The interest was sustained from beginning to end, and besides the delegates present, a vast assemblage of people thronged the streets of Philadelphia during all the sessions of the conventions.

In an off year, as partisans call it, there had never been seen so great excitement, enthusiasm and earnestness in any political assemblage.
Mr.Durant called the Southern Convention to order with the same gavel that had been used in the Secession Convention in South Carolina.
Governor Hamilton of Texas, who presented it for the occasion, reminded his audience that the whirligig of time brings about its revenges, and that it seemed a poetic retribution that a convention of Southern loyalists should be called to order with the same instrument that had rapped the South into disunion and anarchy.
On taking the chair as permanent president of the Southern Convention, Mr.Speed spoke of the Administration, of which for the past few months he had been a reluctant member, with a freedom which, during his connection with it, would have been improper if not impossible.

He described the late convention in this place as one with which "we could not act." "Why was that convention here?
It was here in part because the great cry came up from the white man of the South,--My Constitutional and my natural rights are denied me; and then the cry came up from the black man of the South--My Constitutional and my natural rights are denied me.

These complaints are utterly antagonistic, the one to the other; and this convention is called to say which is right.

Upon that question, if upon the truth as you feel it, speak the truth as you know it, speak the truth as you love permanent peace, as you may hope to establish the institutions of this Government so that our children and our children's children shall enjoy a peace that we have not known.