A Political History of the State of New York Volume I Part 18

Van Buren had shown, from his first entrance into public life, a remarkable faculty for winning men to his own way of thinking. His criticism of Clinton was now directed with characteristic sagacity and skill. His argument, that the object of those who sustained Clinton was to establish a conspiracy with the Federalists at home and abroad, for the overthrow of the Republican party in the nation as well as in the State, seemed justified by the open support of William W. Van Ness, the gifted young justice of the Supreme Court. Further to confirm his contention, Jonas Platt, now of the Supreme bench, and Jacob Rutsen Van Rensselaer of Columbia, a bold, active, and most zealous partisan, who had served in the Legislature and as secretary of state, made no secret of their intention to indorse Clinton's nomination, and, if necessary, to ride over the State to secure his election. Under ordinary circ.u.mstances nothing could discredit the Clinton agitation, with the more reasonable part of the Republican legislators, more than Van Buren's charge, strengthened by such supporting evidence.

The ca.n.a.l influences of the time, however, were too strong for any ingenuity of argument, or adroitness in the raising of alarm, to prevail; and so the skilful manager turned his attention to Joseph G.

Yates, a judge of the Supreme Court, as an opposing candidate who might be successful. Yates belonged to the old-fas.h.i.+oned American type of handsome men. He had a large, shapely head, a prominent nose, full lips, and a face cleanly shaven and rosy. His bearing was excellent, his voice, manner, and everything about him bespoke the gentleman; but neither in aspect nor manner of speech did he measure up to his real desire for political preferment. Yet he had many popular qualities which commended him to the rank and file of his party. He was a man of abstemious habits and boundless industry, whose courtesy and square dealing made him a favourite. Few errors of a political character could be charged to his account. He had favoured Clinton for President; he had supported Tompkins and the war with great zeal, and, to the full extent of his ability and influence, he had proved an ardent friend of the ca.n.a.l policy.

It had been a trait of the Yates family--ever since its founder, an enterprising English yeoman, a native of Leeds in Yorks.h.i.+re, had settled in the colony during the troublous days of Charles I.--to espouse any movement or improvement which should benefit the people.

Joseph had already shown his activity and usefulness in founding Union College; he regarded the proposed ca.n.a.l as a long step in the development and prosperity of the State; but he did not take kindly to Van Buren's suggestion that he become a candidate for governor against Clinton. In this respect he was unlike Robert, chief justice, his father's cousin, who first ran for governor on the Federalist ticket at the suggestion of Hamilton, and, three years later, as an anti-Federalist candidate at the suggestion of George Clinton, suffering defeat on both occasions. He was, however, as ambitious as the old Chief Justice; and, had the time seemed ripe, he would have responded to the call of the Kinderhook statesman as readily as Robert did to the appeals of Hamilton and George Clinton.

Peter B. Porter was more willing. He belonged to the Tompkins-Van Buren faction which nourished the hope that the soldier, who had recently borne the flag of his country in triumph on several battlefields, would carry off the prize, although the caucus was to convene in less than forty-eight hours. There could be no doubt of General Porter's strength with the people. He had served his State and his country with a fidelity that must forever cla.s.s his name with the bravest officers of the War of 1812. He rode a horse like a centaur; and, wherever he appeared, whether equipped for a fight, or off for a hunt through the forests of the Niagara frontier, his easy, familiar manners surrounded him with hosts of friends. The qualities that made him a famous soldier made him, also, a favoured politician. As county clerk, secretary of state, and congressman, he had taken the keenest interest in the great questions that agitated the political life of the opening century; and as a ca.n.a.l commissioner, in 1811, he had supported DeWitt Clinton with all the energy of an enthusiast.

At this time Porter was forty-four years old. He was a graduate of Yale, a student of the law, and as quick in intelligence as he was pleasing of countenance. His speeches, enlivened with gleams of humour, rays of fancy, and flashes of eloquence, expressed the thoughts of an honourable, upright statesman who was justly esteemed of the first order of intellect. Certainly, if any one could take the nomination from DeWitt Clinton it was Peter B. Porter.

