A Political History of the State of New York Volume II Part 10

[Footnote 384: _Ibid._, p. 80.]

In New York, the campaign could have but one outcome. The Free-soil faction divided the Democratic vote nearly by two, giving Van Buren 120,000, Ca.s.s 114,000, and Taylor 218,000. The returns for governor varied but slightly from these figures.[385] In the country at large Taylor secured one hundred and sixty-three electoral votes and Ca.s.s one hundred and twenty-seven. But, a Whig majority of one hundred and four on joint ballot in the Legislature, and the election of thirty-one out of thirty-four congressmen, showed the wreckage of a divided Democracy in New York. The Hunkers elected only six a.s.semblymen; the Free-soilers secured fourteen. The Whigs had one hundred and eight. Returns from all the counties and cities in no wise differed. The Hunkers had been wiped out. If the Free-soilers did not get office, they had demonstrated their strength, and exulted in having routed their adversaries. Although Martin Van Buren was not to leave his retirement at Lindenwald, the brilliant son had avenged his father's wrongs by dashing Lewis Ca.s.s rudely and ruthlessly to the ground.

[Footnote 385: Hamilton Fish, 218,776; John A. Dix, 122,811; Reuben H.

Walworth, 116,811; William Goodell, 1593.--_Civil List, State of New York_ (1887), p. 166.]

CHAPTER XII

SEWARD SPLITS THE WHIG PARTY

1849-1850

The Legislature of 1849 became the scene of a contest that ended in a rout. John A. Dix's term as United States senator expired on March 4, and the fight for the succession began the moment the Whig members knew they had a majority.

William H. Seward's old enemies seemed ubiquitous. They had neither forgotten his distribution of patronage, nor forgiven his interest in slaves and immigrants. To make their opposition effective, John A.

Collier became a candidate. Collier wanted to be governor in 1838, when Weed threw the nomination to Seward; and, although his election as comptroller in 1841 had restored friendly relations with Weed, he had never forgiven Seward. It added strength to the coalition, moreover, that Fillmore and Collier were now bosom friends. The latter's speech at Philadelphia had made the Buffalonian Vice President, and his following naturally favoured Collier. It was a noisy company, and, for a time, its opposition seemed formidable.

"Fillmore and Collier came down the river in the boat with me," wrote Seward from New York on November 16, 1848. "The versatile people were full of demonstrations of affection to the Vice President, and Mr.

Collier divided the honours. The politicians of New York are engaged in plans to take possession of General Taylor before he comes to Washington. Weed is to be supplanted, and that not for his own sake but for mine."[386] As the days pa.s.sed intrigue became bolder.

Hamilton Fish, Washington Hunt, and other prominent members of the party, were offered the senatorship. "I wish you could see the letters I get," Hunt wrote to Weed. "If I wanted to excite your sympathy they would be sufficient. Some say Seward will be elected. More say neither Seward nor Collier will be chosen, but a majority are going for a third man by way of compromise, and my consent is invoked to be number three."[387] Then came the letter, purporting to be written by Seward, declaring that "Collier must be defeated, or our influence with the Administration will be curtailed. You must look to your members, and see the members from Cattaraugus, if possible. I think Patterson will take care of Chautauqua."[388] Out of this forgery grew an acrimonious manifesto from Collier, who professed to believe that Seward was giving personal attention to the work of making himself senator. In the midst of this violent and bitter canva.s.s, Horace Greeley wrote one of his characteristic editorials. "We care not who may be the nominee," said the _Tribune_ of January 24, 1849. "We shall gladly coincide in the fair expression of the will of the majority of the party, but we kindly caution those who disturb and divide us, that their conduct will result only in the merited retribution which an indignant people will visit upon those who prost.i.tute their temporary power to personal pique or selfish purposes."

[Footnote 386: F.W. Seward, _Life of W.H. Seward_, Vol. 2, p. 87.]

[Footnote 387: Thurlow Weed Barnes, _Life of Thurlow Weed_, Vol. 2, p.

