In the midst of such sentiments, it was evident to Van Buren, whose election depended upon the Southern States, that something definite must be done, and that nothing would be considered definite by the South which did not aim at the total abolition of the anti-slavery agitator. Accordingly, his friends held meetings in every county in the State, adopting resolutions denouncing them as "fanatics and traitors to their country," and indorsing Van Buren "as a patriot opposed to the hellish abolition factions and all their heresies." Van Buren himself arranged for the great meeting at Albany at which Governor Marcy presided. "I send you the inclosed proceedings of the citizens of Albany," wrote Van Buren to the governor of Georgia, "and I authorise you to say that I concur fully in the sentiments they advance."
In commenting upon the Albany meeting, Thurlow Weed, with the foresight of a prophet, wrote in the Evening Journal: "This question of slavery, when it becomes a matter of political controversy, will shake, if not unsettle, the foundations of our government. It is too fearful, and too mighty, in all its bearings and consequences, to be recklessly mixed up in our partisan conflicts."[5] When the Legislature convened, in January, 1836, Governor Marcy took up the question in his message. "I cannot doubt," he said, "that the Legislature possesses the power to pass such penal laws as will have the effect of preventing the citizens of this State, and residents within it, from availing themselves, with impunity, of the protection of its sovereignty and laws, while they are actually employed in exciting insurrection and sedition in a sister State, or engaged in treasonable enterprises, intending to be executed therein."[6] Not content with this show of loyalty to the South on the part of his friends, Van Buren secured the support of Silas Wright and Nathaniel P. Tallmadge for the bill, then pending in the United States Senate, prohibiting postmasters from knowingly transmitting or delivering any documents or papers relating to the abolition of slavery, and when the measure, on a motion for engrossment, received a tie vote, Van Buren cast the decisive vote in the affirmative.[7]
Van Buren's prompt action gave him the confidence and support of three-fourths of the slave-holding States, without losing his hold upon the Democracy of the free States. Indeed, there was nothing new that the Whigs could oppose to Van Buren. They were not ready to take the anti-slavery side of the issue, and questions growing out of the bank controversy had practically been settled in 1832. This, therefore, was the situation when the two parties in New York assembled in convention, in September, 1836, to nominate state candidates. Marcy and John Tracy were without opposition. From the first moment he began to administer the affairs of the State, Marcy must have felt that he had found his work at last.
The Whigs were far from being united. Henry Clay's disinclination to become a nominee for President resulted in two Whig candidates, Hugh L. White of Tennessee, the favourite of the southern Whigs, and William Henry Harrison, preferred by the Eastern, Middle, and Western States. This weakness was soon reflected in New York. Thurlow Weed was full of forebodings, and William H. Seward found his law office more satisfactory than a candidate's berth. Like Clay he was perfectly willing another should bear the burden of inevitable defeat. So the Whigs put up Jesse Buel for governor, Gamaliel H. Barstow for lieutenant-governor, and an electoral ticket favourable to Harrison.
Jesse Buel was not a brilliant man. He was neither a thinker, like Seward, nor an orator, like Granger; but he was wise, wealthy, and eminently respectable, with enough of the statesman in him to be able to accept established facts and not to argue with the inexorable. Years before, he had founded the Albany Argus, editing it with ability and great success. Through its influence he became state printer, succeeding Solomon Southwick, after the latter's quarrel with Governor Tompkins over the Bank of America. This was in 1813. Three years later Thurlow Weed, then a young man of nineteen, worked for him as a journeyman printer. "From January till April," he writes, "I uniformly reached the office before daylight, and seldom failed to find Mr. Buel at his case, setting type by a tallow candle and smoking a long pipe." Buel made so much money that the party managers invited him to let others, equally deserving, have a turn at the state printing. So he went into the Assembly, distinguishing himself as an able, practical legislator. But he gradually drew away from the Democrats, as their financial policy became more pronounced; and upon the organisation of the Whig party gave it his support. Had he chosen he might have been its candidate for governor in 1834; and it is difficult to understand why he should have accepted, in 1836, with little expectation of an election, what he declined two years before when success seemed probable.
Gamaliel H. Barstow had been a Clintonian and an anti-Clintonian, a follower and a pursuer of Van Buren, an Adams man and an Anti-Mason—everything, in fact, except a Federalist. But, under whatever standard he fought, and in whatever body he sat, he was a recognised leader, full of spirit, fire, and force. In 1824, he had stood with James Tallmadge and Henry Wheaton at the head of the Adams party; in 1831, he had accompanied John C. Spencer and William H. Seward to the national anti-masonic convention at Baltimore; and, in the long, exciting debate upon the bill giving the people power to choose presidential electors, he exhibited the consummate shrewdness and sagacity of an experienced legislator. There was nothing sinister or vindictive about him; but he had an unsparing tongue, and he delighted to indulge it. This is what he did in 1836. Having turned his back upon the Democratic party, the campaign to him became an occasion for contrasting the past and "its blighting Regency majorities" with the future of a new party, which, no doubt, seemed to him and to others purer and brighter, since the longer it was excluded from power the less opportunity it had for making mistakes.
But 1836 was a year of great prosperity. The undue depression of 1835 was now succeeded by commercial activity and an era of expansion and inflation. Visionary schemes were everywhere present. Real estate values doubled, farms were platted into village lots, wild lands were turned into farms, and a new impulse was given to legitimate and illegitimate enterprises. Stocks rose, labour went up, farm products sold at higher prices, and the whole country responded to the advantages of the money plethora. Democracy rode on the crest of the wave, and Jackson's financial policy was accepted with joy.
Nevertheless the Whig party, hoping to strengthen its numbers in Congress, did not relax its zeal. When the vote, however, revealed nearly thirty thousand majority for Marcy[8] and the Van Buren electoral ticket, with ninety-four Democrats in the Assembly and only one Whig in the Senate, it made Thurlow Weed despair for the Republic.