Manifesto had been launched in the very nick of time, a meeting of conspirators was held in New York, at the house of David Dudley Field, August fourteenth. Though Wade was now at his home in Ohio, Davis was present. So was Greeley. It was decided to ask Lincoln to withdraw. Four days afterward, a "call" was drawn up and sent out confidentially near and far to be signed by prominent politicians. The "call" was craftily worded. It summoned a new Union Convention to meet in Cincinnati, September twenty-eighth, for the purpose either of rousing the party to whole-hearted support of Lincoln, or of uniting all factions on some new candidate. Greeley who could not attend the committee which drew up the "call" wrote that "Lincoln is already beaten."(4) Meanwhile, the infection of dismay had spread fast among the Lincoln managers. Even before the meeting of the conspirators on the fourteenth, Weed told the President that he could not be reelected.(5) One of his bravest supporters, Washburne, came to the dismal conclusion that "were an election to be held now in Illinois, we should be beaten." Cameron, who had returned from Russia and was working hard for Lincoln in Pennsylvania, was equally discouraging. So was Governor Morton in Indiana. From all his "stanchest friends," wrote his chief manager to Lincoln, "there was but one report. The tide is setting strongly against us."(6) Lincoln's managers believed that the great host of free voters who are the balance of power in American politics, were going in a drove toward the camp of the Democrats. It was the business of the managers to determine which one, or which ones, among the voices of discontent, represented truly this controlling body of voters. They thought they knew. Two cries, at least, that rang loud out of the Babel of the hour, should be heeded. One of these harked back to Niagara. In the anxious ears of the managers it dinned this charge: "the Administration prevented negotiations for peace by tying together two demands, the Union must be restored and slavery must be abolished; if Lincoln had left out slavery, he could have had peace in a restored Union." It was ridiculous, as every one who had not gone off his head knew. But so many had gone off their heads. And some of Lincoln's friends were meeting this cry in a way that was raising up other enemies of a different sort. Even so faithful a friend as Raymond, editor of The Times and Chairman of the Republican National Executive Committee, labored hard in print to prove that because Lincoln said he "would consider terms that embraced the integrity of the Union and the abandonment of slavery, he did not say that he would not receive them unless they embraced both these conditions."(7) What would Sumner and all the Abolitionists say to that? As party strategy, in the moment when the old Vindictive Coalition seemed on the highroad to complete revival, was that exactly the tune to