173.]

[Footnote 388: New York _Herald_, December 1, 1848.]

Seward was continuously in Baltimore and Washington, studying briefs that had acc.u.mulated in his long absence during the campaign; but Weed, the faithful friend, like a sentinel on the watch-tower, kept closely in touch with the political situation. "The day before the legislative caucus," wrote an eye-witness, "the Whig members of the Legislature gathered around the editor of the _Evening Journal_ for counsel and advice. It resembled a President's levee. He remained standing in the centre of the room, conversing with those about him and shaking hands with new-comers; but there was nothing in his manner to indicate the slightest mystery or excitement so common with politicians."[389]

[Footnote 389: Thurlow Weed Barnes, _Life of Thurlow Weed_, Vol. 2, p.

174.]

The Whig senators met in caucus on January 29, and by a vote of twelve to eleven decided to join the a.s.sembly. Then the fight began. William S. Johnson, a Whig senator from New York City, declared that he would neither vote for Seward in caucus nor support him in the Legislature.

"It would be equivalent," he continued, "to throwing a firebrand into the South and aiding in the dissolution of the Whig party and of the Union." Thereupon the eleven withdrew from further partic.i.p.ation in the proceedings. When the caucus of the two houses convened, fourteen members declared it inexpedient to support either Seward or Collier; but an informal ballot gave Seward eighty-eight votes and Collier twelve, with twenty-two scattering. Three days later, on joint ballot, Seward received one hundred and twenty-one out of one hundred and thirty Whig votes. "We were always confident that the caucus could have but one result," said the _Tribune_, "and the lofty antic.i.p.ations which the prospect of Seward's election has excited will not be disappointed."

Successful as Seward had been in his profession since leaving the office of governor, he was not entirely happy. "I look upon my life, busy as it is, as a waste," he wrote, in 1847. "I live in a world that needs my sympathies, but I have not even time nor opportunity to do good."[390] His warm and affectionate heart seemed to envy the strife and obloquy that came to champions of freedom; yet his published correspondence nowhere directly indicates a desire to return to public life. "You are not to suppose me solicitous on the subject that drags me so unpleasantly before the public," he wrote Weed on January 26, 1849, three days before the caucus. "I have looked at it in all its relations, and cannot satisfy myself that it would be any better for me to succeed than to be beaten."[391] This a.s.sumed indifference, however, was written with a feeling of absolute confidence that he was to succeed, a confidence that brought with it great content, since the United States Senate offered the "opportunity" for which he sighed in his despondent letter of 1847. On the announcement of his election, conveyed to him by wire at Washington, he betrayed no feeling except one of humility. "I tremble," he wrote his wife, "when I think of the difficulty of realising the expectations which this canva.s.s has awakened in regard to my abilities."[392] To Weed, he added: "I recall with fresh grat.i.tude your persevering and magnanimous friendship."[393]

[Footnote 390: F.W. Seward, _Life of W.H. Seward_, Vol. 2, p. 56.]

[Footnote 391: _Ibid._, p. 97.]

[Footnote 392: F.W. Seward, _Life of W.H. Seward_, Vol. 2, p. 98.]

[Footnote 393: _Ibid._, p. 99.]

From the outset, difficulties confronted the new senator. The question of limiting slavery excited the whole country, and one holding his views belonged in the centre of the struggle. But strife for office gave him more immediate embarra.s.sment. Apprehensive of party discord, Thurlow Weed, at a dinner given the Vice President and Senator, had arranged for conferences between them upon important appointments within the State; but Seward's first knowledge of the New York custom-house appointments came to him in an executive session for their confirmation. Seward, as Lincoln afterward said, "was a man without gall," and he did not openly resent the infraction of the agreement; but when Weed, upon reaching Washington, discovered that Fillmore had the ear of the simple and confiding President, he quickly sought the Vice President. Fillmore received him coldly. From that moment began an estrangement between Weed and the Buffalo statesman which was to last until both were grown gray and civil war had obliterated differences of political sentiment. For twenty years, their intimacy had been uninterrupted and constantly strengthening.

