Great Senators of the United States Forty Years Ago, (1848 and 1849): With Personal Recollections and Delineations of Calhoun, Benton, Clay, Webster, Book

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slavery into new territory were called. John P. Hale, the Free-soil Senator from New Hampshire, had already been suggested as the Presidential candidate of this third party—had, in fact, been nominated the year before (1847) by a convention held at Cleveland, Ohio. Seward and Weed knew there was great danger that, if the third-party movement were left to shape itself and come into the field with John P. Hale as its leader, enough Whigs would be drawn off by it in New England, New York, Pennsylvania and Ohio to give the election to the Democrats. They remembered that only four years before, the Liberty Party defection in New York, whose vote was cast mainly by anti-slavery Whigs, had given the Empire State to Polk and made him President of the United States. It was as clear as day to the two sagacious Whig leaders that the only chance for the Whigs to win the Presidential election of 1848 was to give this inevitable third-party movement a Democratic lead, and a Democraticleader, so as, if possible, to draw off as many Democrats as Whigs from the regular tickets. If that could be done, then New England, New York, Pennsylvania and Ohio would be almost certain to give Whig majorities and render the election of the Whig candidate sure. And now the nomination of General Cass by the Democrats promised to give Seward and Weed their opportunity to turn the third-party movement into a vast Democratic rebellion and bolt. General Cass was a dull, phlegmatic, lymphatic, lazy man. He had an unusuallylarge brain, but it was so torpid that nothing but a powerful appeal to his selfishness or his vanity could arouse it into action ; and when it was aroused its activity was spasmodic and could not be counted upon for sustained energy. There was not a bit of chivalry in Cass's character, nor a...