Cameron’s notoriety as a spoilsman who had been in turn a Democrat, a Know-Nothing, and had flirted with Whiggery, militated against his candidacy among delegates concerned that the party should appear to be as pure as Caesar’s wife. Bates seemed for a time Seward’s strongest challenger because Greeley and the influential Blair family backed him in the hope that he might carry even a few border states as well as the lower North. But the colorless sixty-seven-year-old Missourian had been a slaveholder, a Know-Nothing, and in 1856 he had supported Fillmore. He therefore alienated too many
...more