Even upon the slavery question their views coincided, and, although Fillmore chafed under his growing preference for Seward and the latter's evident intellectual superiority, he had exhibited no impatience toward Weed. But Fillmore was now Vice President, with aspirations for the Presidency, and he saw in Seward a formidable rival who would have the support of Weed whenever the Senator needed it. He rashly made up his mind, therefore, to end their relationship.

With Taylor, Weed was at his ease. The President remembered the editor's letter written in 1846, and what Weed now asked he quickly granted. When Weed complained, therefore, that the Vice President was filling federal offices with his own friends, the President dropped Fillmore and turned to the Senator for suggestions. Seward accepted the burden of looking after patronage. "I detest and loathe this running to the President every day to protest against this man or that,"[394] he wrote; but the President cheerfully responded to his requests. "If the country is to be benefited by our services," he said to the Secretary of the Treasury, "it seems to me that you and I ought to remember those to whose zeal, activity, and influence we are indebted for our places."[395]

[Footnote 394: F.W. Seward, _Life of W.H. Seward_, Vol. 2, p. 113.]

[Footnote 395: Thurlow Weed Barnes, _Life of Thurlow Weed_, Vol. 2, p.

175.]

While Weed employed his time in displacing Hunker office-holders with Whigs, the Democratic party was trying to reunite. It called for a bold hand. John Van Buren, with a courage born of genius, had struck it a terrible blow in the face of tremendous odds, the effect of which was as gratifying to the Barnburners as it was disastrous to the Hunkers. But, in 1849, the party professed to believe that a union of the factions would result in victory, since their aggregate vote in 1848 exceeded the Whig vote by sixteen thousand. It is difficult to realise the arguments which persuaded the Barnburners to rejoin their adversaries whom they had declared, in no measured terms, to be guilty of the basest conduct; but, after infinite labour, Horatio Seymour established constructive harmony and practical co-operation. "We are asked to compromise our principles," said John Van Buren. "The day of compromises is past; but, in regard to candidates for state offices, we are still a commercial people. We will unite with our late antagonists."[396]

[Footnote 396: H.B. Stanton, _Random Recollections_, p. 165.]

Seymour and Van Buren did not unite easily. From the first they were rivals. As an orator, Seymour was the more persuasive, logical, and candid--Van Buren the more witty, sarcastic, and brilliant. Seymour was conciliatory--Van Buren aggressive. Indeed, they had little in common save their rare mental and social gifts, and that personal magnetism which binds followers with hooks of steel. But they stood now at the head of their respective factions. When Van Buren, therefore, finally consented to join Seymour in a division of the spoils, the two wings of the party quickly coalesced in the fall of 1849 for the election of seven state officers. The Free-soil faction professed to retain its principles; and, by placing several Abolitionists upon the ticket, nine-tenths of that party also joined the combination. But the spirit of the Free-soiler was absent. The man whose genius and whose eloquence had been the most potent factor in discrediting the Hunkers now had no anti-slavery speeches to make and no anti-slavery resolutions to present. John Van Buren's identification with the great movement, which he prophesied would stand so strong and work such wonders, was destined, after he had avenged the insult to his father, to vanish like a breath. Nor did the coalition of Hunkers, Barnburners, and Abolitionists prove so numerous or so solid that it could sweep the State. It did, indeed, carry the a.s.sembly by two majority, and with the help of a portion of the Anti-Renters, who refused to support their own ticket, it elected four minor state officers; but the Whigs held the Senate, and, with majorities ranging from fifteen hundred to five thousand, chose the comptroller, the secretary of state, and the treasurer. Washington Hunt, the popular Whig candidate for comptroller, led the ticket by nearly six thousand, a triumph that was soon to bring him higher honours.

