, proposed three cheers for the Union, which were given; but when the balloting was resumed, it went just about as it had gone the day before. On the twenty-third ballot, Douglas got a total of 152½, a majority of the original convention strength of 303, if that made any difference—but he could rise no higher, and after fifty-seven ballots, in which Ben Butler voted at least fifty times for Jefferson Davis, the day’s session was ended with Douglas one vote weaker than he had been at his ineffective peak. And on the morning of Wednesday, May 3, throwing in their hands, the delegates agreed to vote no more but to adjourn and to reconvene in Baltimore