[Footnote 315: Thurlow Weed Barnes, Life of Thurlow Weed, Vol. 2, p. 77.]

The Harrisburg convention, unlike its unselfish predecessors, adjourned without a platform or declaration of principles; nor did the candidates, in accepting their nominations, indulge in political discussion. Votes were wanted from all who opposed Van Buren's administration—from the strict constructionist friends of Tyler, although opposed to the whole Whig theory of government, as much as from the followers of Harrison, who believed in protective tariffs and internal improvements.

Such action contrasted strangely with the work of the national Democratic convention which met at Baltimore on May 6, 1840. If despondency filled the air, the delegates at least had the courage of their convictions. After unanimously renominating Van Buren, it declared for a limited federal power, for the separation of public moneys from private banks, and for the constitutional inability of Congress to interfere with slavery in the States, pronouncing the efforts of Abolitionists both alarming and dangerous to the Union; it opposed internal improvements by the general government; the fostering of one industry to the injury of another; the raising of more money than was needed for necessary expenses; and the rechartering of a national bank. If this declaration did not shape the phrases, and marshal the sentences of future platforms of the party, it embraced the principles upon which Democracy went up to victory or down to defeat during the next two decades; and it must have carried Van Buren through successfully had not his administration fallen upon evil times.

The President, with great moral courage and keen-sighted wisdom, met the crisis of 1837 with an admirable bearing. The statesman suddenly displaced the politician. In the three months intervening between the suspension of specie payments and the extra session of Congress, Van Buren prepared a message as clear and as unanswerable as the logic of Hamilton's state papers. The law, he said, required the secretary of the treasury to deposit public moneys only in banks paying their notes in specie, and, since all banks had suspended specie payments, it was necessary to provide some other custody. For this reason, he had summoned Congress. Then he analysed the cause of the panic, arguing that "the government could not help people earn a living, but it could refuse to aid the deception that paper is gold, and the delusion that value can arise without labour." Those who look to the action of the government, he declared, for specific aid to the citizen to relieve embarrassments arising from losses by reverses in commerce and credit, lose sight of the ends for which government is created, and the powers with which it is clothed. In conclusion, he recommended the enactment of an independent treasury scheme, divorcing the bank and the state.

These words of wisdom, often repeated, long ago became the principle of all administrations, notably of that of President Grant in the great crisis of 1873; and, except from 1841 to 1846, the sub-treasury scheme has been a cardinal feature of American finance. But its enactment was a long, fierce battle. Beginning in 1837, the contest continued through one Congress and half of another. Clay resisted and Webster denounced the project, which did not become a law until July 4, 1840—too late to be of assistance to Van Buren in November. Friends of the New Yorker loved to dwell upon his courage in thus placing himself in the chasm between failing banks and a patriotic people, often paralleling it with the historic leap of Marcus Curtius into the Roman Forum to save the republic. "But with this difference," once exclaimed Andrew B. Dickinson, an unlearned but brilliant Steuben County Whig, generally known as Bray Dickinson: "the Roman feller jumped into the gap of his own accord, but the people throw'd Van Buren in!"

On August 12, 1840, the Whigs renominated William H. Seward for governor, and in the following month the Democrats named William C. Bouck. There was a rugged honesty and ability about Bouck that commended him to the people. He was not brilliant; he rarely attempted to speak in public; and his education had been limited to a few months of school in each winter; but he was a shrewd, wise Schoharie farmer, well read in the ways of men and in the book of the world. Seward thought him "a kind, honest, amiable, and sagacious man, his easy and fascinating manners lacking neither dignity nor grace." Beginning as town clerk, Bouck had served acceptably as sheriff, assemblyman, and for nineteen years as canal commissioner, personally superintending the construction of the canal from Brockport to Lake Erie, and disbursing, without loss, eight millions of dollars. He had travelled up and down the State until the people came to know him as "the old white horse," in allusion to a favourite animal which he rode for many years; and to labourers and contractors his election became a matter of the greatest personal interest.

But the hardships growing out of the panic of 1837 and the crisis of 1839 guided the actions of men. It made little difference to them that Bouck had been a faithful, prudent, and zealous supporter of the canals, or that, like DeWitt Clinton, he had been removed as canal commissioner on purely political grounds. The issues were national—not state. Van Buren clearly saw the force and direction of public sentiment. Yet his sub-treasury measure, so beneficent in its aims that its theory was not lost in the necessities growing out of the Civil War, proved the strongest weapon in the armory of his opponents. Webster, with mingled pathos and indignation, denounced his "disregard for the public distress" by his "exclusive concern for the interest of government and revenue," declaring that help must come to the people "from the government of the United States—from thence alone!" This was the cry of the greenbacker in 1876 and the argument of the free silver advocate in 1896. "Upon this," said Webster, "I risk my political reputation, my honour, my all. He who expects to live to see these twenty-six States resuming specie payments in regular succession once more, may expect to see the restoration of the Jews. Never. He will die without the sight." Yet Webster lived to see the resumption of specie payments in a very short time, and he lived long enough also to exclude this St. Louis speech from his collected works. Nevertheless, Webster's eloquence contributed to Van Buren's overwhelming defeat.

Much has been written of the historic campaign of 1840. The enthusiasm has been called "frenzy" and "crazy fanatacism." It has also been likened to the crusading spirit, aroused by the preaching of Peter the Hermit. "The nation," said Clay, "was like the ocean when convulsed by some terrible storm." Webster declared that "every breeze says change; the cry, the universal cry, is for a change." Long before campaigns usually begin New York was a blaze of excitement. Halls were insufficient to hold the crowds. Where hundreds had formerly assembled, thousands now appeared. The long lines of wagons, driven to the meeting places, raised clouds of dust such as mark the moving of armies. The Whig state convention at Utica became a mass-meeting of twenty-five thousand people, who formed into one great parade. "How long is this procession?" asked a bystander of one of the marshals. "Indeed, sir, I cannot tell," was the reply. "The other end of it is forming somewhere near Albany."

The canvass became one of song, of association, and of imagination, which aroused thoughts that were intensely animating and absorbing. The taunt of a Virginia newspaper that Harrison should remain in his log cabin on the banks of the Ohio made the log cabin "a symbol," as Weed happily expressed it, "of virtue that dwells in obscurity, of the hopes of the humble, of the privations of the poor, of toil and danger, of hospitality and charity and frugality." Log cabins sprang up like gourds in a night. At the door, stood the cider barrel, and, hanging by the window, the omnipresent coonskin swayed in the breeze. They appeared on medals, in pictures, in fancy work, and in processions. Horace Greeley, who had done so much in 1838 through the columns of the Jeffersonian, now began the publication of the Log Cabin, filling whole sides of it with songs elaborately set to music, and making it so universally popular that the New York Tribune, established in the following year, became its legitimate successor in ability and in circulation.

In his biography of Henry Clay, Schurz says that in no presidential canvass has there ever been "less thought." It is likely if there had been no log cabins, no cider, no coon-skins, and no songs, the result would have been the same, for, in the presence of great financial distress, the people seek relief very much as they empty a burning building. But the reader of the Log Cabin will find thought enough. Greeley's editorials summed up the long line of mistakes leading to the panic of 1837, and the people understood the situation. They were simply unwilling longer to trust the party in power.

Evidence of this distrust astonished Democrats as much as it pleased the Whigs. The September election in Maine, followed in October by the result in Ohio and Indiana, both of which gave large Whig majorities, anticipated Harrison's overwhelming election in November. In New York, however, the returns were somewhat disappointing to the Whigs. Harrison carried the State by thirteen thousand majority, receiving in all 234 electoral votes to 60 for Van Buren; but Seward's majority of ten thousand in 1838 now dropped to five thousand,[316] while the Whig majority in the Assembly was reduced to four.

[Footnote 316: William H. Seward, 222,011; William C. Bouck, 216,808.—Civil List, State of New York (1887), p. 166.]

Seward's weakness undoubtedly grew out of his message in the preceding January. With the approval of Dr. Knott of Union College, and Dr. Luckey, a distinguished Methodist divine, he recommended the establishment of separate schools for the children of foreigners and their instruction by teachers of the same faith and language. The suggestion created an unexpected and bitter controversy. Influential journals of both parties professed to see in it only a desire to win Catholic favour, charging that Bishop Hughes of New York City had inspired the recommendation. At that time, the Governor had neither met nor been in communication, with the Catholic prelate; but, in the excitement, truth could not outrun misstatement, nor could the patriotism that made Seward solicitous to extend school advantages to the children of foreign parents, who were growing up in ignorance, be understood by zealous churchmen.

After his defeat, Van Buren retired to Lindenwald, in the vicinity of Kinderhook, his native village, where he was to live twenty-one years, dying at the age of eighty. Lindenwald was an old estate, whose acres had been cultivated for one hundred and sixty years. William P. Van Ness, the distinguished jurist and orator, once owned it, and, thirty years before the ex-President bought it, Irving had secluded himself amidst its hills, while he mourned the death of his betrothed, and finished the Knickerbocker. As the home of Van Buren, Lindenwald did not, perhaps, become a Monticello or a Montpelier. Jefferson and Madison, having served eight years, the allotted term of honour, had formally retired, and upon them settled the halo of peace and triumph that belongs to the sage; but life at Lindenwald, with its leisure, its rural quiet, and its freedom from public care, satisfied Van Buren's bucolic tastes, and no doubt greatly mitigated the anguish arising from bitter defeat, the proscription of friends, and the loss of party regard which he was destined to suffer during the next decade.



