In truth Dorothy was growing more distressed every day over American affairs.  She found harshness in Chicago.  She did not find sympathy with the ideas with which she had grown up.  Her failure to make close friends interfered with her social delights.  Mrs. Douglas had perhaps been her greatest intimate.  With her death she had seemed to lose interest in other cordial associations.  Her nervous organization was badly devitalized.  I, too, hoped to see the continent, and particularly Italy.  But I did not wish to leave until the campaign was over, owing to my interest in Douglas.  I wanted to watch affairs now, but also I wished to help Douglas, if I could.

For the first time the Republicans entered the field.  They adopted a platform which incorporated the Declaration of Independence.  It was against popular sovereignty, lest the people vote in slavery, or be tricked into doing so.  It stood for Congressional control of slavery extension, and implicit in this was the constitutional power of Congress to do so.  It had, with the Declaration of Independence, with the invocation of God, and appeals to the Bible, gathered a working force in the country.  The press, the platform, had been busy to this end.  Seward with his higher law was a contributor.  Chase, who was termed by Douglas a debater, where Seward and Sumner were only essayists, was one of the big figures in the new movement.  Beecher and Greeley were spokesmen of the new organization.  The convention nominated Fremont who had explored Oregon in 1842.

He was of the spirit of Douglas.  He was an expansionist.  He had gone into California in 1845, and raised the American flag on a mountain overlooking Monterey.  He had helped later to conquer California.  He had for various audacious and disobedient acts been tried and court-martialed, and dismissed from military service.  President Polk had approved the verdict, but remitted the penalty.  Then he had resigned.  Now he was the object of the highest honor of an American convention.  He was made the spokesman for a platform which denounced the invasion of Kansas by an armed force in the interests of slavery.  He had gone into California for the slavocracy which engineered the Mexican War, as New England contended.  Now he was at the head of the party waging war upon that slavocracy.  A strange people, these Americans!

Douglas had said that he did not want the office of President.  Perhaps that was an exhibition of political coyness, for he was in the lists just the same!  He had 33 votes on the first ballot, of which only 14 came from the South.  President Pierce, who was running again, met a wavering fortune.  On the sixteenth ballot he had not a vote.  Douglas had 121 votes; a certain Mr. Buchanan had 168.  On the seventeenth ballot this Mr. Buchanan was nominated.  Who was this Mr. Buchanan?