When the Charleston Convention proper reassembled at Baltimore, it was seen that the programme laid out by Jefferson Davis and others in their published address had been adopted.  The seceders had met at Richmond, taken a recess, and now appeared at Baltimore making application for readmission.  But some of the States that withdrew at Charleston had sent contesting delegations, and it resolved itself into tangled rivalry and quarrel of platforms, candidates, and delegations all combined.  For four days a furious debate raged in the convention during the day, while rival mass-meetings in the streets at night called each other “disorganizes,” “bolters,” “traitors,” “disunionists,” and “abolitionists.”  When Douglas, before a test-vote was reached, sent a dispatch suggesting that the party and the country might be saved by dropping his name and uniting upon some other candidate, his followers suppressed the dispatch.

On the fifth day at Baltimore the Democratic National Convention underwent its second “crisis,” and suffered its second disruption.  This time the secession was somewhat broadened; Chairman Cushing resigned his seat, and Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and California withdrew wholly or in part to join the States which had gone out at Charleston.

For the time the disunion extremists were keeping their scheme too well masked for us to establish clearly its historical record.  But the signs and footprints of their underplot are evident.  Here at Baltimore, as at Charleston, and as on every critical occasion, Mr. Yancey was conspicuously present.  Here, as elsewhere, he was no doubt persistently intriguing for disunion in secret while ostentatiously denying disunion purposes in public.

  [Sidenote] Halstead, “Conventions of 1860.”

But little remained to do after the disruption at Baltimore, and that little was quickly done.  The fragments of the original convention continued their session in the Front-street Theater, where they had met, and on the first ballot nominated Stephen A. Douglas for President by an almost unanimous vote.  The seceders organized, under the chairmanship of Caleb Cushing, in Maryland Institute Hall, and also by a nearly unanimous ballot nominated as their candidate for President, John C. Breckinridge, of Kentucky.  Then Mr. Yancey, who in a street mass-meeting had declared that he was neither for the Union per se nor for disunion per se, but for the Constitution, announced that the Democracy, the Constitution, and, through them, the were yet safe.

A month prior to the reassembling of the Charleston “Rumps” above described, Baltimore had already witnessed another Presidential convention and nomination, calling itself peculiarly “National,” in contradistinction to the “sectional” character which it charged upon the Democratic and Republican parties alike.  This was a third party, made up mainly of former Whigs whose long-cherished