The Whigs, however, were to have their day of trouble. The election of Taylor and Fillmore had fired the Southern heart with zeal to defend slavery. More than eighty members of Congress issued an address, drawn by John C. Calhoun, rebuking the agitation of the slavery question, insisting upon their right to take slaves into the territories, and complaining of the difficulty of recovering fugitives. The Virginia Legislature affirmed that the adoption and attempted enforcement of the Wilmot Proviso would be resisted to the last extremity, and that the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia would be a direct attack upon the inst.i.tution of the Southern States. These resolutions were indorsed by Democratic conventions, approved at public meetings, and amplified by state legislatures. In Missouri, Tennessee, and Kentucky the feeling quickly reached fever heat; in the cotton States sentiment boldly favoured "A Southern Confederacy." Sectional interest melted party lines. "The Southern Whigs want the great question settled in such a manner as shall not humble and exasperate the South," said the New York _Tribune_; "the Southern Democrats want it so settled as to conduce to the extension of the power and influence of slavery."

In the midst of this intense southern feeling Henry Clay, from his place in the United States Senate, introduced the historic resolutions which bear his name, proposing an amicable adjustment of all questions growing out of the subject of slavery. This series of compromises was to admit California, establish territorial governments in the regions acquired from Mexico without provision for or against slavery, pay the debt and fix the western boundary of Texas, declare it inexpedient to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia, deny the right of Congress to obstruct the slave trade between States, and to enact a more stringent fugitive slave law. It was in January, 1850, that Clay opened the memorable debate upon these resolutions, which continued eight months and included Webster's great speech of the 7th of March.

When the debate ended in September Zachary Taylor was dead, Millard Fillmore was President, a new Cabinet had been appointed, slavery remained undisturbed in the District of Columbia, Mexico and Utah had become territories open to slave-holders, and a new fugitive slave law bore the approval of the new Chief Executive. During these months the whole country had been absorbed in events at Washington. Private letters, newspapers, public meetings, and state legislatures echoed the speeches of the three distinguished Senators who had long been in the public eye, and who, it was a.s.serted at the time, were closing their life work in saving the Union.

In this discussion, Daniel S. d.i.c.kinson favoured compromise; William H. Seward stood firmly for his anti-slavery convictions. The latter spoke on the 11th of March. He opposed the fugitive slave law because "we cannot be true Christians or real freemen if we impose on another a chain that we defy all human power to lay on ourselves;"[397] he declared for the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia, "and if I shall be asked what I did to embellish the capital of my country, I will point to her freemen and say--these are the monuments of my munificence;" he antagonised the right to take slaves into new territories, affirming that the Const.i.tution devoted the domain to union, to justice, and to liberty. "But there is a higher law than the Const.i.tution," he said, "which regulates our authority over the domain, and devotes it to the same n.o.ble purposes." In treating of threats of disunion he looked with a prophet's eye fourteen years into the future. That vision revealed border warfare, kindred converted into enemies, onerous taxes, death on the field and in the hospital, and conscription to maintain opposing forces. "It will then appear that the question of dissolving the Union is a complex question; that it embraces the fearful issue whether the Union shall stand and slavery be removed by gradual, voluntary effort, and with compensation, or whether the Union shall be dissolved and civil war ensue, bringing on violent but complete and immediate emanc.i.p.ation. We are now arrived at that stage of our national progress when that crisis can be foreseen--when we must foresee it."[398]

[Footnote 397: F.W. Seward, _Life of W.H. Seward_, Vol. 2, p. 126.]

[Footnote 398: _Ibid._, p. 127.]

