Their waters were filtered and cleansed through sand and limestone beds, with finely-blended iron and soluble phosphates. The hills, the mountains, the varying landscape, were magnificent in nature's splendor, inspiring to this thoughtful commingled race, who had all these and the expanse, bounded only by their highest peaks, from earth to sky, to grow and mature tribes of as clear-headed men as have ever been produced in our marvelous civilization. With the strong aversion of this Southern mountain people to slavery, they were nevertheless, by kindred ties, association, the few Negroes among them, and neighborly considerations, so tinctured by the influences of slavery that they were firmly opposed to all kinds of interference with it or speech against it. They looked upon Abolitionists as meddlesome agitators who would stir up needless strife and perhaps bloody insurrection.

Mr. Lincoln was one of this race of people. His family had made several migrations westward. He had been in two of them. He had grown to manhood and political leadership alongside such men; but, leader as he always was to them, and much as they honored and respected him for his integrity and high capacities, there was no faction or part of one in the forming new party so hard to reconcile to any declaration against or interference with slavery or its extension as this same free State body of emigrating Clay Whigs, with whom Mr. Lincoln had no end of trouble.

He labored with them so patiently and so long that many of them grew to think that they alone were the men who should guide him or who could save the new party, or, in the greater emergency, the Nation, but that they would render that service only on condition of getting all they wanted in favor or office-holding. They were an inconsiderable part in the forming party, of which ninety per cent were stoutly opposed to further spread of slavery and the least aggressive policy of the slaveholders. Still this

little faction domineered as far and as long as they could. That Mr. Lincoln succeeded and had no open rupture with this faction, out of which he grew, was proof of his surpassing capacity and abilities; for they would not and did not submit to any other leadership, nor could any other man then living have conducted the war and the ordinary affairs of state and kept so many antiquated statesmen from destroying each other, as himself. It must be remembered also that this small faction had to be kept on the side of the Union, if it was to be saved.

Out of these two East and West factions of Whigs, and all the factions of anti-slavery people indiscriminately, with the larger faction coming from the dissolving Democratic party, the Republican organization was formed and sprang into strong and actual existence as a great party.

The people of the Northwest, in large majorities, had been Democrats from the time of the admission of several of the Territories as States, firmly and almost unchangeably so from the time of Jackson. They were well informed, as intelligent a mass of men as ever tilled the soil, who fully employed themselves in the kindred pursuits of opening up and building into civilization a new country. Most of them were Democrats because of the principles and traditions of the party.

Those of them who were foreign born, and, in some instances, the second generation, were Democrats because of the oppressions in the lands from which they had emigrated. All had groaned under the heaviest loads they could bear, imposed on them by the oppressive exactions of tyrants, until they were distrustful of even representative government, and wanted in its stead self-government. With this influx added to the strong Puritanism of the North Atlantic colonies, the great Northwest had been zealously and reliably Democratic as the Nation had been.

When the Charleston Convention was assembled, the

Democracy could look back over a period of more than thirty years of almost unbroken supremacy. They could have continued so under a wise and just administration, but the spirit of Pharaoh was rampant and ascendant. A great popular leader was to be stricken because he would not bend his neck to the broken faith. They marshaled their hosts against him; and their best Democratic statesman and best-followed leader was beaten in the sundered, dissolving party.

God laid the finger of his wrath upon them, and not Rameses and all his godless Egyptians suffered greater privations, plagues, and slayings than the designing propagandists and the deluded, suffering, and dying Southern people. Poor, old, shaking Buchanan, the wretched specter of a man, late an honored citizen, willingly obeyed them and piteously pleaded for peace after he had faithlessly thrown away his opportunity to command and enforce it. He vainly endeavored to arrest the dreadful, war-rising destruction his neglect had done so much to precipitate, but his prayer and his power were mocked, and he stood before the unmasked treason of his own Cabinet and the ruin of his once powerful party, a broken, palsied, chattering President, parleying for peace, when the conspiracy that had thrived and grown under his want of observance and exercise of force to suppress it was taking the field for war.

God weighed him and, though he was not bad in everything of himself, he proved lighter than the chaff of the threshing-floor. Nebuchadnezzar was not more completely driven from power and authority. Nor was his seven years' grass-living more distinct or impressive than Buchanan's life-ending solitude, which never for a day lifted from or left him.

The breaking-up of the Democratic party brought recruits to the Republicans by hundreds of thousands. It was because of their independent character that two mil

lions of them, sure of political power, willingly broke in fragments the party they held next to Church and family altar, rather than have continued power at the cost of sacrificed principles. Out of these elements which have passed before us was made the powerful, victorious Republican party. The dissolution of the Democratic party was an illustration, oft-repeated, of the downfall of conceited, selfglorious men, parties, kingdoms, and dynasties.

N the latter months of 1859, in the central counties of Illinois, the main subject of interest was what would be

done in the way of getting ready and presenting Mr. Lincoln as our choice for nomination at Chicago. He was our home man, and almost every one in those eight counties knew him and held him as a friendly adviser in all matters of trouble and distress. To those who knew him welland there were many who shared his confidence—he was very much the same as a father, a brother, or a dutiful son; and these people had taken him into their hearts as they could take no other man.

With this plain understanding it will be clear to the minds of men that, when he was being considered and looked over as a contingent availability for President, the question in our home counties was not, "Will you support him?" but "What can we do to help?" It was in the air, and it was the spirit of the people that they were for him as far as they could be, including thousands of Democrats. Many Democrats whom I knew said something like this: "If you Republicans would do so sensible a thing as to nominate Abe Lincoln, I will vote for him. I am a Democrat, and I have not deserted my principles nor our leader, Judge Douglas, whom we would support more earnestly than ever if he had any chance; but those Southern fire-eaters, who are no better than traitors, have made his election impossible ever since he stood firm for fair elections in Kansas, and I would like to give them a lesson in electing Abe Lincoln that they will be sure to remember. He is as smart as any one of