CHAPTER V
THE Republicans of Wisconsin were very kind to me. Through their majority in the Legislature they had made me a member of the Board of Regents of the State University, which was established at Madison, and now, in the spring of 1860, their State Convention appointed me as one of their delegates to the Republican National Convention to be held at Chicago in May. That famous Chicago Convention, with its great wooden “Wigwam” that held many thousands of people, its noisy street parades, its shootings, and jostlings, and wire-pullings, has been so often and elaborately described that I need not go into detail. The Wisconsin delegation elected me its chairman, to announce its votes on the floor of the convention, to make, in its name, such statements or declarations as might become necessary, and generally to represent it whenever such representation was called for.
We Wisconsin delegates were all of one mind in strongly favoring Seward as the Republican candidate for the Presidency. By some of the Republicans in Wisconsin, who were originally from New York, Seward may have been preferred because he was a “New York man.” But the large majority of the party in the State, among them the younger and most ardent element, went to Seward for reasons of a higher order. As I expressed it, in somewhat high-flown language perhaps, in a speech delivered at a ratification meeting after the convention: “It was certainly not for reasons of superior availability that Mr. Seward's name was brought forward. But we were accustomed to look up to him as the intellectual leader of
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