A less fearless and determined nature must have been overwhelmed by the criticism, the censure, and the insulting sneers which this speech provoked. Southern feeling dominated the Senate chamber. Many northern men, sincerely desirous of limiting slavery, preferred giving up the Wilmot Proviso for the sake of peace. Thousands of Whigs regarded dissent from Clay and Webster, their time-honoured leaders, as bold and presumptuous. In reviewing Seward's speech, these people p.r.o.nounced it pernicious, unpatriotic, and wicked, especially since "the higher law" theory, taken in connection with his criticism of the fugitive slave law, implied that a humane and Christian people could not or would not obey it. But the Auburn statesman resented nothing and retracted nothing. "With the single exception of the argument in poor Freeman's case," he wrote, "it is the only speech I ever made that contains nothing I could afford to strike out or qualify."[399]

[Footnote 399: F.W. Seward, _Life of W.H. Seward_, Vol. 2, p. 129.]

But Seward's speech did not influence votes. Clay's compromises pa.s.sed amidst the wildest outbursts of popular enthusiasm. They appealed to a majority of both the great parties as a final settlement of the slavery question. In New York and other cities throughout the State, flags were hoisted, salutes fired, joy bells rung, illuminations flamed at night, and speakers at ma.s.s-meetings congratulated their fellow citizens upon the wisdom of a President and a Congress that had happily averted the great peril of disunion.

These exhibitions of grat.i.tude were engrossing the attention of the people when the Whig state convention met at Utica on the 26th of September, 1850. Immediately, the approval of Seward's course a.s.sumed supreme importance. Unusual excitement had attended the selection of delegates. The new administration became aggressive. No secret was made of its purpose to crush Thurlow Weed; and when the convention a.s.sembled, Hugh Maxwell, collector of the port of New York, and John Young, sub-treasurer, were there to control it. A test vote for temporary chairman disclosed sixty-eight Radicals and forty-one Conservatives present, but in the interest of harmony Francis Granger became the permanent president.

Granger was a man of honour and a man of intellect, whose qualities of fairness and fitness for public life have already been described. When he entered Harrison's Cabinet in 1841, as postmaster-general, the South cla.s.sed him as an Abolitionist; when he left Congress in 1843, in the fulness of his intellectual strength, his home at Canandaigua became the centre of an admiring group of Whigs who preferred the lead of Clay and the conservative policy of Webster. He now appeared as an ally of President Fillmore. It was natural, perhaps, that in appointing a committee on resolutions, Granger should give advantage of numbers to his own faction, but the Radicals were amazed at the questionable action of his committee. It delayed its report upon the pretext of not being ready, and then, late in the evening, in the absence of many delegates, presented what purported to be a unanimous expression, in which Seward was left practically without mention. As the delegates listened in profound silence the majority became painfully aware that something was wanting, and, before action upon it could be taken, they forced an adjournment by a vote of fifty-six to fifty-one.

The next morning the Radicals exhibited a desire for less harmony and more justice. By a vote of seventy-three to forty-six the original resolutions were recommitted to an enlarged committee, and after nominating Washington Hunt for governor and George J. Cornwell for lieutenant-governor, subst.i.tute resolutions were adopted by a vote of seventy-four to forty-two. One difference between the original and the subst.i.tute centred in the organisation of new territories. The majority opposed any surrender or waiver of the exclusion of slavery in any act establishing a regular civil organisation; the minority thought that, since it was impossible to secure the Wilmot Proviso, an insistence upon which would prevent any territorial organisation, it would be better to organise them without it, relying upon nature and the known disposition of the inhabitants to follow the lead of California. This difference, however, could probably have been healed had the Radicals not insisted that "the thanks of the Whig party are especially due to William H. Seward for the signal ability and fidelity with which he sustained those beloved principles of public policy so long cherished by the Whigs of the Empire State, expressed in state and county conventions as well as in the votes and instructions of the state legislature." Upon this resolution the Conservatives demanded a roll call, and when its adoption, by the surprising vote of seventy-five to forty, was announced, the minority, amidst the wildest excitement, left the hall in a body, followed by Francis Granger, whose silver gray hair gave a name to the seceders.

Their withdrawal was not a surprise. Like the secession of the Barnburners three years before, loud threats preceded action. Indeed, William A. Duer, the Oswego congressman, admitted travelling from Washington to Syracuse with instructions from Fillmore to bolt the approval of Seward. But the secession seemed to disturb only the Silver-Grays themselves, who now drafted an address to the Whigs of the State and called a new convention to a.s.semble at Utica on October 17.

