Yet Weed had able indorsers behind his candidates. "I hear there is great opposition to Willis Hall," wrote William Kent, "and I am sorry for it. He has a great heart, and a great head, too. It has been his misfortune, but our good fortune, that his time and talents have been devoted to advancing the Whig party, while those who oppose him were taxing costs and filing demurrers. The extreme Webster men in New York have formed a combination against Willis. It is the dog in the manger, too, for no man from New York is a candidate."[29]
But the dictator made a greater display of practical politics in the selection of a United States senator to succeed Nathaniel P. Tallmadge. There were several aspirants, among them Millard Fillmore, John C. Spencer, John A. Collier, and Joshua A. Spencer. All these men were intensely in earnest. Fillmore, then in Congress, was chairman of the Committee on Ways and Means; and advancement to the Senate would have been a deserved promotion. But Tallmadge had rallied to the support of Seward, under the name of Conservatives, many former National Republicans, who had joined the Democratic party because of anti-Masonry, and Weed believed in keeping them in the Whig party by reelecting their leader. Fillmore, and other candidates, earnestly protested against the policy of discarding tried and faithful friends, and of conferring the highest and most important place in the gift of the party upon a new recruit whose fidelity could not be trusted; "but, strong as those gentlemen were in the Whig party, they were unable to overcome a conviction in the minds of the Whig members of the Legislature," says Weed, solemnly, as if the Whig members of the Legislature really did have something to do with it, "that in view of the approaching presidential election Mr. Tallmadge was entitled to their support. He was, therefore, nominated with considerable unanimity."[30] It was a great shock to Fillmore, which he resented a few years later. Indeed, Weed's dictatorship, although quiet and gentle, was already raising dissent. Albert H. Tracy, indignant at Seward's nomination over the heads of older and more experienced men, had withdrawn from politics, and Gamaliel H. Barstow, the first state treasurer elected by the Whigs, resigned in a huff because he did not like the way things were going. Weed fully realised the situation. "There are a great many disappointed, disheartened friends," he wrote Granger. "It has been a tremendous winter. But for the presidential question which will absorb all other things, the appointments would tear us to pieces."[31] To his door, Seward knew, the censure of the disappointed would be aimed. "The list of appointments made this winter is fourteen hundred," he writes, "and I am not surprised by any manifestation of disappointment or dissatisfaction. This only I claim—that no interest, passion, prejudice or partiality of my own has controlled any decision I have made."[32]
But there was one wheel lacking in the Weed machine. The Democrats controlled the Senate, obstructing bills deemed by the Whigs essential to the public welfare, and refusing to confirm Seward's nominations. By preventing an agreement upon a candidate, preliminary to a joint ballot, they also blocked the election of a United States senator. This situation was intolerable to Weed. Without the Senate, little could be accomplished and nothing of a strictly partisan character. Besides, Weed had his eye on the lucrative place of state printer. In the campaign of 1839, therefore, he set to work to win the higher body of the Legislature by carrying the Albany district, in which three senators were to be chosen. For eighteen years, the Senate had been held by the Regency party, and, in all that time, Albany was numbered among the reliable Democratic districts. But Weed's friends now brought up eight thousand dollars from New York. The Democrats had made a spirited fight, and, although they knew Weed was endowed with a faculty for management, they did not know of his money, or of the ability of his lieutenants to place it. When the votes were counted, Weed's three nominees had an average majority of one hundred and thirty-three. This gave the Whigs nineteen senators and the Democrats thirteen. It was an appalling change for the Democrats, to whom it seemed the prologue to a defeat in 1840. In the "clean sweep" of office-holders that followed, Tallmadge went back to the United States Senate, and Weed took from Croswell the office of public printer.
The presidential election of 1840 began in December, 1839. During Clay's visit to Saratoga, in the preceding summer, Weed had told him he could not carry New York; but, that Clay's friends in New York City, and along the river counties, might not be unduly alarmed, Weed masked his purpose of forcing Harrison's nomination, by selecting delegates ostensibly favourable to General Scott. Twenty delegates for Scott were, therefore, sent to the national convention at Harrisburg, two for Harrison and ten for Clay. On his way, Weed secured an agreement from the New England leaders to act with him, and, by a combination of the supporters of Scott and Harrison, the latter finally received one hundred and forty-eight votes to ninety for Clay. The disappointment of Clay's friends is historic. Probably nothing parallels it in American politics. The defeat of Seward at Chicago in 1860, and of Elaine at Cincinnati in 1876, very seriously affected their friends, but the disappointment of Clay's supporters at Harrisburg, in December, 1839, took the form of anger, which, for a time, seemed fatal to the ticket. "The nomination of Harrison," wrote Thurlow Weed, "so offended the friends of Clay that the convention was thrown entirely in the dark on the question of Vice President. The Kentucky delegation was asked to present a candidate, but they declined. Then John Clayton of Delaware was fixed upon, but Reverdy Johnson withdrew his name. Watkins Leigh of Virginia and Governor Dudley of North Carolina were successively designated, but they declined. While this was passing the Vice Presidency was repeatedly offered to New York, but we had no candidate. Albert H. Tracy was eminently qualified for usefulness in public life. He entertained a high and strict sense of official responsibility, and had he not previously left us he would have been nominated. John Tyler was finally taken because we could get nobody else to accept."[33]
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.