It is possible, had the nomination been left exclusively to Republican members of the Legislature, as it had been for forty years, Porter might have been the choice of his party. Spencer, however, evidently feared Van Buren's subtle control of the Legislature; for, early in the winter, he began encouraging Republicans living in counties represented by Federalists, to demand a voice in the nominating caucus. It was a novel idea. Up to this time, governors and lieutenant-governors had been nominated by members of the Legislature; yet the plan now suggested was so manifestly fair that few dared oppose it. Why should the Republicans of Albany County, it was asked, be denied the privilege of partic.i.p.ating in the nomination of a governor simply because, being in a minority, they were unrepresented in the Legislature? There was no good reason; and, although Van Buren well understood that such counties would return delegates generally favourable to Clinton, he was powerless to defeat the reform. The result was the beginning of nominating conventions, composed of delegates selected by the people, and the nomination of DeWitt Clinton.

The blow to Van Buren was a severe one. "An obscure painter of the Flemish school," wrote Clinton to his friend and confidant, Henry Post, "has made a very ludicrous and grotesque representation of Jonah immediately after he was ejected from the whale's belly. He is represented as having a very bewildered and dismal physiognomy, not knowing from whence he came nor to what place bound. Just so looks Van Buren, the leader of the opposition party."[189] Yet Van Buren seems to have taken his defeat with more serenity and dignity than might have been expected. Statesmen of far n.o.bler character have allowed themselves to indulge in futile demonstrations of disappointment and anger, but Van Buren displayed a remarkable evenness of temper. He advocated with ability and sincerity the bill to construct the ca.n.a.l, which pa.s.sed the Legislature on April 15, the last day of the session.

Indeed, of the eighteen senators who favoured the project, five were bitter anti-Clintonians whose support was largely due to Van Buren.

[Footnote 189: DeWitt Clinton's Letters to Henry Post, in _Harper's Magazine_, Vol. 50, p. 412.]

In this vote, the noes, in both a.s.sembly and Senate, came from Clinton's opponents, including the Tammany delegation and their friends. From the outset Tammany, by solemn resolutions, had denounced the ca.n.a.l project as impractical and chimerical, declaring it fit only for a ditch in which to bury Clinton. At Albany its representatives greeted the measure for its construction with a burst of mockery; and, by placing one obstacle after another in its way, nearly defeated it in the Senate. It was during this contest that the friends of Clinton called his opponents "Bucktails"--the name growing out of a custom, which obtained on certain festival occasions, when leading members of Tammany wore the tail of a deer on their hats.

Refusing to accept DeWitt Clinton, Tammany made Peter B. Porter its candidate for governor. There is ample evidence that Porter never concealed the chagrin or disappointment of defeat; but, though the distinguished General must have known that his name was printed upon the Tammany ticket and sent into every county in the State, he did not co-operate with Tammany in its effort to elect him. Other defections existed in the party. Peter R. Livingston seemed to concentrate in himself all the prejudices of his family against the Clintons. Moses I. Cantine of Catskill, a brother-in-law of Van Buren, though perhaps incapable of personal bitterness, opposed Clinton with such zeal that he refused to vote either for a gubernatorial candidate, or for the construction of a ca.n.a.l. Samuel Young, who seemed to nourish a deep-seated dislike of Clinton, never tired of disparaging the ex-Mayor. He apparently took keen pleasure in holding up to ridicule and in satirising, what he was pleased to call his ponderous pedantries, his solemn affectation of profundity and wisdom, his narrow-mindedness, and his intolerable and transparent egotism. But the ca.n.a.l sentiment was all one way. With the help of the Federalists, who declined to make an opposing nomination, Clinton swept the State like a cyclone, receiving nearly forty-four thousand votes out of a total of forty-five thousand.[190] Porter had less than fifteen hundred. Clinton's inauguration as governor occurred on the first day of July, 1817, and three days later he began the construction of the Erie ca.n.a.l.

[Footnote 190: DeWitt Clinton, 43,310; Peter B. Porter, 1479.--_Civil List, State of New York_ (1887), p. 166.]

CHAPTER XXIII

BUCKTAIL AND CLINTONIAN

1817-1819

DeWitt Clinton had now reached the highest point in his political career. He was not merely all-powerful in the administration, he was the administration. He delighted in the consciousness that he was looked up to by men; that his success was fixed as a star in the firmament; and that the greatest work of his life lay before him. He was still in the prime of his days, only forty-eight years old, with a marvellous capacity for work. It is said that he found a positive delight in doing what seemed to others a wearisome and exhaustive tax upon physical endurance. "The ca.n.a.l," he writes to his friend, Henry Post, in the month of his inauguration, "is in a fine way. Ten miles will be completely finished this season, and all within the estimate.

