Let me give
a schedule, or list, of one of these representative conventions for
a long time before, and inclusive of, that which nominated Buchanan.
(Remember they had come to be the fountains and tissues of the
American body politic, forming, as it were, the whole blood,
legislation, office-holding, &c.) One of these conventions, from 1840
to '60, exhibited a spectacle such as could never be seen except in
our own age and in these States. The members who composed it were,
seven-eighths of them, the meanest kind of bawling and blowing
office-holders, office-seekers, pimps, malignants, conspirators,
murderers, fancy-men, custom-house clerks, contractors, kept-editors,
spaniels well-train'd to carry and fetch, jobbers, infidels,
disunionists, terrorists, mail-riflers, slave-catchers, pushers of
slavery, creatures of the President, creatures of would-be Presidents,
spies, bribers, compromisers, lobbyers, sponges, ruin'd sports,
expell'd gamblers, policy-backers, monte-dealers, duellists, carriers
of conceal'd weapons, deaf men, pimpled men, scarr'd inside with vile
disease, gaudy outside with gold chains made from the people's money
and harlots' money twisted together; crawling, serpentine men, the
lousy combings and born freedom-sellers of the earth. And whence came
they? From back-yards and bar-rooms; from out of the custom-houses,
marshals' offices, post-offices, and gambling-hells; from the
President's house, the jail, the station-house; from unnamed
by-places, where devilish disunion was hatch'd at midnight; from
political hearses, and from the coffins inside, and from the shrouds
inside of the coffins; from the tumors and abscesses of the land; from
the skeletons and skulls in the vaults of the federal almshouses; and
from the running sores of the great cities.
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