But Seymour closed his address with an ugly crack of the whip. Dropping his well-selected words with the skill of a practised debater, he blended the history of past wrongs with those of the present, thus harrowing his auditors into a frame of mind as resentful and passionate as his own. When the public safety permits, he said threateningly, there will be abundant time to condemn and punish the authors of injustice and wrong, whether they occupy the presidential chair or seats in the cabinet. "Let them remember the teachings of history. Despotic governments do not love the agitators that call them into existence. When Cromwell drove from Parliament the latter-day saints and higher-law men of his day, and 'bade them cease their babblings;' and when Napoleon scattered at the point of the bayonet the Council of Five Hundred and crushed revolution beneath his iron heel, they taught a lesson which should be heeded this day by men who are animated by a vindictive piety or a malignant philanthropy.... It is the boast of the Briton that his house is his castle. However humble it may be, the King cannot enter. Let it not be said that the liberties of American citizens are less perfectly protected, or held less sacred than are those of the subjects of a Crown."
The slavery question was less easily and logically handled. He denied that it caused the war, but admitted that the agitators did, putting into the same class "the ambitious man at the South, who desired a separate confederacy," and "the ambitious men of the North, who reaped a political profit from agitation." In deprecating emancipation he carefully avoided the argument of military necessity, so forcibly put by John Cochrane, and strangely overlooked the fact that the South, by the act of rebellion, put itself outside the protection guaranteed under the Constitution to loyal and law-abiding citizens. "If it be true," he said, "that slavery must be abolished to save this Union, then the people of the South should be allowed to withdraw themselves from the Government which cannot give them the protection guaranteed by its terms." Immediate emancipation, he continued, would not end the contest. "It would be only the commencement of a lasting, destructive, terrible domestic conflict. The North would not consent that four millions of free negroes should live in their midst.... With what justice do we demand that the South should be subjected to the evils, the insecurity, and the loss of constitutional rights, involved in immediate abolition?" Then, dropping into prophecy, the broad, optimistic statesmanship of the forties passed into eclipse as he declared that "we are either to be restored to our former position, with the Constitution unweakened, the powers of the State unimpaired, and the fireside rights of our citizens duly protected, or our whole system of government is to fall!"
Seymour, in closing, very clearly outlined his future platform. "We are willing to support this war as a means of restoring our Union, but we will not carry it on in a spirit of hatred, malice, or revenge. We cannot, therefore, make it a war for the abolition of slavery. We will not permit it to be made a war upon the rights of the States. We shall see that it does not crush out the liberties of the citizen, or the reserved powers of the States. We shall hold that man to be as much a traitor who urges our government to overstep its constitutional powers, as he who resists the exercise of its rightful authority. We shall contend that the rights of the States and the General Government are equally sacred."[51]
If the campaign contributed to the South a certain degree of comfort, reviving the hope that it would yet have a divided North to contend against, the election, giving Dickinson over 100,000 majority, furnished little encouragement. The People's party also carried both branches of the Legislature, securing twenty out of thirty-two senators, and seventy out of the one hundred and twenty-eight assemblymen. Among the latter, Henry J. Raymond and Thomas G. Alvord, former speakers, represented the undaunted mettle needed at Albany.
To add to the result so gratifying to the fusionists, George Opdyke defeated Fernando Wood by a small plurality for mayor of New York. Wood had long been known as a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. He talked reform and grew degenerate; he proclaimed patriotic views and held disloyal sentiments; he listened respectfully to public opinion, and defied it openly in his acts. He did not become a boss. It was ten years later before William M. Tweed centralised Tammany's power in one man. But Wood developed the system that made a boss possible. He dominated the police, he organised the lawless, he allied himself with the saloon, and he used the judiciary. In 1858, being forced out of Tammany, he retreated like a wounded tiger to Mozart Hall, organised an opposition society that took its name from the assembly room in which it met, and declared with emphasis and expletives that he would fight Tammany as long as he lived. From that moment his shadow had kept sachems alarmed, and his presence had thrown conventions into turmoil.
The arts of the card-sharper and thimble-rigger had been prodigally employed to save the candidate of Mozart Hall. Even the sachems of Tammany, to avert disaster, nominated James T. Brady, whose great popularity it was believed would draw strength from both Opdyke and Wood; but Brady refused to be used. Opdyke had been a liberal, progressive Democrat of the Free-Soil type and a pioneer Republican. He associated with Chase in the Buffalo convention of 1848 and coöperated with Greeley in defeating Seward in 1860. He had also enjoyed the career of a busy and successful merchant, and, although fifty years old, was destined to take a prominent part in municipal politics for the next two decades. One term in the Assembly summed up his office-holding experience; yet in that brief and uneventful period jobbers learned to shun him and rogues to fear him. This was one reason why the brilliant and audacious leader of Mozart Hall, in his death struggle with an honest man, suddenly assumed to be the champion of public purity.