The application of the simple labour-saving machinery of our contractors has the operation of magic. Trees, stumps, and everything vanish before it."[191] The exceptional work and responsibility put upon him during the construction of his "big ditch," as his enemies sarcastically called it, might well have made him complain of the official burdens he had to bear; but neither by looks nor words did he indicate the slightest disposition to grumble. Nature had endowed him with a genius for success. He loved literature, he delighted in country life, he was at home among farmers, and with those inclined to science he a.n.a.lysed the flowers and turned with zest to a closer study of rocks and soils. No man ever enjoyed more thoroughly, or was better equipped intellectually to undertake such a career as he had now entered upon. His audacity, too, amazed his enemies and delighted his friends.

[Footnote 191: DeWitt Clinton's Letters to Henry Post, in _Harper's Magazine_, Vol. 50, p. 412.]

But Clinton had learned nothing of the art of political management either in his retirement or by experience. He was the same domineering, uncompromising, intolerant dictator, helpful only to those who continually sounded his praises, cold and distant toward those who acted with independence and spirit. He had made his enemies his footstool; and he now a.s.sumed to be the recognised head of the party whose destinies were in his keeping and whose fortunes were swayed by his will. It is, perhaps, too much to say that this was purely personal ambition. On the contrary, Clinton seems to have acted on the honest conviction that he knew better than any other man how New York ought to be governed, and the result of his effort inclines one to the opinion that he was right in the belief. At all events, it is not surprising that a man of his energy and capacity for onward movement should refuse to regulate his policy to the satisfaction of the men that had recently crushed him to earth, and who, he knew, would crush him again at the first opportunity. In this respect he was not different from Van Buren; but Van Buren would have sought to placate the least objectionable of his opponents, and to bring to his support men who were restless under the domination of others.

Clinton, however, did nothing of the kind. He would not even extend the olive branch to Samuel Young after the latter had quarrelled with Van Buren. He preferred, evidently, to rely upon his old friends--even though some of their names had become odious to the party--and upon a coterie of brilliant Federalists, led by William W. Van Ness, Jonas Platt, and Thomas J. Oakley, with whom he was already upon terms of confidential communication. He professed to believe that the principles of Republican and Federalist were getting to be somewhat undefined in their character; and that the day was not far off, if, indeed, it had not already come, when the Republican party would break into two factions, and, for the real business of statesmans.h.i.+p, divide the Federalists between them. Yet, in practice, he did not act on this principle. To the embarra.s.sment of his Federalist friends he failed to appoint their followers to office, making it difficult for them to explain why he should profit by Federalist support and turn a deaf ear to Federalist necessities; and, to the surprise of his most devoted Republican supporters, he refused to make a clean sweep of the men in office whom he believed to have acted against him. He quickly dropped the Tammany men holding places in New York City, and occasionally let go an up-state politician at the instance of Ambrose Spencer, but with characteristic independence he disregarded the advice of his friends who urged him to let them all go.

Meanwhile, a change long foreseen by those who were in the inner political circle was rapidly approaching. At no period of American history could such a man as Clinton remain long in power without formidable rivals. No sooner, therefore, had the Legislature convened, in January, 1818, than Martin Van Buren, Samuel Young, Peter R.

Livingston, Erastus Root, and their a.s.sociates, began open war upon him. For a long time it had been a question whether it was to be Clinton and Van Buren, or Van Buren and Clinton. Van Buren had been growing every day in power and influence. Seven years before Elisha Williams had sneered at him as Little Matty. "Poor little Matty!" he wrote, "what a blessing it is for one to think he is the greatest little fellow in the world. It would be cruel to compel this man to estimate himself correctly. Inflated with pride, flattered for his pertness, caressed for his a.s.surance, and praised for his impertinence, it is not to be wondered that in a market where those qualifications pa.s.s for evidence of intrinsic merit he should think himself great." Williams, great and brilliant as he was, could not bear with patience the supremacy which Van Buren was all too certainly obtaining. He struggled against him, intrigued against him, and finally hated and lampooned him, but the superiority of Van Buren's talents as a managing politician was destined to make him pre-eminent in the State and in the nation.