The Democrats in their state convention, which met at Syracuse on September 11, repeated the policy of conciliation so skilfully engineered in 1849 by Horatio Seymour. They received Barnburner delegates, they divided the offices, and they allowed John Van Buren to rule. It mattered not what were the principles of the captivating Prince and his followers so long as they accepted "the recent settlement by Congress of questions which have unhappily divided the people of these States." Thus the Free-soil Barnburners disappeared as a political factor. Some of them continued to avow their anti-slavery principles, but no one had the temerity to mention them in convention.

Men deemed it politic and prudent to affect to believe that the slavery question, which had threatened to disturb the national peace, was finally laid at rest. The country so accepted it, trade and commerce demanded it, and old political leaders conceded it. In this frame of mind, delegates found it easy to nominate Horatio Seymour for governor and Sanford E. Church for lieutenant-governor. The next day the Abolitionists, tired of their union with Hunkers and Barnburners, nominated William L. Chaplin and Joseph Plumb.

The convention of the Silver-Grays, held at Utica in October, did not exalt its members. It was simply a protest. A lion-hearted man had presumed to voice his convictions, and, although the convention favoured exercising a liberal spirit of toleration toward the compromise measures, it refused to exercise such a spirit toward William H. Seward, or to tolerate him at all. It gave the President a flattering indors.e.m.e.nt for his approval of the fugitive slave law, it accepted Washington Hunt as its nominee for governor, and it listened to several addresses, among them one from James O. Putnam of Buffalo; but the proceedings lacked the enthusiasm that springs from a clear principle, backed by a strong and resolute band of followers. The speech of Putnam, however, attracted wide attention. Putnam was a young man then, less than thirty-three years old, pa.s.sionately devoted to Daniel Webster, and a personal friend of Millard Fillmore. As a speaker he was polished, smooth, and refined, and even when impa.s.sioned kept his pa.s.sion well within conventional bounds. On this occasion his mellow and far-reaching voice, keyed to the pitch of sustained rhetoric, dropped his well-balanced and finely moulded sentences into the convention amidst hearty applause. He did not then see with the clearness of Seward's vision. He belonged rather to the more enlightened and intelligent conservatives who had begun to feel the ultimate disaster slavery must bring, and who desired that such disaster should be put off as long as possible; but the day was soon to dawn in which he would become a loyal supporter of the principles that were to be forever settled in the civil strife which Seward so vividly portrayed in the speech that created the Silver-Grays.

The recently adopted compromise did not become an issue in the New York campaign of 1850. If its opponents could not approve, they deemed silence wise. The followers of Fillmore in the up-state counties generally acted with the Seward men in support of Washington Hunt; but a great meeting, held at Castle Garden, near the close of the campaign, partially succeeded in uniting Democrats and Administration Whigs in New York City. A letter was read from Daniel Webster, calling upon all good citizens not to rekindle the flames of "useless and dangerous controversy;" resolutions favouring a vigorous enforcement of the fugitive slave law were adopted; and a coalition ticket with Seymour at its head was agreed upon. This meeting, called a great popular protest against demagoguery, opened an aggressive canva.s.s to defeat Hunt and destroy the Syracuse indors.e.m.e.nt of Seward by raising the cry that Seward Whigs preferred civil war to a peaceable enforcement of the fugitive slave law. Seward took no part in this campaign. After Congress adjourned on the last day of September, he devoted the short time between the sessions to his law business. His friends, however, were active. Weed attacked the Castle Garden meeting with a bitterness and vigour rarely disclosed in the columns of the _Evening Journal_, and Greeley poured one broadside after another into what he regarded as the miserable mismanagement, blundering, and confusion of the Administration.

While waiting the result of the election, people were startled into sadness by the sudden death of Samuel Young at the age of seventy-two.