It was at the height of this overwrought condition of the Southern mind, that the National Convention of the Democratic party met at Charleston on the 23d of April, 1860. The convention had been assembled in South Carolina, as the most discontented and extreme of Southern States, in order to signify that the Democracy could harmonize on her soil, and speak peace to the nation through the voice which had so often spoken peace before. But the Northern Democrats failed to comprehend their Southern allies. In their anxiety to impress the slave-holders with the depth and malignity of Northern anti-slavery feeling, they had unwittingly implicated themselves as accessories to the crime they charged on others. If they were, in fact, the friends to the South which they so loudly proclaimed themselves to be, now was the time to show their faith by their works. The Southern delegates had come to the convention in a truculent spirit,--as men who felt that they were enduring wrongs which must then and there be righted. They had a grievance for which they demanded redress, as a preliminary step to further conference. They wanted no evasion, they would accept no delay. The Northern delegates begged for the nomination of Douglas as the certain method of defeating the Republicans, and asked that they might not be borne down by a platform which they could not carry in the North. The Southern delegates demanded a platform which should embody the Constitutional rights of the slave-holder, and they would not qualify or conceal their requirements. If the North would sustain those rights, all would be well. If the North would not sustain them, it was of infinite moment to the South to be promptly and definitely advised of the fact. The Southern delegates were not presenting a particular man as candidate. On that point they would be liberal and conciliatory. But they were fighting for a principle, and would not surrender it or compromise it. The supporters of Douglas from the North saw that they would be utterly destroyed at home if they consented to the extreme Southern demand. Their destruction would be equally sure even with Douglas as their candidate if the platform should announce principles which he had been controverting ever since his revolt against the Lecompton bill. For the first time in the history of national Democratic conventions the Northern delegates refused to submit to the exactions of the South. Hitherto platforms had been constructed just as Southern men dictated. Candidates had been taken as their preference directed. But now the Northern men, pressed by the rising tide of Republicanism in every free State, demanded some ground on which they could stand and make a contest at home. PROCEEDINGS OF CHARLESTON CONVENTION.