A candidate was needed, therefore, who could successfully cope with Douglas and the Douglas theory; and this ability had been convincingly demonstrated by Lincoln.  As a mere personal choice, a majority of the convention would have preferred Seward; but in the four pivotal States there were many voters who believed Seward’s antislavery views to be too radical.  They shrank apprehensively from the phrase in one of his speeches that “there is a higher law than the Constitution.”  These pivotal States all lay adjoining slave States, and their public opinion was infected with something of the undefined dread of “abolitionism.”  When the delegates of the pivotal States were interviewed, they frankly confessed that they could not carry their States for Seward, and that would mean certain defeat if he were the nominee for President.  For their voters Lincoln stood on more acceptable ground.  His speeches had been more conservative; his local influence in his own State of Illinois was also a factor not to be idly thrown away.

Plain, practical reasoning of this character found ready acceptance among the delegates to the convention.  Their eagerness for the success of the cause largely overbalanced their personal preferences for favorite aspirants.  When the convention met, the fresh, hearty hopefulness of its members was a most inspiring reflection of the public opinion in the States that sent them.  They went at their work with an earnestness which was an encouraging premonition of success, and they felt a gratifying support in the presence of the ten thousand spectators who looked on at their work.  Few conventions have ever been pervaded by such a depth of feeling, or exhibited such a reserve of latent enthusiasm.  The cheers that greeted the entrance of popular favorites, and the short speeches on preliminary business, ran and rolled through the great audience in successive moving waves of sound that were echoed and reechoed from side to side of the vast building.  Not alone the delegates on the central platform, but the multitude of spectators as well, felt that they were playing a part in a great historical event.

The temporary, and afterward the permanent organization, was finished on the first day, with somewhat less than usual of the wordy and tantalizing small talk which these routine proceedings always call forth.  On the second day the platform committee submitted its work, embodying the carefully considered and skilfully framed body of doctrines upon which the Republican party, made up only four years before from such previously heterogeneous and antagonistic political elements was now able to find common and durable ground of agreement.  Around its central tenet, which denied “the authority of Congress, of a territorial legislature, or of any individuals, to give legal existence to slavery in any territory of the United States,” were grouped vigorous denunciations of the various steps and incidents of the pro-slavery reaction, and its prospective demands; while its positive recommendations embraced the immediate admission of Kansas, free homesteads to actual settlers, river and harbor improvements of a national character, a railroad to the Pacific Ocean, and the maintenance of existing naturalization laws.