“That is all, sir; I am satisfied,” concluded the stranger, departing from the great pavilion, and going directly across the street to the church, wherein sat the executive or business part of the convention, leaving the corresponding editor of the North Star in a most aggravated state of conjectures.”
The all-important business at the church, then under consideration before them, was the nomination of a candidate for the presidency. The session was long and important. No report of the proceedings or their progress had been received during the day. Near sunset a representative of the council entered the pavilion, and announced from the stage that they would soon be ready to give the convention the result of their deliberations. Soon after there was a great move forward, and, amidst deafening applause, the Hon. Salmon P. Chase ascended the platform, and announced that, for reasons sufficiently satisfactory to the executive council, the name of Judge John McLean, of Ohio, had been dropped as a candidate for the presidency of the United States, and that of Martin Van Buren substituted; and he had been selected by the council to make this statement, from considerations of the relationship which he bore to the rejected nominee; so that his friends in the convention might understand that it was no act of political injustice by which the change was made.
Probably, apart from the executive body, none knew at the time the cause of the withdrawal of the name of the judge. Whether or not his statement, made doubly eloquent by this infamous decision, added its weight to stay the march to the presidential goal of an ambitious, soulless man, we know that he was rejected, and Martin Van Buren received the preferment. And, as Martin Delany never claimed of him a reward for the service unconsciously rendered, in the event of his election, as is customary, it is likely he was forgotten, to be remembered, however, in the better days of the nation, and by its noblest president.
From the Free Soil Convention he and a number of the colored delegates went directly to Cleveland, to attend a national convention of colored men. They assembled in the court-room, granted to them by the proper authority, the court and bar having generously adjourned for the purpose--a mark of courtesy not often, if ever, recorded at the conventions of this color. And, what was equally as remarkable, the citizens, represented by gentlemen of position, on the last day of the convention, took a vote in the house expressive of their satisfaction with the entire proceedings of the delegates.