CHAPTER XII
HOFFMAN DEFEATED, CONKLING PROMOTED
1866
The knowledge that Republicans, to overcome the President's vetoes, must have a two-thirds majority in Congress, precipitated a State campaign of unusual energy. The contest which began on April 9, when Johnson disapproved the Civil Rights Bill, was intensified by the Philadelphia convention and the President's "swing-around-the-circle;" but the events that made men bitter and deeply in earnest were the Memphis and New Orleans riots, in which one hundred and eighty negroes were killed and only eleven of their assailants injured. To the North this became an object-lesson, illustrating the insincerity of the South's desire, expressed at Philadelphia, for reconciliation and peace.
The Republican State convention, meeting at Syracuse on September 5, echoed this sentiment. In the centre of the stage the Stars and Stripes, gracefully festooned, formed a halo over the portrait of Abraham Lincoln, while a Nast caricature of President Johnson betrayed the contempt of the enthusiastic gathering. Weed and Raymond were conspicuous by their absence. The Radicals made Charles H. Van Wyck chairman, Lyman Tremaine president, George William Curtis chairman of the committee on resolutions, and Horace Greeley the lion of the convention. At the latter's appearance delegates leaped to their feet and gave three rounds of vociferous cheers. The day's greatest demonstration, however, occurred when the chairman, in his opening speech, stigmatised the New York friends of the President.[315] Van Wyck prudently censored his bitterness from the press copy, but the episode reflected the intense unpopularity of Seward, Weed, and Raymond.
In the privacy of the club Seward's old-time champions had spoken of "the decline of his abilities," "the loss of his wits," and "that dry-rot of the mind's noble temper;" but now, in a crowded public hall, they cheered any sentiment that charged a betrayal of trust and the loss of principles. Of course Seward had not lost his principles, nor betrayed his trust. He held the opinions then that he entertained before the removal of the splints and bandages from the wounds inflicted by the bowie-knife of the would-be assassin. He had been in thorough accord with Lincoln's amnesty proclamation, issued in December, 1863, as well as with his "Louisiana plan" of reconstruction, and Johnson's proclamation and plan of reconstruction, written under Seward's influence, did not differ materially. But Seward's principles which rarely harmonised with those of the Radicals, now became more conspicuous and sharply defined because of the tactlessness and uncompromising spirit of Lincoln's successor. Besides, he was held responsible for the President's follies. To a convention filled with crutches, scarred faces, armless sleeves, and representatives of Andersonville and Libby Prisons, such an attitude seemed like a betrayal of his trust, and the resentment of the delegates, perhaps, was not unnatural.
If Seward was discredited, Reuben E. Fenton was conspicuously trusted. According to Andrew D. White, a prominent State senator of that day, the Governor was not a star of the magnitude of his Republican predecessors.[316] Others probably held the same opinion. Fenton's party, however, renominated him by acclamation, and then showed its inconsistency by refusing a like honour to Thomas G. Alvord, the lieutenant-governor. The service of the Onondaga Chief, as his friends delighted to call him, had been as creditable if not as important as the Governor's, but the brilliant gifts of Stewart L. Woodford, a young soldier of patriotic impulses, attracted a large majority of the convention.[317] Up to that time, Woodford, then thirty years of age, was the youngest man nominated for lieutenant-governor. He had made a conspicuous sacrifice to become a soldier. In 1861 Lincoln appointed him an assistant United States attorney, but the silenced guns of Sumter inspired him to raise a company, and he marched away at its head, leaving the civil office to another. Later he became commandant of the city that sheltered the guns first trained upon the American flag, and after his return, disciplined and saddened by scenes of courage and sacrifice, the clarion notes of the young orator easily commanded the emotions of his hearers. No one ever wearied when he spoke. His lightest word, sent thrilling to the rim of a vast audience, swayed it with the magic of control. He was not then at the fulness of his power or reputation, but delegates had heard enough to desire his presence in the important campaign of 1866, and to stimulate his activity they made him a candidate.
The platform declared that while the constitutional authority of the Federal government cannot be impaired by the act of a State or its people, a State may, by rebellion, so far rupture its relations to the Union as to suspend its power to exercise the rights which it possessed under the Constitution; that it belonged to the legislative power of the government to determine at what time a State may safely resume the exercise of its rights; and that the doctrine that such State is itself to judge when it is in proper condition to resume its place in the Union is false, as well as the other doctrine that the President was alone sole judge of the period when such suspension shall be at an end.