ention is worthy of notice. The
great influence of the Anti-Renters who held the balance of power in
the convention of 1846 had disappeared. The Governor's anti-rent
friends urged his renomination with the earnest voice of a brave
people; but John Young was destined to be the comet of a season only.
His course in respect to appointments and to the Mexican War had
alienated Thurlow Weed, and his pardon of the anti-rent rioters
estranged the conservative Whigs. Although a shrewd politician, with
frank and affable manners, as an administrative officer he lacked the
tact displayed so abundantly as a legislator; and its absence
seriously handicapped him. Twenty delegates measured his strength in a
convention that took forty-nine votes to nominate. Under the Taylor
administration, Young received an appointment as assistant treasurer
in New York City--the office given to William C. Bouck in 1846--but
his career may be said to have closed the moment he promised to pardon
a lot of murderous rioters to secure an election as governor. With
that, he passed out of the real world of state-craft into the class of
politicians whose ambition and infirmities have destroyed their
usefulness. He died in April, 1852, at the age of fifty.

Hamilton Fish was the favourite candidate for governor in the Utica
convention. His sympathies leaned toward the conservatives of his
party; but the moderation of his speech and his conciliatory manners
secured the good wishes of both factions, and he received seventy-six
votes on the first ballot. Fish was admittedly one of the most popular
young men in New York City. He had never sought or desired office. In
1842, the friends of reform sent him to Congress from a strong
Democratic district, and in 1846, after repeatedly and peremptorily
declining, the Whig convention, to save the party from disruption,
compelled him to take the nomination for lieutenant-governor on the ticket
with John Young. In 1847, after Addison Gardiner, by his appointment
to the Court of Appeals, had vacated the lieutenant-governorship,
the convention, in resentment of Fish's defeat by the Anti-Renters,
again forced his nomination for the same office, and his election
followed by thirty thousand majority. Fish was now thirty-nine years
old, with more than two-score and five years to live. He was to become
a United States senator, and to serve, for eight years, with
distinguished ability, as secretary of state in the Cabinet of
Pres