15. That each State Council shall have authority to amend their several constitutions, so as to abolish the several degrees, and substitute a pledge of honor, instead of other obligations, for fellowship and admission into the party. 16. A free and open discussion of all political principles embraced in our platform. The seceding delegates, consisting of the antislavery wing of the party and small in number, organized a convention of their own, and without the formality of a ballot, nominated John C. Fremont, of California, for President, and Ex-Governor William F. Johnston, of Pennsylvania, for Vice-President, but they finally supported Fremont and Dayton. The fragments of the old Whig party met in national convention at Baltimore on the 17th of September, in which 26 States were raggedly represented. Edward Bates, of Missouri, presided over the convention, and the proceedings were uneventful. Fillmore and Donelson, the candidates nominated by the American party, were unanimously nominated for President and Vice-President by resolution, and the following platform adopted: _Resolved_, That the Whigs of the United States, now here assembled, hereby declare their reverence for the Constitution of the United States, their unalterable attachment to the national Union, and a fixed determination to do all in their power to preserve them for themselves and their posterity. They have no new principles to announce, no new platform to establish, but are content to broadly rest—where their fathers rested—upon the Constitution of the United States, wishing no safer guide, no higher law. _Resolved_, That we regard with the deepest interest and anxiety the present disordered condition of our national affairs—a portion of the country ravaged by civil war, large sections of our population embittered by mutual recriminations; and we distinctly trace these calamities to the culpable neglect of duty by the present national administration. _Resolved_, That the Government of the United States was formed by the conjunction in political unity of widespread geographical sections, materially differing not only in climate and products, but in social and domestic institutions; and that any cause that shall permanently array the different sections of the Union in political hostility and organized parties, founded only on geographical distinctions, must inevitably prove fatal to a continuance of the national Union. _Resolved_, That the Whigs of the United States declare, as a fundamental rule of political faith, an absolute necessity for avoiding geographical parties. The danger so clearly discerned by the Father of his Country has now become fearfully apparent in the agitation now convulsing the nation, and must be arrested at once if we would preserve our Constitution and our Union from dismemberment, and the name of America from being blotted out from the family of civilized nations.