That Van Buren was not always honourable, the famous Fellows-Allen contest had recently demonstrated. Henry Fellows, a Federalist candidate for a.s.semblyman in Ontario County, received a majority of thirty votes over Peter Allen, a Republican; but because the former's name appeared in his certificate as Hen. Fellows, the Bucktails, guided by Van Buren, seated Allen, whose vote was absolutely needed to elect a Republican Council of Appointment. Writing "Hen." for Henry was not error; it was not even an inadvertence. Van Buren knew that it stood for Henry as "Wm." did for William, or "Jas." for James. But Van Buren wanted the Council. It cannot be said that this action was inconsistent with the sentiment then governing the conduct of parties; for the maxim obtained that "everything is fair in war." Nevertheless, it illuminated Van Buren's character, and left the impression upon some of his contemporaries that he was a stranger to a high standard of political morality.

Probably DeWitt Clinton would have taken similar advantage. But in practical politics Clinton was no match for the Kinderhook statesman.

Van Buren studied the game like a chess-player, taking knights and p.a.w.ns with the ease of a skilful mover. Clinton, on the other hand, was an optimist, who believed in his destiny. In the performance of his official duties he mastered whatever he undertook and relied upon the people for his support; and so long as he stood for internal improvements and needed reform in the public service, he did not rely in vain. Force, clearness and ability characterised his state papers.

For years he had been a student of munic.i.p.al and county affairs; and, in suggesting new legislation, he exhibited rare judgment and absolute impartiality. A comprehension that sound finance had much to do with domestic prosperity, entered into his review of the financial situation--in its relation to the construction of the ca.n.a.ls--indicating fulness of information and great clearness as to existing conditions.

Clinton was honestly proud of his ca.n.a.l policy; more than once he declared, with exultation, that nothing was more certain to promote the prosperity of the State, or to secure to it the weight and authority, in the affairs of the nation, to which its wealth and position ent.i.tled it. Seldom in the history of an American commonwealth has a statesman been as prophetic. But in managing the details of party tactics--in dealing with individuals for the purpose of controlling the means that control men--he conducted the office of governor much as he did his candidacy for President in 1812, without plan, and, apparently, without organisation. With all his courage, Clinton must have felt some qualms of uneasiness as one humiliation followed another; but if he felt he did not show them. Conscious of his ability, and of his own great purposes, he seems to have borne his position with a sort of proud or stolid patience.

This inattention or inability to attend to details of party management became painfully apparent at the opening of the Legislature in January, 1818. Van Buren and his friends had agreed upon William Thompson for speaker of the a.s.sembly. Thompson was a young man, warm in his pa.s.sions, strong in his prejudices, and of fair ability, who had served two or three terms in the lower house, and who, it was thought, as he represented a western district, and, in opposition to Elisha Williams, had favoured certain interests in Seneca County growing out of the location of a new courthouse, would have greater strength than other more prominent Bucktails. It was known, also, that Thompson had taken a violent dislike to Clinton and could be relied upon to advance any measure for the latter's undoing. To secure his nomination, therefore, Van Buren secretly notified his partisans to be present at the caucus on the evening before the session opened.

The Clintonians had talked of putting up John Van Ness Yates, son of the former Chief Justice, a ready talker, companionable and brilliant, a gentleman of fine literary taste, with an up-and-down political career due largely to his consistent following of Clinton. But the Governor now wanted a stronger, more decided man; and, after advising with Spencer, he selected Obadiah German, for many years a leader in the a.s.sembly, and until recently a member of the United States Senate, with such a record for resistance to Governor Tompkins, and active complicity with the Federalists who had aided his election to the a.s.sembly, that the mere mention of his name to the Bucktails was like a firebrand thrown onto the roof of a thatched cottage. German himself doubted the wisdom of his selection. He was an old-time fighter, preferring debate on the floor to the wielding of a gavel while other men disputed; but the Governor, with sublime faith in German's fidelity and courage, and a sublimer faith in his own power to make him speaker, turned a deaf ear to the a.s.semblyman's wishes.

Had Clinton now conferred with his friends in the Legislature, or simply urged their presence at the caucus, he might easily have nominated German in spite of his record. On the contrary, he did neither, and when the caucus met, of the seventy-five members present, forty-two voted for Thompson and thirty-three for German. When too late Clinton discovered his mistake--seventeen Clintonians had been absent and all the Bucktails present. The great Clinton had been outwitted!

