The Republican Convention met in Baltimore on the seventh of June and renominated Mr. Lincoln for President on a platform strongly approving his conduct of the war and reaffirming the views that he had expressed from time to time concerning it. At the same time Andrew Johnson, of Tennessee, was nominated for Vice-President. Johnson was a Southerner and was at that time acting as military governor of Tennessee. He had always been a Democrat, but he had strongly favored the prosecution of the war for the Union, and at that critical time when Mr. Lincoln's reëlection seemed more than doubtful, it was deemed politic thus to put a war Democrat on the ticket with him, by way of holding to his support that large body of Democratic voters who favored the vigorous prosecution of the contest.
Although Johnson was himself a Southerner, it would have been difficult to find any man more antagonistic than he was to the ruling class of men at the South. He had been born a "poor white,"--that is to say, a member of that class at the South which was everywhere held in contempt both by negroes and by white men. He had received no education in his childhood, and it is said, could neither read nor write until after his marriage, when his wife taught him. But he was a man of very considerable intellectual ability, and by diligent work he had come into prominence as a lawyer, before Mr. Lincoln selected him to exercise the functions of military governor over the practically recovered state of Tennessee. As every reader knows, this selection of Johnson for Vice-President proved in the end to be a thorn in the flesh to the Republican party. Their Democratic Vice-President was destined to succeed to the Presidency by Mr. Lincoln's assassination, almost at the beginning of his second term, and as President to do all that he could to thwart and baffle the policies of the party that had elected him.
When the Democratic Convention met in Chicago on the twenty-ninth of August, the situation in the field was such as greatly to discourage a large part of the population at the North. The demands of the Lincoln administration for more and more troops had been incessant and insistent. These demands had exhausted the willingness of the people to respond, and the administration had been compelled to resort to a forcible draft as a means of keeping up the armies in the field. This resort to the policy of enforced enlistment was everywhere bitterly resented. It was held to be un-American, un-Republican, despotic.