CHAPTER IV

HUMILIATION OF THE WHIGS

1841-1842

The Whig state convention, assembled at Syracuse on October 7, 1842, looked like the ghost of its predecessor in 1840. The buoyancy which then stamped victory on every face had given place to fear and forebodings. Eighteen months had left nothing save melancholy recollections. Even the log cabins, still in place, seemed to add to Whig depression, being silent reminders of the days when melody and oratory, prophetic of success, filled hearts which could no longer be touched with hope and faith. This meant that the Whigs, in the election of 1841, had suffered a decisive defeat, losing the Assembly, the Senate, and most of the congressmen. Even Francis Granger, whose majority usually ran into the thousands, was barely elected by five hundred. Orleans County, at one time the centre of the anti-masonic crusade, sent Sanford E. Church to Albany, the first Democrat to break into the Assembly from the "infected district" since the abduction of William Morgan.

Several reasons accounted for this change. Harrison's death, within a month after his inauguration, made John Tyler President, and Tyler first refused appointments to Whigs, and then vetoed the bill, passed by a Whig Congress, re-establishing the United States Bank. He said that he had been opposed, for twenty-five years, to the exercise of such a power, if any such power existed under the Constitution. This completed the break with the party that elected him. Henry Clay denounced his action, the Cabinet, except Webster, resigned in a body, and the Whigs with great unanimity indorsed the Kentucky statesman for President in 1844. To add to the complications in New York, John C. Spencer, who now became secretary of war, so zealously espoused and warmly defended the President that feelings of mutual distrust and ill-will soon grew up between him and Weed. It is doubtful if any New York Whig, at a time of such humiliation, could have accepted place in Tyler's Cabinet and remained on terms of political intimacy with Weed; but, of all men, John C. Spencer was the least likely to do so. In Freeman's celebrated cartoon, "The Whig Drill," Spencer is the only man in the squad out of step with Thurlow Weed, the drum-major.

Governor Seward also played a part in the story of his party's downfall. The school question, growing out of his recommendation that separate schools for the children of Roman Catholics should share in the public moneys appropriated by the State for school purposes, lost none of its bitterness; the McLeod controversy put him at odds with the national Administration; and the Virginia controversy involved him in a correspondence that made him odious in the South. In his treatment of the McLeod matter, Seward was clearly right. Three years after the destruction of the Caroline, which occurred during the Canadian rebellion, Alexander McLeod, while upon a visit in the State, boasted that he was a member of the attacking party and had killed the only man shot in the encounter. This led to his arrest on a charge of murder and arson. The British Minister based his demand for McLeod's release on the ground that the destruction of the Caroline "was a public act of persons in Her Majesty's service, obeying the orders of their superior authorities." In approving the demand, Lord Palmerston suggested that McLeod's execution "would produce war, war immediate and frightful in its character, because it would be a war of retaliation and vengeance." Webster, then secretary of state, urged Seward to discontinue the prosecution and discharge McLeod; but the Governor, promising a pardon if McLeod was convicted, insisted that he had no power to interfere with the case until after trial, while the courts, upon an application for McLeod's discharge on habeas corpus, held that as peace existed between Great Britain and the United States at the time of the burning of the Caroline, and as McLeod held no commission and acted without authority, England's assumption of responsibility for his act after his arrest did not oust the court of its jurisdiction. Fortunately, McLeod, proving his boast a lie by showing that he took no part in the capture of the Caroline, put an end to the controversy, but Seward's refusal to intervene broke whatever relations had existed between himself and Webster.

The Virginia correspondence created even greater bitterness. The Governor discovered that a requisition for the surrender of three coloured men, charged with aiding the escape of a fugitive slave, was based upon a defective affidavit; but, before he could act, the court discharged the prisoners upon evidence that no offence had been committed against the laws of Virginia. Here the matter might very properly have ended; but, in advising Virginia's governor of their discharge, Seward voluntarily and with questionable propriety, enlarged upon an interpretation of the constitutional provision for the surrender of fugitives from justice, contending that it applied to acts made criminal by the laws of both States, and not to "an act inspired by the spirit of humanity and of the Christian religion," which was not penal in New York. This was undoubtedly as good law as it was poor politics, for it needlessly aroused the indignation of Virginia, whose legislature retaliated by imposing special burdens upon vessels trading between Virginia and New York until such time as the latter should repeal the statute giving fugitive slaves the right of trial by jury.

The immediate cause of the Whig defeat, however, had its origin in disasters incident to the construction of the canals. It had been the policy of Governor Marcy, and other Democratic leaders, to confine the annual canal expenditures to the surplus revenues, and, in enlarging the Erie, it was determined to continue this policy. On the other hand, the Whigs advocated a speedy completion of the public works, limiting the state debt to an amount upon which interest could be paid out of the surplus revenues derived from the canal. This policy, backed by several Democratic members of the Senate in 1838, resulted in the authorisation of a loan of four millions for the Erie enlargement. In 1839 Seward, still confident of the State's ability to sustain the necessary debt, advised other improvements, including the completion of the Genesee Valley and Black River canals, as well as the construction of three railroads, at a total estimated expenditure of twelve to fifteen millions. By 1841, the debt had increased to eighteen millions, including the loan of four millions, while the work was scarcely half finished. To add to the difficulty, state stocks depreciated over twenty per cent., embarrassing the administration in its efforts to raise money. The Democrats pronounced such a policy disastrous and ruinous; and, although the Whigs replied that the original estimates were wrong, that the price of labour and material had advanced, and that when completed the canals would speedily pay for themselves, the people thought it time to call a halt, and in the election of 1841 they called it.[317]

[Footnote 317: "Seward had faults, which his accession to power soon displayed in bold relief. His natural tendencies were toward a government not merely paternal, but prodigal—one which, in its multiform endeavours to make every one prosperous, if not rich, was very likely to whelm all in general embarrassment, if not in general bankruptcy. Few governors have favoured, few senators voted for more unwisely lavish expenditures than he. Above the suspicion of voting money into his own pocket, he has a rooted dislike to opposing a project or bill whereby any of his attached friends are to profit. And, conceited as we all are, I think most men exceed him in the art of concealing from others their overweening faith in their own sagacity and discernment."—Horace Greeley, Recollections of a Busy Life, p. 312.]

It was this overwhelming defeat that so depressed the Whigs, gathered at the Syracuse convention, as they looked over the field for a gubernatorial candidate to lead them, if possible, out of the wilderness of humiliation. Seward had declined a renomination. He knew that his course, especially in the Virginia controversy, had aroused a feeling of hostility among certain Whigs who not only resented his advancement over Granger and Fillmore, his seniors in years and in length of public service, but who dreaded his lead as too bold, too earnest, and too impulsive. The fact that the Abolitionists had already invited him to accept their nomination for President in 1844 indicated the extent to which his Virginia correspondence had carried him. So, he let his determination be known. "My principles are too liberal, too philanthropic, if it be not vain to say so, for my party," he wrote Christopher Morgan, then a leading member of Congress. "The promulgation of them offends many; the operation of them injures many; and their sincerity is questioned by about all. Those principles, therefore, do not receive fair consideration and candid judgment. There are some who know them to be right, and believe them to be sincere. These would sustain me. Others whose prejudices are aroused against them, or whose interests are in danger, would combine against me. I must, therefore, divide my party in convention. This would be unfortunate for them, and, of all others, the most false position for me. And what have I to lose by withdrawing and leaving the party unembarrassed? My principles are very good and popular ones for a man out of office; they will take care of me, when out of office, as they always have done. I have had enough, Heaven knows, of the power and pomp of place."[318]

[Footnote 318: F.W. Seward, Life of W.H. Seward, Vol. 1, p. 547.]

With Seward out of the way, Luther Bradish was the logical candidate for governor. Fillmore had many friends present, and John A. Collier of Binghamton, alternating between hope and fear, let his wishes be known. But, as lieutenant-governor, Bradish had won popularity by firmness, patience, and that tact which springs from right feeling, rather than cold courtesy; and, in the end, the vote proved him the favourite. For lieutenant-governor, the convention chose Gabriel Furman, a Brooklyn lawyer of great natural ability, who had been a judge of the municipal court and was just then closing a term in the State Senate, but whose promising career was already marred by the opium habit. He is best remembered as one of Brooklyn's most valued local historians. The resolutions, adhering to the former Whig policy, condemning Tyler's vetoes and indicating a preference for Clay, showed that the party, although stripped of its enthusiastic hopes, had lost none of its faith in its principles or confidence in its great standard-bearer.

The Democrats had divided on canal improvements. Beginning in the administration of Governor Throop, one faction, known as the Conservatives, had voted with the Whigs in 1838, while the other, called Radicals, opposed the construction of any works that would increase the debt. This division reasserted itself in the Legislature which convened in January, 1842. The Radicals elected all the state officers. Azariah C. Flagg became comptroller, Samuel Young secretary of state, and George P. Barker attorney-general. Six canal commissioners, belonging to the same wing of the party, were also selected. Behind them, as a leader of great force in the Assembly, stood Michael Hoffman of Herkimer, ready to rain fierce blows upon the policy of Seward and the Conservatives. Hoffman had served eight years in Congress, and three years as a canal commissioner. He was now, at fifty-four years of age, serving his first term in the Assembly, bringing to the work a great reputation both for talents and integrity, and as a powerful and effective debater.[319] Hoffman was educated for a physician, but afterward turned to the law. "Had he not been drawn into public life," says Thurlow Weed, "he would have been as eminent a lawyer as he became a statesman."[320]

[Footnote 319: "For four days the debate on a bill for the enlargement of the canals shed darkness rather than light over the subject, and the chamber grew murky. One morning a tallish man, past middle age, with iron-gray locks drooping on his shoulders, and wearing a mixed suit of plain clothes, took the floor. I noticed that pens, newspapers, and all else were laid down, and every eye fixed on the speaker. I supposed he was some quaint old joker from the backwoods, who was going to afford the House a little fun. The first sentences arrested my attention. A beam of light shot through the darkness, and I began to get glimpses of the question at issue. Soon a broad belt of sunshine spread over the chamber. 'Who is he?' I asked a member. 'Michael Hoffman,' was the reply. He spoke for an hour, and though his manner was quiet and his diction simple, he was so methodical and lucid in his argument that, where all had appeared confused before, everything now seemed clear."—H.B. Stanton, Random Recollections, p. 173.]

[Footnote 320: Thurlow Weed Barnes, Life of Thurlow Weed, Vol. 1, p. 34.]

The Albany Regency, as a harmonious, directing body, had, by this time, practically gone out of existence. Talcott was dead, Marcy and Silas Wright were in Washington, Benjamin F. Butler, having resigned from the Cabinet as attorney-general, in 1838, had resumed the practice of his profession in New York City, and Van Buren, waiting for another term of the Presidency, rested at Lindenwald. The remaining members of the original Regency, active as ever in political affairs, were now destined to head the two factions—Edwin Croswell, still editor of the Albany Argus, leading the Conservatives, with Daniel S. Dickinson, William C. Bouck, Samuel Beardsley, Henry A. Foster, and Horatio Seymour. Azariah C. Flagg, with Samuel Young, George P. Barker, and Michael Hoffman, directed the Radicals. All were able men. Bouck carried fewer guns than Young; Beardsley had weight and character, without much aptitude; Foster overflowed with knowledge and was really an able man, but his domineering nature and violent temper reduced his influence. Seymour, now only thirty-two years old, had not yet entered upon his illustrious and valuable public career; nor had Daniel S. Dickinson, although of acknowledged ability, exhibited those traits which were to distinguish him in party quarrels. He did not belong in the class with Marcy and Wright, though few New Yorkers showed more indomitable courage than Dickinson—a characteristic that greatly strengthened his influence in the councils of the leaders whose differences were already marked with asperity.

Success is wont to have magical effects in producing a wish to put an end to difference; and the legislative winter of 1843 became notable for the apparent adjustment of Democratic divisions. The Radicals proposed the passage of an act, known as the "stop and tax law of 1842," suspending the completion of the public works, imposing a direct tax, and pledging a portion of the canal revenues as a sinking fund for the payment of the existing debt. It was a drastic measure, and leading Conservatives, with much vigour, sought to obtain a compromise permitting the gradual completion of the most advanced works. Bouck favoured sending an agent to Holland to negotiate a loan for this purpose, a suggestion pressed with some ardour until further effort threatened to jeopardise his chance of a renomination for governor; and when Bouck ceased his opposition other Conservatives fell into line. The measure, thus unobstructed, finally became the law, sending the Democrats into the gubernatorial campaign of 1842 with high hopes of success.

By accident or design, the Democratic state convention also met at Syracuse on October 7. William C. Bouck and Daniel S. Dickinson had been the candidates, in 1840, for governor and lieutenant-governor, and they now demanded renomination. The Radicals wanted Samuel Young or Michael Hoffman for governor; and, before the passage of the "stop and tax law," the contest bid fair to be a warm one. But, after making an agreement to pledge the party to the work of the last Legislature, the Radicals withdrew all opposition to Bouck and Dickinson. In their resolutions, the Democrats applauded Tyler's vetoes; approved the policy of his administration; denounced the re-establishment of a national bank; opposed a protective tariff; and favoured the sub-treasury, hard money, a strict construction of the Constitution, and direct taxation for public works.

The campaign that followed stirred no enthusiasm on either side. The Whigs felt the weight of the canal debt, which rested heavily upon the people; and, although many enthusiastic young men, active in the organisation of Clay clubs and in preparing the way for the Kentucky statesman in 1844, held mass-meetings and read letters from their great leader, New York again passed under the control of the Democrats by a majority of nearly twenty-two thousand.[321] It was not an ordinary defeat; it was an avalanche. Only one Whig senator, thirty Whig assemblymen, and nine or ten congressmen were saved in the wreck. "I fear the party must break up from its very foundations," Fillmore wrote Weed. "There is no cohesive principle—no common head."[322]

[Footnote 321: William C. Bouck, 208,072; Luther Bradish, 186,091.—Civil List, State of New York (1887), p. 166.]

[Footnote 322: Thurlow Weed Barnes, Life of Thurlow Weed, Vol. 2, p. 96.]

Seward took no such pessimistic view. He had the promise of the future in him, a capacity for action, a ready sympathy with men of all classes, occupations, and interests, and he saw rays of light where others looked only into darkness. "It is not a bad thing to be left out of Congress," he wrote Christopher Morgan, depressed by his defeat. "You will soon be wanted in the State, and that is a better field."[323] Seward had the faculty of slow, reflective brooding, and he often saw both deep and far. In the night of that blinding defeat only such a nature could find comfort in the outlook.

[Footnote 323: F.W. Seward, Life of W.H. Seward, Vol. 1, p. 627.]



CHAPTER V

DEMOCRATS DIVIDE INTO FACTIONS

1842-1844

From the moment of William C. Bouck's inauguration as governor, in January, 1843, Democratic harmony disappeared. It was supposed the question of canal improvement had been settled by the "stop and tax law" of 1842, and by the subsequent agreement of the Conservatives, at the Syracuse convention, in the following October. No one believed that any serious disposition existed on the part of the Governor to open the wound, since he knew a large majority of his party opposed the resumption of the work, and that the state officers, who had viewed his nomination with coldness, were watching his acts and critically weighing his words.

But he also knew that his most zealous and devoted friends, living along the line of the Erie, Black River, and Genesee Valley canals, earnestly desired the speedy completion of certain parts of these waterways. In order to please them, his message suggested the propriety of taking advantage of the low prices of labour and provisions to finish some of the work. He did it timidly. There was no positive recommendation. He touched the subject as one handles a live electric wire, trembling lest he rouse the sleeping opposition of the Radicals, or fail to meet the expectation of friends. But the recommendation, too expressionless to cheer his friends and too energetic to suit his opponents, foreshadowed the pitfalls into which he was to tumble. He had been the first to suggest the Erie enlargement, and he knew better than any other man in the State how important was its completion; yet he said as little in its favour as could be said, if he said anything at all, and that little seemed to be prompted, not so much for the good of the State, as to satisfy the demands of ardent friends, who had contributed to his nomination and election.

Severe criticism of the message, by the radical press, quickly showed that not even a temporary reconciliation had been effected by the act of 1842. Had the Governor now been sufficiently endowed with a faculty for good management, he must have strengthened himself and weakened his enemies with the vast amount of patronage at his command. Not since the days of Governor Lewis, had the making of so many appointments been committed to an executive. The Whigs, under Seward, had taken every office in the State. But Bouck, practising the nepotism that characterised Lewis' administration forty years before, took good care of his own family, and then, in the interest of harmony, turned whatever was left over to the members of the Legislature, who selected their own friends regardless of their relations to the Governor. There is something grim and pathetic in the picture of the rude awakening of this farmer governor, who, while working in his own weak way for harmony and conciliation, discovered, too late, that partisan rivalries and personal ambition had surrounded him with a cordon of enemies that could not be broken. To add to his humiliation, it frequently happened that the nominations of those whom he greatly desired confirmed, were rejected in the Senate by the united votes of Radicals and Whigs.

The controversy growing out of the election of a state printer to succeed Thurlow Weed increased the bitterness between the factions. Edwin Croswell had been removed from this office in 1840, and the Conservatives now proposed to reinstate him. Croswell had carefully avoided taking part in the factional contests then beginning to rend the party. He had supported, apparently in good faith, the "stop and tax law" of 1842, and, in the campaigns of 1841 and 1842, had been associated with Azariah C. Flagg in the publication of the Rough Hewer, a weekly paper of radical views, issued from the press of the Argus; but his sympathies were with the Conservatives, and when they sought to re-elect him public printer, the Radicals, led by Flagg, announced as their candidate Henry H. Van Dyck, the owner, since 1840, of a one-third interest in the Argus. For seventeen years, from 1823 to 1840, Croswell had held the office of state printer, accumulating wealth and enjoying the regard of the party; and Flagg and his colleagues contended that he should now give way to another equally deserving. This was a strong reason in a party that believed in rotation in office, especially when coupled with a desire on the part of the Radicals to control the Argus; and, to avoid an open rupture, Croswell proposed that a law be passed making the Argus the state paper, without naming a public printer. Van Dyck objected to this, as it would leave Croswell in control of the establishment. Besides, Van Dyck claimed that, at the time he purchased an interest in the Argus, Croswell promised to support him for state printer. This Croswell denied.

Instantly, the air was alive with the thrill of battle. Croswell faced difficulties such as no other office-seeker had thus far encountered, difficulties of faction, difficulties of public sentiment, and difficulties of personnel. Flagg's conceded fidelity and honesty as a public officer, supplemented by his shrewdness and sagacity, made him the unquestioned leader of the Radicals; and, in this initial and crucial test of strength, he was indisposed to compromise or conciliate; but in Edwin Croswell he met the most impressive figure among the gladiators of the party. Croswell was the veteran editor whose judgment had guided its tactics, and whose words were instinct with life, with prophecy, and with fate. When he entered the pilot-house of his party, men knew something was going to happen. A perceptible hush seemed to announce his presence. At such times, his caustic sentences, clear and compact, were rarely conciliatory; but when he turned away from the wheel, achievement had proven his right to leadership.

In his contest with Flagg, however, Croswell encountered angry criticism from the Radicals and frigid approval from some Conservatives. His candidacy plainly impaired the high respect which his conduct and abilities had brought him. It was a mistake from every point of view; but, once committed to such a course his Conservative friends persevered, giving him finally sixty-six out of one hundred and six votes cast. A speech made by Assemblyman Leland of Steuben affords an interesting glimpse of the many influences summoned from every quarter, until men found themselves in the centre of a political cauldron from which there seemed no escape. "All who have come up here for office," said Leland, "have been compelled to take one side or the other, and as neither side knows what will be the result, some have been disposed to cry 'good Lord, if a Lord, or good devil, if not a Lord.'" The newspapers added to the perils of the quarrel. In the discussion preceding the election, the Albany Atlas, a daily paper recently established, but until now without political prominence, became the organ of the Radicals; and between it and the Argus a fierce editorial battle, which extended to other Democratic papers throughout the State, made the factional division broader and more bitter.

Despite their quarrels, which continued throughout the legislative session, the Democrats, in the state election of November, 1843, carried two-thirds of the Assembly and five-sixths of the Senate. Nevertheless, the strength of the Conservatives was greatly increased. The utter and sudden abandonment of the canals, marked by a long line of tools left where the workmen dropped them, had played an important part in the campaign, and when the Democratic legislative caucus convened, in January, 1844, the friends of canal improvement easily defeated Michael Hoffman for speaker by a vote of fifty-six to thirty-five, in favour of Elisha Litchfield of Onondaga. Henry A. Foster, also an uncompromising champion of the Conservatives, was elected president pro tem. of the Senate. Litchfield had been in Congress. He was a strong man of acknowledged influence in the central counties of the State. Besides, he had been a faithful follower and an ardent admirer of Croswell. There were those who thought Horatio Seymour ought to be speaker; and, for a time, it looked as if he might secure the office. He was the real leader of the Conservatives, and he had more friends than Litchfield. But Litchfield had Croswell.

Backed by such a re-enforcement of Conservatives, Governor Bouck spoke of canal improvement with less timidity. He admitted the necessity of the tax law of 1842, but suggested the completion of "such new works as can be done with better economy than to sustain those designed to be superseded" and "are exposed to great and permanent injury." There was nothing forceful in this recommendation. He still kept the middle of the road, but his request practically amounted to the completion of some of the new work. It meant the finishing of the Schoharie aqueduct, improving the Jordan level, enlarging the locks of the Erie canal, and going on with the construction of the Black River and Genesee Valley canals.

The Radicals, realising the seriousness of the situation, now rested their hopes upon an elaborate report by Robert Dennison, chairman of the Senate canal committee. It was a telling blow. It attacked the estimated, as compared to the actual, cost of the canals, charging engineers with culpable ignorance or corrupt intention. The Chenango canal, it said, was estimated to cost $1,000,000; it actually cost $2,417,000. The first estimate of the Black River canal called for an expenditure of $437,000; after work was commenced, a recalculation made it $2,431,000. It cost, finally, over $2,800,000. The Genesee Valley canal presented even greater disparity, and more glaring ignorance. The original estimate fixed the cost at $1,774,000. Afterward, the same engineer computed it at $4,900,000; and it cost over $5,500,000. The State would have made money, the report said, had it built macadamised roads, instead of canals, at a cost of $4,000 a mile, and paid teamsters two dollars a day for hauling all the produce that the canals would transport when finished. In conclusion, Dennison declared that work on the canals could not be resumed without laying an additional direct tax. This statement touched the pocket-books of the people; and, in the opinion of the Radicals, closed the discussion, for no Democrat, confronting a presidential and gubernatorial election, would dare burden his party with another direct canal tax.

Horatio Seymour, chairman of the canal committee of the Assembly, now appeared with a report, covering seventy-one octavo pages, which illuminated the question even to the enlightenment of Michael Hoffman. It was the first display of that mastery of legislative skill and power, which Seymour's shrewd discerning mind was so well calculated to acquire. The young Oneida statesman had been a favourite since his advent in the Assembly in 1842. His handsome face, made more attractive by large, luminous eyes, and a kind, social nature, peculiarly fitted him for public life; and, back of his fascinating manners, lay sound judgment and great familiarity with state affairs. Like Seward, he possessed, in this respect, an advantage over older members, and he was now to show something of the moral power which the Auburn Senator displayed when he displeased the short-sighted partisans who seemed to exist and to act only for the present.

In presenting his report Seymour was careful to sustain the pledges of the act of 1842, and to condemn the pre-existing policy of creating additional debts for the purpose of constructing new canals or enlarging the Erie. With gentle and cunning skill he commended Azariah C. Flagg's policy, adopted in 1835, of using only the surplus revenue of the canals for such purposes. "The errors we have committed," said his report, "are not without their utility or profitable teaching. The corruptions of extravagance and the bitter consequences of indebtedness, have produced their own correctives, and public opinion, admonished by the past, has returned to its accustomed and healthful channels, from which it will not be readily diverted. There is no portion of our citizens who desire to increase our state indebtedness, or to do aught to the detriment of our common interests, when they are shown the evils that inevitably follow in the train of borrowing large sums of money, to be repaid, perhaps, in periods of pecuniary distress and embarrassment. Neither is it true, on the other hand, that any considerable number of our citizens are opposed to the extension of our canals when it can be effected by the aid of surplus revenues."[324]

[Footnote 324: Jabez D. Hammond, Political History of New York, Vol. 3, p. 412.]

This last sentence was the keynote. Bouck had suggested the principle, and other Conservatives had vainly tried to enforce it, but it remained for Seymour to obtain for it a fair and candid hearing. With great clearness, he unfolded the condition of the public works and of the public finances, and, with able reasoning, he showed that, out of the canal revenues, all the pledges of the act of 1842 could be met, and out of the surplus revenues, all the pledges of the act of 1836 could be completed. At the conclusion, he introduced a bill providing for the resumption of work along the lines set forth in the report.

The reports of Dennison and Seymour reduced the issue to its lowest terms. Dennison wanted the surplus revenues, if any, applied to the payment of the state debt; Seymour insisted upon their use for the enlargement of the Erie and the completion of the Black River and Genesee Valley canals. Both favoured a sinking fund, with which to extinguish the state debt, and both opposed the construction of any new work which should add to that debt. But Dennison, with pessimistic doggedness, denied that there would be sufficient surplus to produce the desired result. Seymour, with much of the optimism of Seward, cherished the hope that rich tolls, growing larger as navigation grew better, would flow into the treasury, until all the canals would be completed and all the debts wiped out. The Radical was more than a pessimist—he was a strict constructionist of the act of 1842. He held that the Seymour bill was a palpable departure from the policy of that act, and that other measures, soon to follow, would eventually overthrow such a policy. To all this Seymour replied in his report, that "just views of political economy are not to be disseminated by harsh denunciations, which create the suspicion that there is more of hostility to the interests of those assailed than an honest desire to protect the treasury of the State."[325]

[Footnote 325: Jabez D. Hammond, Political History of New York, Vol. 3, p. 412.]

Hoffman and Seymour set the tone to the debate in the Assembly. They were, admittedly, the leaders of the two factions, and, although Hoffman possessed remarkable powers of denunciation, which he used freely against measures, his courtesy toward opponents was no less marked than Seymour's.[326] Other Conservatives supported the measure with ability. But it was Seymour's firmness of mind, suavity of manner, unwearied patience, and incomparable temper, under a thousand provocations, that made it possible to pass the bill, substantially as he wrote it, by a vote of sixty-seven to thirty-eight. Even Michael Hoffman refused to vote against it, although he did not vote for it.

[Footnote 326: "One morning Hoffman rose to reply to Seymour, but on learning that he was ill he refused to deliver his speech for two or three days, till Seymour was able to be in his seat."—H.B. Stanton, Random Recollections, p. 175.]

The measure met fiercer opposition in the Senate. It had more acrid and irritable members than the Assembly, and its talkers had sharper tongues. In debate, Foster was the most formidable, but Albert Lester's acerbity of temper fixed the tone of the discussion. Finally, when the vote was taken the Democrats broke evenly for and against the measure; but, as five Whigs supported it, the bill finally passed, seventeen to thirteen.

It was a great victory for Seymour, then only thirty-four years old. Indeed, the history of the session may be described as the passage of a single measure by a single man whose success was based on supreme faith in the Erie canal. Seymour flowingly portrayed its benefits, and, with prophetic eye, saw the deeply ladened boats transporting the produce of prosperous farmers who had chosen homes in the West when access was rendered so easy. What seemed to others to threaten disaster to the State, appealed to him as a great highway of commerce that would yield large revenues to the Commonwealth and abundantly bless its people. He predicted the building of villages and the development of diversified industries along its banks, and, in one of his captivating sentences, he described the pleasure of travelling quickly by packets, viewing the scenery of the Mohawk Valley by day and sleeping comfortably in a cabin-berth at night. But he did not favour building so rapidly as to burden the State with debt. This was the mistake of the Seward administration, and the inevitable reaction gave the Radicals an argument for delay, and Dennison an opportunity for a telling report. Seymour put his faith in the earning capacity of the Erie canal. Forty years later, when he advocated the abolition of tolls, he found all his predictions more than verified.



CHAPTER VI

VAN BUREN DEFEATED AT BALTIMORE

1844

The canal contest and Horatio Seymour's success preceded many surprises and disappointments which were to be disclosed in the campaign of 1844. Never were the motions of the political pendulum more agitated or more irregular. For three years, public sentiment had designated Henry Clay and Martin Van Buren as the accepted candidates of their respective parties for President; and, until the spring of 1844, the confidence of the friends of the Kentucky statesman did not exceed the assurance of the followers of the ex-President. Indeed, the Democratic party was known throughout the country as the "Van Buren party," and, although James Buchanan, John C. Calhoun, and Lewis Cass had each been named as suitable persons for Chief Executive, the sage of Lindenwald was the party's recognised leader and prospective candidate. His sub-treasury scheme, accepted as wise and salutary, was still the cornerstone of the party, buttressed by a tariff for revenue and opposition to a national bank.

In national affairs, the Democratic party in New York was still a unit. The Legislature of 1843 had re-elected Silas Wright to the United States Senate, without a dissenting Democratic vote; and a state convention, held at Syracuse in September of the same year, and made up of Radicals and Conservatives, had instructed its delegation to support New York's favourite son. But a troublesome problem suddenly confronted Van Buren. President Tyler had secretly negotiated a treaty of annexation with Texas, ostensibly because of the contiguity and great value of its territory, in reality, because, as Calhoun, then secretary of state, showed in his correspondence with Great Britain, Texas seemed indispensable to the preservation and perpetuation of slavery. Texas had paved the way for such a treaty by providing, in its constitution, for the establishment of slavery, and by prohibiting the importation of slaves from any country other than the United States. But for three months friends of the treaty in the United States Senate had vainly endeavoured to find a two-thirds majority in favour of its ratification. Then, the exponents of slavery, having secretly brought to their support the enormous prestige of Andrew Jackson, prepared to nominate a successor to President Tyler who would favour the treaty.

Van Buren had never failed the South while in the United States Senate. He had voted against sending abolition literature through the mails into States that prohibited its circulation; he had approved the rules of the Senate for tabling abolition petitions without reading them; he had publicly deprecated the work of abolition leaders; and, by his silence, had approved the mob spirit when his friends were breaking up abolition meetings. But, in those days, American slavery was simply seeking its constitutional right to exist unmolested where it was; and, although the anti-slavery crusade from 1830 to 1840, had profoundly stirred the American conscience, slavery had not yet, to any extended degree, entered into partisan politics. The annexation of Texas, however, was an aggressive measure, the first of the great movements for the extension of slavery since the Missouri Compromise; and it was important to the South to know in advance where the ex-President stood. His administration had been adverse to annexation, and rumour credited him with unabated hostility. To force him into the open, therefore, William H. Hammit, a member of Congress from Mississippi, addressed him a letter on the 27th of March, 1844. "I am an unpledged delegate to the Baltimore convention," wrote Hammit, "and it is believed that a full and frank declaration of your opinion as to the constitutionality and expediency of immediately annexing Texas will be of great service to the cause, at a moment so critical of its destiny."[327] Van Buren held this letter until the 20th of April, thirty-seven days before the meeting of the convention. When he did reply he recalled the fact that in 1837, after an exhaustive consideration of the question, his administration had decided against annexation, and that nothing had since occurred to change the situation; but that if, after the subject had been fully discussed, a Congress chosen with reference to the question showed that the popular will favoured it, he would yield. It was a letter of great length, elaborately discussing every point directly or indirectly relating to the subject.

[Footnote 327: Jabez D. Hammond, Political History of New York, Vol. 3, p. 441.]

Van Buren deeply desired the nomination, and if the South supported him he was practically certain of it. It was in view of the necessity of such support that Van Buren's letter has been pronounced by a recent biographer "one of the finest and bravest pieces of political courage, and deserves from Americans a long admiration."[328] Such eulogy is worthily bestowed if Van Buren, at the time of the Hammit letter, fully appreciated the gravity of the situation; but there is no evidence that he understood the secret and hostile purpose which led up to the Hammit inquiry, and the letter itself is evidence that he sought to conciliate the Southern wing of his party. Charles Jared Ingersoll of Pennsylvania, in his diary of May 6, 1844, declares that nearly all of Van Buren's admirers and most of the Democratic press were even then committed to annexation. Nevertheless, Van Buren and his trusted advisers could not have known of the secret plotting of Buchanan's and Cass's followers, or of the deception shrewdly practised by Cave Johnson of Tennessee, ostensibly a confidential friend, but really a leader in the plot to defeat Van Buren.[329] Besides, the sentiment of the country unmistakably recognised that powerful and weighty as the inducements for annexation appeared, they were light when opposed in the scale of reason to the treaty of amity and commerce with Mexico, which must be scrupulously observed so long as that country performed its duties and respected treaty rights. Even after the nomination of a President only sixteen senators out of fifty-one voted for annexation, proving that the belief still obtained, in the minds of a very large and influential portion of the party, that annexation was decidedly objectionable, since it must lead, as Benton put it in his great speech delivered in May, 1844, to an unjust, unconstitutional war with Mexico upon a weak and groundless pretext. Thus, Van Buren had behind him, the weight of the argument, a large majority of the Senate, including Silas Wright, his noble friend, and a party sentiment that had not yet yielded to the crack of the southern whip; and he was ignorant of the plan, already secretly matured, to defeat him with the help of the followers of Buchanan and Cass by insisting upon the two-thirds rule in the convention. Under these circumstances, it did not require great courage to reaffirm his previous views so forcibly and ably expressed. Cognisant, however, of the growing desire in the South for annexation, he took good care to remove the impression that he was a hard-shell, by promising to yield his opinion to the judgment of a new Congress. This was a long step in the direction of consent. It virtually said, "If you elect a Congress that will ratify the treaty and pay the price, I will not stand in your way." In the presence of such complacency, the thought naturally occurs that he might have gone a step farther and consented to yield his opinions at once had he known or even suspected the secret plans of his southern opponents, the bitterness of Calhoun and Robert J. Walker, and their understanding with the friends of Buchanan and Cass. Jackson's letter favourable to annexation, skilfully procured for publication just before the convention, "to blow Van out of water," as his enemies expressed it, was, indeed, known to Van Buren, but the latter believed its influence discounted by the great confidence Jackson subsequently expressed in his wisdom.[330]

[Footnote 328: Edward M. Shepard, Life of Martin Van Buren, p. 407.]

[Footnote 329: "Judge Fine, Mr. Butler, and other members of the New York delegation, reposed great confidence in the opinions and statements of Mr. Cave Johnson, of Tennessee. He frequently met with the delegation, and expressed himself in the strongest terms of personal and political friendship towards Mr. Van Buren and Mr. Wright. He said he regretted that the Democratic convention in Tennessee had not named Mr. Van Buren as the candidate. So strong was the confidence in Mr. Johnson as a friend of Mr. Van Buren, that he was apprised of all our plans in regard to the organisation of the convention, and was requested to nominate Gov. Hubbard of New Hampshire, as temporary chairman. But when the convention assembled Gen. Saunders of North Carolina called the convention to order and nominated Hendrick B. Wright, of Pennsylvania, a friend of Mr. Buchanan, as temporary president. Messrs. Walker, Saunders, and Cave Johnson were the principal managers for the delegates from the southern section of the Union."—Jabez D. Hammond, Political History of New York, Vol. 3, p. 447.]

[Footnote 330: "The danger of Van Buren's difference with Jackson it was sought to avert. Butler visited Jackson at the Hermitage, and doubtless showed him for what sinister end he had been used. Jackson did not withdraw his approval of annexation; but publicly declared his regard for Van Buren to be so great, his confidence in Van Buren's love of country to be so strengthened by long intimacy, that no difference about Texas could change his opinion. But the work of Calhoun and Robert J. Walker had been too well done."—Edward M. Shepard, Life of Martin Van Buren, p. 407.]

Three days before the date of Van Buren's letter, Henry Clay, writing upon the same subject, expressed the opinion that annexation at this time, without the assent of Mexico, would be a measure "compromising the national character, involving us certainly in war with Mexico, probably with other foreign powers, dangerous to the integrity of the Union, inexpedient to the present financial condition of the country, and not called for by any general expression of public opinion." Van Buren had visited Clay at Ashland in 1842, and, after the publication of their letters, it was suggested that a bargain had then been made to remove the question of annexation from politics. However this may be, the friends of the ex-President, after the publication of his letter, understood, quickly and fully, the gravity of the situation. Subterranean activity was at its height all through the month of May. Men wavered and changed, and changed again. So great was the alarm that leading men of Ohio addressed their delegation in Congress, insisting upon Van Buren's support. It was a moment of great peril. The agitators themselves became frightened. A pronounced reaction in favour of Van Buren threatened to defeat their plans, and the better to conceal intrigue and tergiversation they deemed it wise to create the belief that opposition had been wholly and finally abandoned. In this they proved eminently successful. "Many of the strongest advocates of annexation," wrote a member of the New York delegation in Congress, on May 18, nine days before the convention, "have come to regard the grounds taken by Van Buren as the only policy consistent not only with the honour, but the true interests of the country. Such is fast becoming and will soon be the opinion of the whole South."[331] But the cloud, at last, burst. No sooner had the Baltimore convention convened than Benjamin F. Butler, the ardent friend and able spokesman of Van Buren, discovered that the backers of Cass and Buchanan were acting with the Southerners in the interest of a rule that required two-thirds of all the delegates in the convention to nominate. Instantly the air was thick with suggestion, devices, expedients. All the arts of party emergency went on at an unprecedented rate. The eloquent New Yorker, his clear, tenor voice trembling with emotion, fought the battle on the highest moral grounds.

[Footnote 331: Jabez D. Hammond, Political History of New York, Vol. 3, p. 444.]

With inexhaustible tenacity, force, and resource, he laboured to hold up to men's imagination and to burn into their understanding the shame and dishonour of adopting a rule, not only unsound and false in principle, but which, if adhered to, would coerce a majority to yield to a minority. "I submit," declared Butler, in closing, "that to adopt a rule which requires what we know cannot be done, unless the majority yield to the minority, is to subject ourselves to the rule, not of reason, but of despotism, and to defeat the true purposes and objects of this convention—the accomplishment of the people's will for the promotion of the people's good."[332]

[Footnote 332: Jabez D. Hammond, Political History of New York, Vol. 3, p. 450.

"The real contest took place over the adoption of the rule requiring a two-thirds vote for the nomination. For it was through this rule that enough Southern members, chosen before Van Buren's letter, were to escape obedience to their instructions to vote for him. Robert J. Walker, then a senator from Mississippi, a man of interesting history and large ability, led the Southerners. He quoted the precedent of 1832 when Van Buren had been nominated for the Vice Presidency under the two-thirds rule, and that of 1835, when he had been nominated for the Presidency. These nominations had led to victory. In 1840 the rule had not been adopted. Without this rule, he said amid angry excitement, the party would yield to those whose motto seemed to be 'rule or ruin.' Butler, Daniel S. Dickinson, and Marcus Morton led the Northern ranks.... Morton said that under the majority rule Jefferson had been nominated; that rule had governed state, county, and township conventions. Butler admitted that under the rule Van Buren would not be nominated, although a majority of the convention was known to be for him. In 1832 and 1835 the two-thirds rule had prevailed because it was certainly known who would be nominated; and the rule operated to aid not to defeat the majority. If the rule were adopted, it would be by the votes of States which were not Democratic, and would bring 'dismemberment and final breaking up of the party.' Walker laughed at Butler's 'tall vaulting' from the floor; and, refusing to shrink from the Van Buren issue, he protested against New York dictation, and warningly said that, if Van Buren were nominated, Clay would be elected."—Edward M. Shepard, Life of Martin Van Buren, p. 408.]

The adoption of the rule, by a vote of 148 to 118, showed that the Democratic party did not have a passionate devotion for Martin Van Buren. Buchanan opposed his nomination; leading men in other States did not desire him. The New England States, with Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, had instructed for him; yet sixty-three of these instructed delegates voted for the two-thirds rule, knowing that its adoption would defeat him. The rule received thirty majority, and Van Buren, on the first ballot, received only thirteen. On the second ballot he dropped to less than a majority; on the seventh he had only ninety-nine votes. The excitement reached a climax when a motion to declare him the nominee by a majority vote, was ruled out of order. In the pandemonium, the New Yorkers, for the first time, seemed to unloose themselves, letting fly bitter denunciations of the treachery of the sixty-three delegates who were pledged to Van Buren's support. When order was restored, a Virginian suddenly put forward the name of James K. Polk as that of "a pure, whole-hogged Democrat." Then the convention adjourned until the next day.

Harmony usually follows a bitter convention quarrel. Men become furiously and sincerely indignant; but the defeated ones must accept the results, or, Samson-like, destroy themselves in the destruction of their party. The next morning, Daniel S. Dickinson, the most violently indignant the day before, declared that "he loved this convention because it had acted so like the masses." In a high state of nervous excitement, Samuel Young had denounced "the abominable Texas question" as the firebrand thrown among them, but his manner now showed that he, also, had buried the hatchet. Even the serene, philosophic Butler, who, in "an ecstacy of painful excitement," had "leaped from the floor and stamped," to use the language of an eye-witness, now resumed his wonted calmness, and on the ninth ballot, in the midst of tremendous cheering, used the discretion vested in him to withdraw Van Buren's name. In doing so, he took occasion to indicate his preference for James K. Polk, his personal friend. Following this announcement, Dickinson cast New York's thirty-five votes for the Tennesseean, who immediately received the necessary two-thirds vote. The situation had given Polk peculiar advantages. The partisans of Cass and Buchanan, having willingly defeated Van Buren, made the friends of the New Yorker thirsty to put their knives into these betrayers. This situation, opening the door for a compromise, brought a "dark horse" into the race for the first time in the history of national conventions. Such conditions are common enough nowadays, but it may well be doubted if modern political tactics ever brought to the surface a more inferior candidate. "Polk! Great God, what a nomination!" wrote Governor Letcher of Kentucky to Buchanan.

To make the compromise complete, the convention, by acclamation, nominated Silas Wright for Vice President. But the man who had recently declined a nomination to the Supreme Court of the United States, and who, after the defeat of Van Buren, had refused the use of his name for President, did not choose, he said, "to ride behind the black pony." A third ballot resulted in the selection of George M. Dallas of Pennsylvania. Among the resolutions adopted, it was declared that "our title to the whole of Oregon is clear and unquestionable; that no portion of the same ought to be ceded to England or any other power; and the reoccupation of Oregon and the reannexation of Texas at the earliest practicable period, are great American measures, which the convention recommends to the cordial support of the Democracy of the Union."

Van Buren's defeat practically closed his career. His failure of re-election in 1840 had left his leadership unimpaired, but with the loss of the nomination in 1844 went prestige and power which he was never to regain. Seldom has it been the misfortune of a candidate for President to experience so overwhelming an overthrow. Clay's failure in 1839 and Seward's in 1860 were as complete; but they lacked the humiliating features of the Baltimore rout. Harrison was an equal favourite with Clay in 1839; and at Chicago, in 1860, Lincoln shared with Seward the prominence of a leading candidate; but at Baltimore, in 1844, no other name than Van Buren's appeared conspicuously above the surface, until, with the help of delegates who had been instructed for him, the two-thirds rule was adopted. It seemed to Van Buren the result of political treachery; and it opened a chasm between him and his former southern friends that was destined to survive during the remaining eighteen years of his life. The proscription of his New York friends undoubtedly aided this division, and the death of Jackson, in 1845, and rapidly accumulating political events which came to a climax in 1848, completed the separation.

There are evidences that Van Buren's defeat did not break the heart of his party in New York. Contemporary writers intimate that after his election as President the warm, familiar manners changed to the stiffer and more formal ways of polite etiquette, and that his visit to New York, during his occupancy of the White House, left behind it many wounds, the result of real or fancied slights and neglect. Van Buren's rule had been long. His good pleasure sent men to Congress; his good pleasure made them postmasters, legislators, and cabinet officers. In all departments of the government, both state and national, his influence had been enormous. For years his friends, sharing the glory and profits of his continued triumphs, had been filling other ambitious men with envy and jealousy, until his overthrow seemed necessary to their success. Even Edwin Croswell shared this feeling, and, although he did not boldly play a double part, the astute editor was always seeking a position which promised the highest advantage and the greatest security to himself and his faction. This condition of mind made him quick to favour Polk and the annexation of Texas, and to leave Van Buren to his now limited coterie of followers.

Van Buren had much liking for the career of a public man. Very probably he found his greatest happiness in the triumphs of such a life; but we must believe he also found great contentment in his retirement at Lindenwald. He did not possess the tastes and pleasures of a man of letters, nor did he affect the "classic retirement" that seemed to appeal so powerfully to men of the eighteenth century; but, like John Jay, he loved the country, happy in his health, in his rustic tastes, in his freedom from public cares, and in his tranquil occupation. Skilled in horticulture, he took pleasure in planting trees, and in cultivating, with his own hand, the fruits and flowers of his table. There can be no doubt of his entire sincerity when he assured an enthusiastic Pennsylvania admirer, who had pronounced for him as a candidate in 1848, that whatever aspirations he may have had in the past, he now had no desire to be President.



CHAPTER VII

SILAS WRIGHT AND MILLARD FILLMORE

1844

The New York delegation, returning from the Baltimore convention, found the Democratic party rent in twain over the gubernatorial situation. So long as Van Buren seemed likely to be the candidate for President, opposition to Governor Bouck's renomination was smothered by the desire of the Radicals to unite with the Conservatives, and thus make sure of the State's electoral vote. This was the Van Buren plan. After the latter's defeat, however, the Radicals demanded the nomination of Silas Wright of Canton. Van Buren and Wright had taken no part in the canal controversy; but they belonged to the Radicals, and, with Wright, and with no one else, could the latter hope to defeat the "Agricultural Governor." Their importunity greatly distressed the Canton statesman, who desired to remain in the United States Senate, to which he had been recently re-elected for a third term, and to whom, from every point of view, the governorship was distasteful.[333] Besides taking him from the Senate, it meant contention with two bitterly jealous and hostile factions, one of which would be displeased with impartiality, the other ready to plunge the party into a fierce feud on the slightest show of partiality. Therefore, he firmly declined to be a candidate.

[Footnote 333: "Next to the Presidency no place was so much desired, in the times we are now reviewing, as that of senator of the United States. The body was illustrious through the fame of its members, who generally exhibited the very flower and highest outcome of American political life; dignified, powerful, respected, it was the pride of the nation, and one of its main bulwarks. The height of ordinary ambition was satisfied by attainment to that place; and men once securely seated there would have been content to hold it on and on, asking no more. One cannot doubt the sincerity of the expressions in which Mr. Wright announced his distress at being thrown from that delightful eminence into the whirlpools and quicksands at Albany."—Morgan Dix, Memoirs of John Dix, Vol. 1, pp. 194, 195.]

But the Albany Atlas, representing the Radicals, insisted upon Wright's making the sacrifice; and, to give Bouck an easy avenue of escape, Edwin Croswell, representing the Conservatives, advised that the Governor would withdraw if he should consent to stand. But he again refused. Still the Atlas continued to insist. By the middle of July things looked very black. In Albany, the atmosphere became thick with political passion. Finally, Van Buren interfered. He was profoundly affected with the idea that political treachery had compassed his defeat, and he knew the nomination of Polk was personally offensive to Silas Wright; but, faithful to his promise to support the action of the Baltimore convention, he requested his friend to lead the state ticket, since the result in New York would probably decide, as it did decide, the fate of the Democratic party in the nation. Still the Senator refused. His decision, more critical than he seemed to be aware, compelled his Radical friends to invent new compromises, until the refusal was modified into a conditional consent. In other words, he would accept the nomination provided he was not placed in the position of opposing "any Republican who is, or who may become a candidate."

This action of the Radicals kept the Conservatives busy bailing a sinking boat. They believed the candidacy of Bouck would shut out Wright under the terms of his letter, and, although the Governor's supporters were daily detached by the action of county conventions, and the Governor himself wished to withdraw to avoid the humiliation of a defeat by ballot, the Conservatives continued their opposition. For once it could be truthfully said of a candidate that he was "in the hands of his friends." Even the "judicious" delegate, whom the Governor directed to withdraw his name, declined executing the commission until a ballot had nominated Wright, giving him ninety-five votes to thirty for Bouck. "Wright's nomination is the fatality," wrote Seward. "Election or defeat exhausts him."[334] Seward had the gift of prophecy.

[Footnote 334: F.W. Seward, Life of W.H. Seward, Vol. 1, p. 723.

"Wright was a strong man the day before his nomination for governor. He fell far, and if left alone will be not, what he might have been, George I. to William of Orange, lineal heir to Jackson, through Van Buren. The wiseacres in New York speak of him with compliment, 'this distinguished statesman;' yet they bring all their small artillery to bear upon him, and give notice that he is demolished. The praise they bestow is very ill concealed, but less injurious to us than their warfare, conducted in their mode."—Letter of W.H. Seward to Thurlow Weed, Ibid., Vol. 1, p. 725.]

The bitterness of the contest was further revealed in the refusal of Daniel S. Dickinson, a doughty Conservative, to accept a renomination for lieutenant-governor, notwithstanding Silas Wright had especially asked it. There were many surmises, everybody was excited, and the door to harmony seemed closed forever; but it opened again when the name of Addison Gardiner of Rochester came up. Gardiner had been guided by high ideals. He was kind and tolerant; the voice of personal anger was never heard from his lips; and Conservative and Radical held him in high respect. At Manlius, in 1821, Gardiner had become the closest friend of Thurlow Weed, an intimacy that was severed only by death. He was a young lawyer then, anxious to seek his fortune in the West, and on his way to Indianapolis happened to stop at Rochester. The place proved too attractive to give up, and, through his influence, Weed also made it his residence. "How curious it seems," he once wrote his distinguished journalistic friend, "that circumstances which we regard at the time as scarcely worthy of notice often change the entire current of our lives." A few years later, through Weed's influence, Gardiner became a judge of the Supreme Court, laying the foundation for a public life of honourable and almost unceasing activity.

Though the Whigs needed their ablest and most popular men to meet Wright and Gardiner, preceding events guided the action of their state convention, which met at Syracuse, on the 11th of September, 1844. Horace Greeley had picked out Millard Fillmore for the Vice Presidency on the ticket with Henry Clay, and his New York friends, proud of his work in Congress, as chairman of the Committee on Ways and Means, presented his name with the hope that other States, profiting by the tariff which he had framed, might join them in recognising his valuable public service. But the convention had not taken kindly to him, probably for the same reason that Greeley desired his promotion; for, upon the slavery question, Fillmore had been more pronounced and aggressive than Seward, sympathising and acting in Congress with Giddings of Ohio and John P. Hale of New Hampshire, a part very difficult to perform in those days without losing caste as a Whig.

Fillmore's defeat on May 1, however, made him the candidate for governor on September 11. Weed pronounced for him very early, and the party leaders fell into line with a unanimity that must have been as balm to Fillmore's sores. "I wish to say to you," wrote George W. Patterson to Weed, "that you are right, as usual, on the question of governor. After Frelinghuysen was named for Vice President, it struck me that Fillmore above all others was the man. You may rest assured that he will help Mr. Clay to a large number of good men's votes. Mr. Clay's slaves and his old duel would have hurt him with some men who will now vote the ticket. Fillmore is a favourite everywhere; and among the Methodists where 'old Father Fillmore' is almost worshipped, they will go him with a rush."[335] Yet the Buffalo statesman, not a little disgruntled over his treatment at Baltimore, disclaimed any desire for the nomination. To add to his chagrin, he was told that Weed and Seward urged his selection for his destruction, and whether he believed the tale or not, it increased his fear and apprehension. But people did not take his assumed indifference seriously, and he was unanimously nominated for governor, with Samuel J. Wilkin, of Orange, for lieutenant-governor. Wilkin had been a leader of the Adams party in the Assembly of 1824 and 1825. He was then a young lawyer of much promise, able and clear-headed, and, although never a showy debater, he possessed useful business talent, and an integrity that gave him high place among the men who guided his party. "I like Wilkin for lieutenant-governor," wrote Seward, although he had been partial to the selection of John A. King.

[Footnote 335: Thurlow Weed Barnes, Life of Thurlow Weed, Vol. 2, p. 121.]

Without doubt, each party had put forward, for governor, its most available man. Fillmore was well known and at the height of his popularity. During the protracted and exciting tariff struggle of 1842, he had sustained himself as chairman of the Ways and Means Committee with marked ability. It added to his popularity, too, that he had seemed indifferent to the nomination. In some respects Fillmore and Silas Wright were not unlike. They were distinguished for their suavity of manners. Both were impressive and interesting characters, wise in council, and able in debate, with a large knowledge of their State and country; and, although belonging to opposite parties and in different wings of the capitol at Washington, their service in Congress had brought to the debates a genius which compelled attention, and a purity of life that raised in the public estimation the whole level of congressional proceedings. Neither was an orator; they were clear, forcible, and logical; but their speeches were not quoted as models of eloquence. In spite of an unpleasant voice and a slow, measured utterance, there was a charm about Wright's speaking; for, like Fillmore, he had earnestness and warmth. With all their power, however, they lacked the enthusiasm and the boldness that captivate the crowd and inspire majorities. Yet they had led majorities. In no sphere of Wright's activities, was he more strenuous than in the contest for the independent treasury plan which he recommended to Van Buren, and which, largely through his efforts as chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, was finally forced into law on the 4th of July, 1840. Fillmore, in putting some of the hated taxes of 1828 into the tariff act of 1842, was no less strenuous, grappling facts with infinite labour, until, at last, he overcame a current of public opinion that seemed far too powerful for resistance.

Of the two men, Silas Wright was undoubtedly the stronger character. He was five years older than Fillmore, and his legislative experience had been four or five years longer. His great intellectual power peculiarly fitted him for the United States Senate. He had chosen finance as his specialty, and in its discussion had made a mark. He could give high and grave counsel in great emergencies. His inexhaustible patience, his active attention and industry, his genius in overcoming impediments of every kind, made him the peer of the ablest senator. He was not without ambitions for himself; but they were always subordinate in him to the love of party and friends. It will never be known how far he influenced Van Buren's reply to Hammit. He bitterly opposed the annexation of Texas, and his conferences with the ex-President must have encouraged the latter's adherence to his former position. Van Buren's defeat, however, in no wise changed Wright's attitude toward him. It is doubtful if the latter could have been nominated President at Baltimore had he allowed the use of his name, but it was greatly to his credit, showing the sincerity of his friendship for Van Buren, that he spurned the suggestion and promptly declined a unanimous nomination for Vice President. Such action places him in a very small group of American statesmen who have deliberately turned their backs upon high office rather than be untrue to friends.

Silas Wright was strictly a party man. He came near subjecting every measure and every movement in his career to the test of party loyalty. He started out in that way, and he kept it up until the end. In 1823 he sincerely favoured the choice of presidential electors by the people, but, for the party's sake, he aided in defeating the measure. Two years later, he preferred that the State be unrepresented in the United States Senate rather than permit the election of Ambrose Spencer, then the nominee of a Clintonian majority, and he used all his skill to defeat a joint session of the two houses. For the sake of party he now accepted the gubernatorial nomination. Desire to remain in the Senate, opposition to the annexation of Texas, dislike of participating in factional feuds, refusal to stand in the way of Bouck's nomination, the dictates of his better judgment, all gave way to party necessity. He anticipated defeat for a second term should he now be elected to a first, but it had no influence. The party needed him, and, whatever the result to himself, he met it without complaint. This was the man upon whom the Democrats relied to carry New York and to elect Polk.

There were other parties in the field. The Native Americans, organised early in 1844, watched the situation with peculiar emotions. This party had suddenly sprung up in opposition to the ease with which foreigners secured suffrage and office; and, although it shrewdly avoided nominations for governor and President, it demoralised both parties by the strange and tortuous manoeuvres that had ended in the election of a mayor of New York in the preceding spring. It operated, for the most part, in that city, but its sympathisers covered the whole State. Then, there was the anti-rent party, confined to Delaware and three or four adjoining counties, where long leases and trifling provisions of forfeiture had exasperated tenants into acts of violence. Like the Native Americans, these Anti-Renters avoided state and national nominations, and traded their votes to secure the election of legislative nominees.

But the organisation which threatened calamity was the abolition or liberty party. It had nominated James G. Birney of Michigan for President and Alvan Stewart for governor, and, though no one expected the election of either, the organisation was not unlikely to hold the balance of power in the State. Stewart was a born Abolitionist and a lawyer of decided ability. In the section of the State bounded by Oneida and Otsego counties, where he shone conspicuously as a leader for a quarter of a century, his forensic achievements are still remembered. Stanton says he had no superior in central New York. "His quaint humour was equal to his profound learning. He was skilled in a peculiar and indescribable kind of argumentation, wit, and sarcasm, that made him remarkably successful out of court as well as in court. Before anti-slavery conventions in several States he argued grave and intricate constitutional questions with consummate ability."[336]

[Footnote 336: H.B. Stanton, Random Recollections, p. 135.]

It was evident that the Anti-Renters and Native Americans would draw, perhaps, equally from Whigs and Democrats; but the ranks of Abolitionists could be recruited only from the anti-slavery Whigs. Behind Stewart stood Gerrit Smith, William Jay, Beriah Green, and other zealous, able, benevolent, pure-minded men—some of them wealthy. Their shibboleth was hostility to a slave-holder, or one who would vote for a slave-holder. This barred Henry Clay and his electors.

At the outset the Whigs plainly had the advantage. Spring elections had resulted auspiciously, and the popularity of Clay seemed unfailing. He had avowed opposition to the annexation of Texas, and, although his letter was not based upon hostility to slavery and the slave trade, it was positive, highly patriotic, and in a measure satisfactory to the anti-slavery Whigs. "We are at the flood," Seward wrote Weed; "our opponents at the ebb."[337] The nomination of Wright had greatly strengthened the Democratic ticket, but the nomination of Polk, backed by the Texas resolution, weighted the party as with a ball and chain. Edwin Croswell had characterised Van Buren's letter to Hammit as "a statesmanlike production," declaring that "every American reader, not entirely under the dominion of prejudice, will admit the force of his conclusions."[338] This was the view generally held by the party throughout the State; yet, within a month, every American reader who wished to remain loyal to the Democratic party was compelled to change his mind. In making this change, the "slippery-elm editor," as Croswell came to be known because of the nearness of his office to the old elm tree corner in Albany, led the way and the party followed. It was a rough road for many who knew they were consigning to one grave all hope of ending the slavery agitation, while they were resurrecting from another, bitter and dangerous controversies that had been laid to rest by the Missouri Compromise. Yet only one poor little protest, and that intended for private circulation, was heard in opposition, the signers, among them William Cullen Bryant, declaring their intention to vote for Polk, but to repudiate any candidate for Congress who agreed with Polk. Bryant's purpose was palpable and undoubted; but it soon afterward became part of his courage not to muffle plain truth from any spurious notions of party loyalty, and part of his glory not to fail to tell what people could not fail to see.

[Footnote 337: F.W. Seward, Life of W.H. Seward, Vol. 1, p. 699.]

[Footnote 338: Jabez D. Hammond, Political History of New York, Vol. 3, p. 441, note.]

As the campaign advanced, the Whig side of it resembled the contest of 1840. The log cabin did not reappear, and the drum and cannon were less noisy, but ash poles, cut from huge trees and spliced one to another, carried high the banner of the statesman from Ashland. Campaign songs, with choruses for "Harry of the West," emulated those of "Old Tip," and parades by day and torch-light processions by night, increased the enthusiasm. The Whigs, deeply and personally attached to Henry Clay, made mass-meetings as common and nearly as large as those held four years before. Seward speaks of fifteen thousand men gathered at midday in Utica to hear Erastus Root, and of a thousand unable to enter the hall at night while he addressed a thousand more within. Fillmore expressed the fear that Whigs would mistake these great meetings for the election, and omit the necessary arrangements to get the vote out. "I am tired of mass-meetings," wrote Seward. "But they will go on."[339]

[Footnote 339: F.W. Seward, Life of W.H. Seward, Vol. 1, p. 723.]

Seward and Weed were not happy during this campaign. The friends of Clay, incensed at his defeat in 1840, had pronounced them the chief conspirators. Murmurs had been muffled until after Tyler's betrayal of the party and Seward's retirement, but when these sources of possible favours ran dry, the voice of noisy detraction reached Albany and Auburn. It was not an ordinary scold, confined to a few conservatives; but the censure of strong language, filled with vindictiveness, charged Weed with revolutionary theories, tending to unsettle the rights of property, and Seward with abolition notions and a desire to win the Irish Catholic vote for selfish purposes. In February, 1844, it was not very politely hinted to Seward that he go abroad during the campaign; and by June, Weed talked despondingly, proposing to leave the Journal. Seward had the spirit of the Greeks. "If you resign," he said, "there will be no hope left for ten thousand men who hold on because of their confidence in you and me."[340] In another month Weed had become the proprietor as well as the editor of the Evening Journal.

[Footnote 340: F.W. Seward, Life of W.H. Seward, Vol. 1, p. 719.

"I think you cannot leave the Journal without giving up the whole army to dissension and overthrow. I agree that if, by remaining, you save it, you only draw down double denunciation upon yourself and me. Nor do I see the way through and beyond that. But there will be some way through. I grant, then, that, for yourself and me, it is wise and profitable that you leave. I must be left without the possibility of restoration, without a defender, without an organ. Nothing else will satisfy those who think they are shaded. Then, and not until then, shall I have passed through the not unreasonable punishment for too much success. But the party—the country? They cannot bear your withdrawal. I think I am not mistaken in this. Let us adhere, then. Stand fast. It is neither wise nor reasonable that we should bear the censure of defeat, when we have been deprived of not merely command, but of a voice in council."—W.H. Seward to Thurlow Weed, Ibid., Vol. 1, p. 720.]