The hearts of the Bucktails must have rejoiced when they heard the count, especially as the refusal of the Clintonians to make the nomination unanimous indicated an intention to turn to the Federalists for aid. This was the one error the Bucktails most desired Clinton to commit; for it would stamp them as the regular representatives of the party, and reduce the Clintonians to a faction, irregular in their methods and tainted with Federalism. It is difficult to realise the arguments which could persuade Clinton to take such a step. Even if such conduct be not considered a question of principle, and only one of expediency, he should have condemned it. Yet this is just what Clinton did not do. After two days of balloting he disclosed his hand in a motion declaring Obadiah German the speaker, and sixty-seven members, including seventeen Federalists, voted in the affirmative, while forty-eight, including three Federalists, voted in the negative.

"The a.s.sembly met on Tuesday," wrote John A. King to his father, on January 8, 1818, "but adjourned without choosing a speaker. The next day, after a short struggle, Mr. German was chosen by the aid of some of the Federalists. I regret to say that there are some of the Federal gentlemen and influential ones, too, who are deeply pledged to support the wanderings fortunes of Mr. Clinton. On this point the Federal party must, if it has not already, divide. Once separated there can be no middle course; a neutrality party in politics, if not an absurdity, at least is evidence of indecision. We are not yet declared enemies, but if I mistake not, the question of Council and the choice of a United States senator must, if these gentlemen persist, decide the matter irrevocably. Mr. W. Duer, Van Vechten, Bunner, Hoffman, and myself are opposed to Mr. W. Van Ness, Oakley, and J. Van Rensselaer.

Mr. Clinton has found means to flatter these gentlemen with the prospect of attaining their utmost wishes by adhering to and supporting his administration."[192]

[Footnote 192: Charles R. King, _The Life and Correspondence of Rufus King_, Vol. 6, p. 102.]

Clinton committed the second great error of his life when he consented to bolt the caucus nominee of his party. It was an act of conscious baseness. He had not manfully put forward his strength. Instead of managing, he temporised; instead of meeting his adversaries with a will, he did nothing, while they worked systematically and in silence.

Even then he need not have entered the caucus; but, once having voluntarily entered it, it was his plain duty to support its nominee.

As a question of principle or expediency Clinton's conduct, therefore, admits of no defence. The plea that Van Buren had secretly a.s.sembled the Bucktails in force neither justifies nor palliates it; for the slightest management on Clinton's part would have controlled the caucus by bringing together fifty members instead of thirty-three, and the slightest inquiry would have discovered the weakness of having only thirty-three present instead of fifty.

Clinton professed to believe that the Federalists no longer existed as a party; and it is probably true that he desired to create a party of his own out of its members.h.i.+p, strengthened by the Clintonians, and to leave Tammany and its Bucktail supporters to build up an opposition organisation. But in this he was in advance of his time. Though the day was coming when a majority of the Clintonians and Federalists would make the backbone of the Whig party in the Empire State, a new party could not be built up by such methods as Clinton now introduced.

New parties, like poets, are born, not made, and a love for principle, not a desire for spoils, must precede their birth. If Clinton had sincerely desired a new organisation, he should have disclaimed all connection with the Republican or Federalist, and planted his standard on the cornerstone of internal improvements, prepared to make the sacrifice that comes to those who are tired of existing conditions and eager for new policies and new a.s.sociations. But Clinton was neither reformer nor pioneer. He loved the old order of things, the Council of Appointment, the Council of Revision, the Const.i.tution of 1777 as amended by the convention of 1801, and all the machinery that gave power to the few and control to the boss. He had been born to power.

From his first entrance into the political arena he had exercised it--first with the help of his uncle George, afterward with the a.s.sistance of his brother-in-law, Ambrose Spencer; and now that he had swung back into power again by means of his ca.n.a.l policy, he had no disposition to let go any part of it by letting go the Republican party. What Van Buren got from him he must take by votes, not by gifts.

