m L. Chaplin and Joseph Plumb.

The convention of the Silver-Grays, held at Utica in October, did not
exalt its members. It was simply a protest. A lion-hearted man had
presumed to voice his convictions, and, although the convention
favoured exercising a liberal spirit of toleration toward the
compromise measures, it refused to exercise such a spirit toward
William H. Seward, or to tolerate him at all. It gave the President a
flattering indorsement for his approval of the fugitive slave law, it
accepted Washington Hunt as its nominee for governor, and it listened
to several addresses, among them one from James O. Putnam of Buffalo;
but the proceedings lacked the enthusiasm that springs from a clear
principle, backed by a strong and resolute band of followers. The
speech of Putnam, however, attracted wide attention. Putnam was a
young man then, less than thirty-three years old, passionately devoted
to Daniel Webster, and a personal friend of Millard Fillmore. As a
speaker he was polished, smooth, and refined, and even when
impassioned kept his passion well within conventional bounds. On this
occasion his mellow and far-reaching voice, keyed to the pitch of
sustained rhetoric, dropped his well-balanced and finely moulded
sentences into the convention amidst hearty applause. He did not then
see with the clearness of Seward's vision. He belonged rather to the
more enlightened and intelligent conservatives who had begun to feel
the ultimate disaster slavery must bring, and who desired that such
disaster should be put off as long as possible; but the day was soon
to dawn in which he would become a loyal supporter of the principles
that were to be forever settled in the civil strife which Seward so
vividly portrayed in the speech that created the Silver-Grays.

The recently adopted compromise did not become an issue in the New
York campaign of 1850. If its opponents could not approve, they deemed
silence wise. The followers of Fillmore in the up-state counties
generally acted with the Seward men in support of Washington Hunt; but
a great meeting, held at Castle Garden, near the close of the
campaign, partially succeeded in uniting Democrats and Administration
Whigs in New York City. A letter was read from Daniel Webster, calling
upon all good citizens not to rekindle the flames of "useless and
dangerous controversy;" resolutions favouring a vigorous enforcement
of the fugitive slave law were adopted; and a coalition ticket wi