Yet was I not wholly blind to consequences and the admonitions of prudence; and when the call for a Liberal Republican Convention appeared I realized that if I expected to remain a Democrat in a Democratic community, and to influence and lead a Democratic following, I must proceed warily.
Though many of those proposing the new movement were familiar acquaintances--some of them personal friends--the scheme was in the air, as it were.

Its three newspaper bellwethers--Samuel Bowles, Horace White and Murat Halstead--were especially well known to me; so were Horace Greeley, Carl Schurz and Charles Sumner, Stanley Matthews being my kinsman, George Hoadley and Cassius M.Clay next-door neighbors.

But they were not the men I had trained with--not my "crowd"-- and it was a question how far I might be able to reconcile myself, not to mention my political associates, to such company, even conceding that they proceeded under good fortune with a good plan, offering the South extrication from its woes and the Democratic Party an entering wedge into a solid and hitherto irresistible North.
Nevertheless, I resolved to go a little in advance to Cincinnati, to have a look at the stalking horse there to be displayed, free to take it or leave it as I liked, my bridges and lines of communication quite open and intact.
III A livelier and more variegated omnium-gatherum was never assembled.

They had already begun to straggle in when I arrived.

There were long-haired and spectacled doctrinaires from New England, spliced by short-haired and stumpy emissaries from New York--mostly friends of Horace Greeley, as it turned out.