Clinton's flagrant violation of the caucus rule, that a minority must yield to the majority, not only broke the Republican party into the famous factions known as Clintonians and Bucktails; it alarmed local leaders throughout the State; made the rank and file distrustful of the Governor's fealty, and consolidated his enemies, giving them the best of the argument and enabling Van Buren to build up an organisation against which the Governor was ever after compelled to struggle with varying fortune. Indeed, in the next month, Van Buren so managed the selection of a Council that it gave Clinton credit for controlling appointments without the slightest power of making them, so that the disappointed held him responsible and the fortunate gave him no thanks. Following this humiliation, too, came the election, by one majority, of Henry Seymour, a bitter opponent of Clinton, to the ca.n.a.l commissioners.h.i.+p made vacant by the resignation of Joseph Ellicott. The Governor's attention had been called to the danger of his candidate's defeat; but with optimistic a.s.surance he dismissed it as impossible until Ephraim Hart, just before the election occurred, discovered that the cunning hand of Van Buren had accomplished his overthrow. "A majority of the ca.n.a.l commissioners are now politically opposed to the Governor," declared the Albany _Argus_, "and it will not be necessary for a person who wishes to obtain employment on the ca.n.a.l as agent, contractor or otherwise, to avow himself a Clintonian." This exultant shout meant that in future only anti-Clintonians would make up the army of ca.n.a.l employees.

But a greater _coup d'etat_ was to come. Van Buren understood well enough that Clinton's strength with the people was not as a politician or Republican leader, but as a stubborn, indefatigable advocate of the ca.n.a.l; and that, so long as the Bucktails opposed his scheme, their control of appointments could not overthrow him. Van Buren, therefore, determined to silence this opposition. Just how he did it is not of record. It was said, at the time, that a caucus was held of Clinton's opponents; but, however it was done, it must have required all Van Buren's strength of will and art of persuasion to sustain him in the midst of so many difficulties--difficulties which were greatly increased by the unfriendly conduct of Erastus Root, and two or three senators from the southern district, including Peter Sharpe, afterward speaker of the a.s.sembly. Yet the fact that he accomplished it, and with such secrecy that Clinton's friends did not know how it was brought about, showed the quiet and complete control exercised by Van Buren over the members of the Bucktail party. The _National Advocate_, edited by Mordecai Manesseh Noah, a conspicuous figure in politics for forty years and one of the most unrelenting partisans of his day, had supported Tammany in its long and bitter antagonism to the ca.n.a.l with a malevolence rarely equalled in that or any other day.

He measured pens with Israel W. Clarke of the Albany _Register_, who had so ably answered every point that Noah charged their authors.h.i.+p to Clinton himself. But after Van Buren had spoken, the _Advocate_, suddenly, as if by magic, changed its course, and, with the rest of the Bucktail contingent, rallied to the support of Clinton's pet scheme with arguments as sound and full of clear good sense as the Governor himself could wish. The people, however, had good reason to know that statesmen were not all and always exactly as they professed to be; and the immediate effect of the Bucktail change of heart amounted to little more than public notice that the ca.n.a.l policy was a complete success, and that Tammany and its friends had discovered that further opposition was useless.

CHAPTER XXIV

RE-ELECTION OF RUFUS KING

1819-1820

Although Clinton's ca.n.a.l policy now dominated Bucktails as well as Clintonians, eliminating all differences as to public measures, the bitterness between these factions increased until the effort to elect a United States senator to succeed Rufus King resulted in a complete separation. The Clintonians had settled upon John C. Spencer, while the Bucktails thought Samuel Young, a decided friend of Clinton's ca.n.a.l policy, the most likely man to attract support. Both were representative men, and either would have done honour to the State.

John C. Spencer needed no introduction or advertis.e.m.e.nt as the son of Ambrose Spencer. He was a man of large promise. Everything he did he did well, and he had already done much. Though scarcely thirty-four years of age, he had established himself as a leading lawyer of the Commonwealth, whose strong, vigorous English in support of the war had found its way into Parliament as an unanswerable argument to Lord Liverpool's unwise policy, winning him an enviable reputation as a writer. Skilful in expression, adroit in attack, calm and resourceful in argument, with the sarcasm of the younger Pitt, he had presented American rights and British outrages in a clearer light than others, arousing his countrymen very much as the letters of Junius had quickened English political life forty years before. He made it plain that England's insistence upon the right to stop and search an American vessel, and England's persistent refusal to recognise a naturalised American citizen on board an American vessel, were the real causes of quarrel. "There is not an individual," said a leading British journal, "who has attended at all to the dispute with the United States, who does not see that it has been embittered from the first, and wantonly urged on by those who, for the sake of their own aggrandis.e.m.e.nt, are willing to plunge their country into all the evils portrayed by the American writer."

