ntinued to urge that policy as the key to the
campaign as well as to New York's commerce. But after the votes were
counted the Whigs discovered that they had played a losing game. Two
minor state officers out of eight, with a tie in the Senate and two
majority in the Assembly, summed up their possessions. The defeat of
George W. Patterson for comptroller greatly distressed his friends,
and the loss of the canal board, with all its officers, plunged the
whole Whig party into grief. Several reasons for this unexpected
result found advocates in the press. There were evidences of
infidelity in some of the up-state counties, especially in the Auburn
district, where Samuel Blatchford's law partnership with Seward had
defeated him for justice of the Supreme Court; but the wholesale
proscription in New York City by Administration or "Cotton Whigs," as
they were called, fully accounted for the overthrow. It was taken as a
declaration of war against Sewardism. "The majorities against
Patterson and his defeated associates," said the _Tribune_, in its
issue of November 20, "imply that no man who is recognised as a
friend of Governor Seward and a condemner of the fugitive slave law
must be run on our state ticket hereafter, or he will be beaten by the
Cotton influence in this city." Hamilton Fish took a similar view. "A
noble, glorious party has been defeated--destroyed--by its own
leaders," he wrote Weed. "Webster has succeeded better under Fillmore
than he did under Tyler in breaking up the Whig organisation and
forming a third party. I pity Fillmore. Timid, vacillating, credulous,
unjustly suspicious when approached by his prejudices, he has allowed
the sacrifice of that confiding party which has had no honours too
high to confer upon him. It cannot be long before he will realise the
tremendous mistake he has made."[408]

[Footnote 408: Thurlow Weed Barnes, _Life of Thurlow Weed_, Vol. 2, p.
196.]

What Hamilton Fish said the great majority of New York Whigs thought,
and in this frame of mind they entered the presidential campaign of
1852. Fillmore, Scott, and Webster were the candidates. Fillmore had
not spared the use of patronage to further his ambition. It mattered
not that the postmaster at Albany was the personal friend of Thurlow
Weed, or that the men appointed upon the recommendation of Seward were
the choice of a majority of their party, the proscription extended to
all who disapproved the Silver-Grays' bolt of 1850, o