s from Radicals were heard before his inauguration. They
resented his acceptance of a Hunker's hospitality, asserting that he
should have made his home at a public house where Hunker and Radical
alike could freely counsel with him; they complained of his
resignation as United States senator, insisting that he ought to have
held the office until his inauguration as governor and thus prevented
Bouck appointing a Hunker as his successor; they denounced his
indifference in the speakership contest; and they murmured at his
opposition to a constitutional convention. There was cause for some of
these lamentations. It was plain that the Governor was neither a
leader nor a conciliator. A little tact would have held the Radicals
in line against a constitutional convention and kept inviolate the act
of 1842, but he either did not possess or disclaimed the arts and
diplomacies of a political manager. He could grapple with principles
in the United States Senate and follow them to their logical end, but
he could not see into the realities of things as clearly as Seymour,
or estimate, with the same accuracy, the relative strength of
conflicting tendencies in the political world. Writers of that day
express amazement at the course of Silas Wright in vetoing the canal
appropriation, some of them regarding him as a sort of political
puzzle, others attributing his action to the advice of false friends;
but his adherence to principle more easily explains it. Seymour knew
that the "up-state" voters, who would probably hold the balance of
power in the next election, wanted the canal finished and would resent
its defeat. Wright, on the other hand, believed in a suspension of
public works until the debt of the State was brought within the safe
control of its revenues, and in the things he stood for, he was as
unyielding as flint.

When the Legislature adjourned Hunkers and Radicals were too wide
apart even to unite in the usual address to constituents; and in the
fall campaign of 1845, the party fell back upon the old issues of the
year before. To the astonishment of the Hunkers, however, the
legislative session opened in January, 1846, with two Radicals to one
Conservative. It looked to the uninitiated as if the policy of canal
improvement had fallen into disfavour; but Croswell, and other Hunkers
in the inner political circle, understood that a change, long foreseen
by them, was rapidly approaching. The people of New York felt profound
inte