Rufus King certainly did his work well. He had abundantly discouraged him as to the Federalists and had fully advised him as to the importance of settling his accounts; but all to no purpose. Two days later Thompson wrote Van Buren that the Vice President "will stand." The Kinderhook statesman, however, disinclined to give it up, asked the Secretary in a note on the same day for authority to use his name "if the Vice President, when he arrives here, should wish to decline." On the 7th of February, John A. King wrote his father: "Hopes are still entertained that the Vice President's decision may yet yield to the wishes of many of his oldest friends. Those, however, who know him best have no such hopes. Judge Yates has said that he never refused an offer of any sort in his life."[201] And so it proved in this instance. Tompkins was immovable. Like a race horse trained to running, he only needed to be let into the ring and given a free rein. When the bell sounded he was off on his fifth race for governor.
If Tompkins was handicapped with a shortage and a canal record, Clinton was harassed for want of a party. To conceal the meagreness of his strength in a legislative caucus, Clinton was renominated with John Taylor at a meeting of the citizens of Albany. He had a following and a large one, but it was without cohesion or discipline. Men felt at liberty to withdraw without explanation and without notice. Within eight months after his election as a Clintonian senator, Benjamin Mooers of Plattsburg accepted the nomination for lieutenant-governor on the ticket with Governor Tompkins, apparently without loss of political prestige, or the respect of neighbours. The administration at Washington recognised the Bucktails as the regular Republican party, and showered offices among them, until Clinton later made it a matter of public complaint and official investigation. Other disintegrating influences were also at work. The "high minded" Federalists, in a published document signed by forty or fifty leading men, declared the Federal party dissolved and annihilated, and pronounced the Clinton party simply a personal one. To belong to it independence must be surrendered, and to obtain office in it, one must laud its head and bow the knee, a system of sycophancy, they said, disgusting all "high minded" men. But DeWitt Clinton's strength was not in parties nor in political management. He belonged to the great men of his time, having no superior in New York, and, in some respects, no equal in the country. He possessed a broader horizon, a larger intellect, a greater moral courage, than most of his contemporaries. It is probably true that, like a mountain, he appeared best at a distance, but having confidence in his ability and integrity, people easily overlooked his rough, unpopular manners. The shrewd, sagacious Yankee farmers who were filling up the great western counties of Ontario and Genesee believed in him. The Bucktails did not know, until the eastern and western districts responded with five thousand eight hundred and four majority for Clinton, as against four thousand three hundred and seventy-seven for Tompkins in the middle and southern districts, what a capital cry Clinton had in the canal issue; what a powerful appeal to selfish interests he could put into voice; and what a loud reply selfish interests would make to the appeal. It was not, in fact, a race between parties at all; it was not a question of shortage or settlement. It is likely the shortage affected the result somewhat; but the majority of over fourteen hundred meant approval of Clinton and his canal policy rather than distrust of Tompkins and his unsettled accounts. The question in 1820 was, shall the canal be built? and, although the Bucktails had ceased their hostility, the people most interested in the canal's construction wanted Clinton to complete what he had so gloriously and successfully begun.
The campaign was fought out with bitterness and desperation until the polls closed. No national or state issue divided the parties. In fact, there were no issues. It was simply a question whether Clinton and his friends, or Tompkins and the Bucktails should control the state government. The arguments, therefore, were purely personal. Clinton's friends relied upon his canal policy, his honesty, and his integrity—the Bucktails insisted that Clinton was no longer a Republican; that the canal would be constructed as well without him as with him, and that his defeat would wipe out factional strife and give New York greater prominence in the councils of the party. "For the last ten days," wrote Van Buren to Rufus King, on April 13, "I have scarcely had time to take my regular meals and am at this moment pressed by at least half a dozen unfinished concerns growing out of this intolerable political struggle in which we are involved."[202] Nevertheless, he had no doubt of Tompkins' election. "I entertain the strongest convictions that we shall succeed,"[203] he wrote later in the month. On the other hand, Clinton was no less certain. In his letters to Henry Post he is always confident; but at no time more so than now. "The canal proceeds wondrously well," he says. "The Martling opposition has ruined them forever. The public mind was never in a better train for useful operations. John Townsend has just come from the west. There is but one sentiment."[204] Yet, when the battle ended, it looked like a Clintonian defeat and Bucktail victory; for the latter had swept the Legislature, adding to their control in the Senate and capturing the Assembly by a majority of eighteen over all. It was only the presence of Tompkins among the slain that transferred the real glory to Clinton, whose majority was fourteen hundred and fifty-seven in a total vote of ninety-three thousand four hundred and thirty-seven. This exceeded any former aggregate by nearly ten thousand.[205]
Daniel D. Tompkins took his defeat much to heart. He believed his unsettled accounts had occasioned whispered slanders that crushed him. After his angry controversy with Comptroller McIntyre, in the preceding year, he seriously considered the propriety of resigning as Vice President; for he sincerely believed his figures were right and that the Comptroller's language had classed him in the public mind with what, in these latter days, would be called "grafters." "Our friend on Staten Island is unfortunately sick in body and mind," Clinton wrote to Post in September, 1819. "His situation upon the whole is deplorable and calculated to excite sympathy."[206] It was, indeed, a most unfortunate affair, for the State discovered, years after it was too late, that it did owe the War Governor ninety-two thousand dollars.
Tompkins' public life continued four years longer. In the autumn of 1820, the Legislature balanced his accounts and the country re-elected him Vice President. The next year his party made him a delegate to the constitutional convention, and the convention made him its president; but he never recovered from the chagrin and mortification of his defeat for the governorship. Soon after the election, melancholy accounts appeared of the havoc wrought upon a frame once so full of animal spirits. He began to drink too freely even for those days of deep drink. His eye lost its lustre; deep lines furrowed the round, sunny face; the unruffled temper became irritable; and, within three months after the close of his second term as Vice President, before he had entered his fifty-second year, he was dead.
CHAPTER XXVI
THE ALBANY REGENCY
1820-1822
When the Legislature assembled to appoint presidential electors in November, 1820, Bucktail fear of Clinton was at an end for the present. Before, his name had been one to conjure with; thenceforth it was to have no terrors. He had, indeed, been re-elected governor, but the small majority, scarcely exceeding one per cent. of the total vote, showed that he was now merely an independent, and a very independent member, of the Republican party. To the close of his career he was certain to be a commanding figure, around whom all party dissenters would quickly and easily rally; but it was now an individual figure, almost an eccentric figure, whose work as a political factor seemed to be closed.
Yet Clinton was not ready to go into a second retirement. On the theory, as he wrote Henry Post, that "the meekness of Quakerism will do in religion, but not in politics,"[207] he looked about him for something to arouse public attention and to excite public indignation, and, for the want of a better subject, he charged the Monroe administration with interference in the recent state election. Post advised caution; but Clinton, stung by the defeat of his friends and by his own narrow escape, had become possessed with the suspicion that federal officials had used the patronage of the government against him. So, in his speech to the Legislature in November, he protested against the outrage. "If the officers under the appointment of the federal government," he declared, "shall see fit as an organised and disciplined corps to interfere in state elections, I trust there will be found a becoming disposition in the people to resist these alarming attempts upon the purity and independence of their local governments."[208] Clinton had no evidence upon which to support this charge. It was, at best, only a suspicion based upon his own methods; but the Senate demanded proof, and failing to get specifications, it declared it "highly improper that the Chief Magistrate of the State should incriminate the administration of the general government, without ample testimony in his possession." The resolutions closed with an expression of confidence in the patriotism and integrity of the government.