Page:Memoirs of Henry Villard, volume 1.djvu/163

 very flower of the leaders of the young Republican party: Horace Greeley, William M. Evarts, Thaddeus Stevens, Preston King, David Wilmot, Andrew G. Curtin, Henry J. Raymond, Thurlow Weed, General James Watson Webb, George William Curtis, George S. Boutwell, George Ashmun, Joshua R. Giddings, William Dennison, “Tom” Corwin, Henry S. Lane, N. B. Judd, Lyman Trumbull, and Carl Schurz. It was undeniably what all the opposition parties—the Douglas Democracy, the Buchanan or Breckinridge Democracy, and the Bell and Everett “American” party—charged it with being: a sectional convention, made up exclusively of representatives of the free States, excepting the five border Slave States. The Proceedings were of absorbing interest, and, upon the whole, harmonious. Still, two divergent tendencies upon the slavery question, one radical and the other conservative, were noticeable, which led to the most dramatic incident of the Convention. It was when the motion of Joshua R. Giddings to embody the preamble to the Declaration of Independence, “That all men are created equal,” etc., etc., was voted down, and George William Curtis, then only thirty-six years old, rose to renew it with a matchless burst of eloquence which at once carried away the audience.

In one respect the Convention proved a great disappointment to me. I was enthusiastically for the nomination of William H. Seward, who seemed to me the proper and natural leader of the Republican party ever since his great “irrepressible conflict” speech in 1858. The noisy demonstrations of his followers, and especially of the New York delegation in his favor, had made me sure, too, that his candidacy would be irresistible. I therefore shared fully the intense chagrin of the New York and other State delegations when, on the third ballot, Abraham Lincoln received a larger vote than Seward, and the former's unanimous nomination followed. I had not got over the prejudice against Lincoln with which my personal contact with him in 1858 imbued me. It seemed to me