look at the stalking horse there to be displayed, free to take it or leave
it as I liked, my bridges and lines of communication quite open and intact.



III


A livelier and more variegated omnium-gatherum was never assembled. They
had already begun to straggle in when I arrived. There were long-haired
and spectacled doctrinaires from New England, spliced by short-haired and
stumpy emissaries from New York--mostly friends of Horace Greeley, as it
turned out. There were brisk Westerners from Chicago and St. Louis. If
Whitelaw Reid, who had come as Greeley's personal representative, had his
retinue, so had Horace White and Carl Schurz. There were a few rather
overdressed persons from New Orleans brought up by Governor Warmouth, and a
motely array of Southerners of every sort, who were ready to clutch at any
straw that promised relief to intolerable conditions. The full contingent
of Washington correspondents was there, of course, with sharpened eyes and
pens to make the most of what they had already begun to christen a conclave
of cranks.

Bowles and Halstead met me at the station, and we drove to the St. Nicholas
Hotel, where Schurz and White were awaiting us. Then and there was
organized a fellowship which in the succeeding campaign cut a considerable
figure and went by the name of the Quadrilateral. We resolved to limit
the Presidential nominations of the convention to Charles Francis Adams,
Bowles' candidate, and Lyman Trumbull, White's candidate, omitting
altogether, because of specific reasons urged by White, the candidacy of B.
Gratz Brown, who because of his Kentucky connections had better suited my