"To anybody looking back at the Republican National Convention of
1860, it must be plain that there were only two men who had any
chance of being nominated for President.

"These were Lincoln and Seward. I was present at the Convention as a
spectator and I knew this fact at the time, but it seemed to me at
the beginning that Seward's chances were the better. One third of
the delegates of Illinois preferred Seward and expected to vote for
him after a few complimentary ballots for Lincoln. If there had been
no Lincoln in the field, Seward would certainly have been nominated
and then the course of history would have been very different from
what it was, for if Seward had been nominated and elected there
would have been no forcible opposition to the withdrawal of such
States as then desired to secede. And as a consequence the
Republican party would have been rent in twain and disabled from
making effectual resistance to other demands of the South.

"It was Seward's conviction that the policy of non-coercion would
have quieted the secession movement in the Border States and that
the Gulf States would, after a while, have returned to the Union
like repentant prodigal sons. His proposal to Lincoln to seek a
quarrel with four European nations, who had done us no harm, in
order to arouse a feeling of Americanism in the Confederate States,
was an outgrowth of this conviction. It was an indefensible
proposition, akin to that which prompted Bismarck to make use of
France as an anvil on which to hammer and weld Germany together, but
it was not an unpatriotic one, since it was bottomed on a desire to
preserve the Union without civil war."

Never was a political leadership more fairly, more nobly, and more