The young Republican party now had to face a completely united Democratic party which came forward with the story that the war was a failure. They chose the dismissed General George B. McClellan as their candidate and wrapped him in the ambiguous mist of an abused hero. But they reckoned without the inspired tactics of his successor, Ulysses S. Grant. The tide turned. “Lincoln’s man” was doing the job. Now Sherman was “marching to the sea,” and the backbone of the Confederacy was broken. The people returned Abraham Lincoln to the White House. With Lincoln safe, Douglass took the stump for the strengthening of the Emancipation Proclamation. The next step was to pass the Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery by law. In October, Douglass and John Langston called a National Convention of Colored Men for a four-day session in Syracuse. People still could not believe that the war would end in complete emancipation of all slaves. Douglass called upon this convention of free artisans, craftsmen and laborers in the free Northern states to take their place inside the governmental framework. “Events more mighty than men--eternal Providence, all-wide and all-controlling,” he told them, “have placed us in new relations to the government and the government to us. What that government is to us today, and what it will be tomorrow, is made evident by a very few facts. Look at them, colored men. Slavery in the District of Columbia is abolished forever; slavery in all the territories of the United States is abolished forever; the foreign slave trade, with its ten thousand revolting abominations, is rendered impossible; slavery in ten states of the Union is abolished forever; slavery in the five remaining states is as certain to follow the same fate as the night is to follow the day. The independence of Haiti is recognized; her minister sits beside our “Prime Minister,” Mr. Seward, and dines at his table in Washington, while colored men are excluded from the cars in Philadelphia ... a black man’s complexion in Washington, in the presence of the Federal government, is less offensive than in the City of Brotherly Love. Citizenship is no longer denied us under this government.” The minutes of the convention were sent to President Lincoln. In December Lincoln laid the Thirteenth Amendment before Congress, and in January, 1865, slavery was forever abolished from any part of the United States “or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” Tirelessly, ceaselessly, Lincoln weighed every move he made. No harsh words, no condemnation--he recognized human weakness. “_Our_ responsibility,” he said. Not the South’s alone, not merely the slaveholder’s. He did not cant of “sins” and “virtues.”