Such distinctions were not accepted by the Southern people.

Their leaders had taught them that the one necessarily involved the other, and that a man who was in favor of the Wilmot Proviso was as bitter an enemy to the South as one who incited a servile insurrection.

These views were unceasingly pressed upon the South by the Northern Democracy, who, in their zeal to defeat the Republicans at home, did not scruple to misrepresent their aims in the most reckless manner.

They were constantly misleading the public opinion of the slave States, until at last the South recognized no difference between the creed of Seward and the creed of Gerrit Smith, and held Lincoln responsible for all the views and expressions of William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips.

The calling of a National Republican Convention was to their disordered imagination a threat of destruction.