1st 2d 3d 4th 5th Ballot Ballot Ballot Ballot Ballot Wade .......... 147 170 178 206 38 Wilson ........ 119 114 101 87 Colfax ........ 115 145 165 186 541 Fenton ........ 126 144 139 144 69 Curtin ........ 51 45 40 Only the votes for the leading candidates are here given. Mr. Colfax was therefore nominated on the fifth ballot, and it was felt that his name added great strength to the ticket. He was then Speaker of the House, to which he had been elected with the organization of the party in 1854, and had served with great ability for six terms. The Democratic Convention met in New York in Tammany Hall on July 4, 1868. It was a gathering composed principally of Southern leaders and Generals and Northern Copperheads. After a troubled session of six days the Chairman of the Convention, Horatio Seymour, of New York, was nominated for President on the twenty-second ballot, and Francis P. Blair, Jr., of Missouri, was nominated for Vice-President. The platform advocated the payment of the national debt in depreciated currency, the overthrowing of all that had been done under the reconstruction policy of Congress and the taxing of Government bonds. The platform practically doomed the party to defeat before the campaign had really opened. The canvass was exciting, but the October States practically decided the contest, and the election on November 3d registered what had long been conceded. Grant and Colfax received the 214 electoral votes of twenty-six States; Seymour and Blair only carrying eight States, New York among them, with their 80 electoral votes. The popular vote gave Grant and Colfax 3,012,833, and Seymour and Blair 2,703,249. The third session of the Fortieth Congress assembled on December 7, 1868. One phase of the slavery question still remained unsettled, that of giving the negro the right of suffrage. For several years a strong sentiment had shown itself in the North in favor of granting this right, and Congress had already recognized this sentiment by giving the negro the right to vote in the District of Columbia, which act was passed over President Johnson's veto. The great injustice of freeing the negro and withholding from him the means of protecting his freedom by the right of suffrage was not generally felt, and it remained now for a Republican Congress to crown with a great act of justice the long labors of the party, to remove all the evils of insufferable bondage, and to complete the work of the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments. On February 27, 1869, Congress proposed, through the Department of State, the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution: