Volume II Part 6 (1/2)
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 att.i.tude 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 friends.h.i.+p 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 partic.i.p.ating 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 antic.i.p.ated 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 const.i.tutional 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 s.h.i.+bboleth 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 m.u.f.fle 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 ma.s.s-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 ma.s.s-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 p.r.o.nounced them the chief conspirators. Murmurs had been m.u.f.fled 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 pa.s.sed 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.]
As the campaign grew older, however, Clay's friends gladly availed themselves of Seward's influence with anti-slavery Whigs and naturalised citizens. ”It is wonderful what an impulse the nomination of Polk has given to the abolition sentiment,” wrote Seward. ”It has already expelled other issues from the public mind. Our Whig central committee, who, a year ago, voted me out of the party for being an Abolitionist, has made abolition the war-cry in their call for a ma.s.s-meeting.”[341] Even the sleuth-hounds of No-popery were glad to invite Seward to address the naturalised voters, whose hostility to the Whigs, in 1844, resembled their dislike of the Federalists in 1800. ”It is a sorry consolation for this ominous aspect of things,”
he wrote Weed, ”that you and I are personally exempt from the hostility of this cla.s.s toward our political a.s.sociates.”[342]
[Footnote 341: F.W. Seward, _Life of W.H. Seward_, Vol. 1, p. 718.]