12th of the following December, James Kent died in his
eighty-fifth year. He had outlived by eighteen years his contemporary,
John Jay; by nearly forty-five years his great contemporary, Alexander
Hamilton; and by more than thirty years his distinguished predecessor,
Chancellor Livingston. He was the last of the heroic figures that made
famous the closing quarter of the eighteenth and the opening quarter
of the nineteenth centuries. He could sit at the table of Philip Hone,
amidst eminent judges, distinguished statesmen, and men whose names
were already famous in literature, and talk of the past with personal
knowledge from the time the colony graciously welcomed John Murray,
Earl of Dunmore, as its governor, or threateningly frowned upon
William Howe, viscount and British general, for shutting up its civil
courts. When, finally, his body was transferred from the sofa in the
library where he had written himself into an immortal fame, to the
cemetery on Second Avenue, the obsequies became the funeral not merely
of a man but of an age.

CHAPTER XI

THE FREE-SOIL CAMPAIGN

1847-1848

The fearless stand of Preston King in supporting the Wilmot
Proviso[368] took root among the Radicals, as Seward prophesied, and
the exclusion of slavery from territory obtained from Mexico, became
the dominant Democratic issue in the State. Because of their approval
of this principle the Radicals were called "Barnburners." Originally,
these factional differences, as noted elsewhere, grew out of the canal
controversy in 1838 and in 1841, the Conservatives wishing to devote
the surplus canal revenues to the completion of the canals--the
Radicals insisting upon their use to pay the state debt. Under this
division, Edwin Croswell, William C. Bouck, Daniel S. Dickinson, Henry
A. Foster, and Horatio Seymour led the Conservatives; Michael Hoffman,
John A. Dix, and Azariah C. Flagg marshalled the Radicals. When the
Conservatives, "hankering" after the offices, accepted unconditionally
the annexation of Texas, they were called Hunkers. In like manner, the
Radicals who sustained the Wilmot Proviso now became Barnburners,
being likened to the farmer who burned his barn to get rid of rats.
William L. Marcy, Silas Wright, Benjamin F. Butler, and the Van
Burens took no part in the canal controversy; but after Martin Van
Buren's defeat in 1844 Marcy became a prominent Hunker and entered
Polk's Cabinet, while Wright, Butler, and the Van Burens