A single term in Congress had placed Spencer in the ranks of the leaders. He was trenchant in speech, forceful on paper, and helpful in committee. Intellectually, he took the place of the distinguished South Carolinian, just then leaving Congress to become Monroe's secretary of war, whose thin face and firm mouth resembled the New Yorker's. Spencer, like Calhoun, delighted in establis.h.i.+ng by the subtlest train of philosophical reasoning the delicate lines that exposed sophistry and error, and made clear the disputed point in law or in legislation. The rhetorical drapery that gave Samuel Young such signal success found no place in Spencer's arguments or in his pamphlets; but to a logic that deeply penetrated his subject he added an ethical interest which captivated the mind, as his reasoning illuminated and made plain. He was a born fighter. Like his father, he asked no quarter and he gave none. His eye had the expression one sees in hawks and game-c.o.c.ks. At twenty-eight, as district attorney of the five western counties of the State, he had become a terror to evil-doers, and it is said of him, at his old home in Canandaigua, that men, conscious of their innocence, preferred appealing to the mercy of the court than endure prosecution at his hands. Possibly he possessed the small affections which Disraeli thought necessary to be coupled with large brains to insure success in public life, yet his nature, in every domestic and social relation, was the gentlest and simplest. DeWitt Clinton did not always approve Spencer's political course. He thought him "an incubus on the party," "the political millstone of the west," and he attributed the occasional loss of Ontario and neighbouring counties "to his deleterious management." The austerity and haughtiness of his manner naturally lessened his popularity, just as his caustic pen and satirical tongue made him bitter enemies; but his strong will and imperious manner were no more offensive than Clinton's. Like Clinton, too, Spencer was ill at ease in a harness; he resented being lined up by a party boss. But, at the time he was talked of for United States senator, the intelligent action and tireless industry upon which his fame rests, had so impressed men, that they overlooked unpopular traits in their admiration for his great ability. People did not then know that he was to sit in the Cabinet of a President, and be nominated to a place upon the Supreme bench of the United States; but they knew he was destined to become famous, because he was already recognised as a professional and political leader.

The genius of Samuel Young had also left its track behind. He was not a great lawyer, but his contemporaries thought him a great man. He combined brilliant speaking with brilliant writing. The fragments of his speeches that have been preserved scarcely hint at the extraordinary power accorded them in the judgment of his neighbours.

It is likely that the magic of presence, voice, and action, exaggerated their merits, since he possessed the gifts of a trained orator, rivalling the forceful declamation of Erastus Root, the mellow tones and rich vocabulary of William W. Van Ness, and the smoothness of Martin Van Buren. But, if his speeches equalled his pamphlets, the judgment of his contemporaries must be accepted without limitation.

Chancellor Kent objected to giving joint stock companies the right to engage in privateering, a drastic measure pa.s.sed by the Legislature of 1814 in the interest of a more vigorous prosecution of the war; and in his usual felicitous style, and with much learning, the stubborn Federalist p.r.o.nounced the statute inconsistent with the spirit of the age and contrary to the genius of the Federal Const.i.tution. Young replied to the great Chancellor in a series of essays, brilliant and readable even in a new century. He showed that, although America had been handicapped by Federalist opposition, by a disorganised army, and by a navy so small that it might almost as well have not existed, yet American privateers--outnumbering the British fleet, scudding before the wind, defying capture, running blockades, destroying commerce, and bearing the stars and stripes to the ends of the earth--had dealt England the most staggering blow ever inflicted upon her supremacy of the sea. This was plain talk and plain truth; and it made the speaker of the a.s.sembly known throughout the State as "the sword, the s.h.i.+eld, and the ornament of his party." Young was as dauntless as Spencer, and, if anything, a more distinguished looking man. He was without austerity and easy of approach; and, although inclined to reticence, he seemed fond of indulging in jocular remarks and an occasional story; but he was a man of bad temper. He fretted under opposition as much as Clinton, and he easily became vindictive toward opponents. This kept him unpopular even among men of his own faction. Clinton thought him "much of an imbecile," and suggested in a letter to Post that "suspicions are entertained of his integrity."[193]

Yet Young had hosts of friends eager to fight his political battles.