. At the editor's suggestion, therefore, the President
tendered Silas Wright the head of the treasury, and, upon his
declination, an offer of the secretaryship of war came to Butler. The
latter said he would have taken, although with reluctance, either the
state or treasury department; but the war portfolio carried him too
far from the line of his profession. Thus the veteran editor's scheme,
having worked itself out as anticipated, left the President at
liberty, without further consultation with Van Buren, to give William
L. Marcy[351] what Butler had refused. To the Radicals the result was
as startling as it was unwelcome. It left the Conservatives in
authority. Through Marcy they would command the federal patronage, and
through their majority in the Legislature they could block the wheels
of their opponents. It was at this time that the Conservatives,
"hankering," it was said, after the offices to be given by an
Administration committed to the annexation of Texas, were first called
"Hunkers."

[Footnote 351: "On the great question that loomed threateningly on the
horizon, Wright and Marcy took opposite sides. Wright moved calmly
along with the advancing liberal sentiment of the period, and died a
firm advocate of the policy of the Wilmot Proviso. On this test
measure Marcy took no step forward."--H.B. Stanton, _Random
Recollections_, p. 40.]

John Young, a Whig member of the Assembly, no sooner scented the
increasingly bitter feeling between Hunker and Radical than he
prepared to take advantage of it. Young was a great surprise to the
older leaders. He had accomplished nothing in the past to entitle him
to distinction. In youth he accompanied his father, a Vermont
innkeeper, to Livingston County, where he received a common school
education and studied law, being admitted to the bar in 1829, at the
age of twenty-seven. Two years later he served a single term in the
Assembly, and for ten years thereafter he had confined his attention
almost exclusively to his profession, becoming a strong jury lawyer.
In the meantime, he changed his politics from a firm supporter of
Andrew Jackson to a local anti-masonic leader, and finally to a
follower of Henry Clay. Then the Whigs sent him to Congress, and, in
the fall of 1843, elected him to the celebrated Assembly through which
Horatio Seymour forced the canal appropriation. But John Young seems
to have made little more of a reputation in this historic struggle
than he did as a