w-Nothing vote of 122,000,
with Clark and Seymour running close to 156,000 each, and Bronson with
less than 35,000. The people did not seem to have been thinking about
Bronson at all. Seymour's veto commended the Governor to the larger
cities, and it swept him on like a whirlwind. New York gave him
26,000. His election was conceded by the Whigs and claimed by the
Democrats; but, after several weeks of anxious waiting, the official
count made Clark the governor by a plurality of 309.[451] Including
defective votes plainly intended for Seymour, Clark's plurality was
only 153. Raymond ran 600 ahead of Clark, but his plurality over
Ludlow was 20,000, since the latter's vote was 20,000 less than
Seymour's. These twenty thousand preferred to vote for Elijah Ford of
Buffalo, who ran for lieutenant-governor on the ticket with Bronson,
possibly because of Ludlow's alleged perfidy at the Syracuse
convention. Of the congressmen elected, twenty-five were Whigs, three
Softs, two Anti-Nebraskans, and three Know-Nothings; in the Assembly
there were eighty-one Whigs, twenty-six Softs, and seventeen Hards.

[Footnote 451: Myron H. Clark, 156,804; Horatio Seymour, 156,495;
Daniel Ullman, 122,282; Green C. Bronson, 33,850.--_Civil List, State
of New York_ (1887), p. 166.]

The result of the election could scarcely be called a Whig victory;
but it was a popular rebuke to the Nebraska bill. Clark's majority,
slender as it finally appeared by the official count, was due to the
Whigs occupying common ground with Free-soilers who discarded party
attachments in behalf of their cherished convictions. The Silver-Grays
found a home with the Hards and the Know-Nothings, and many Democrats,
unwilling to go to the Whigs, voted for Ullman.

It was the breaking-up of old parties. The great political crisis
which had been threatening the country for many years was about to
burst, and, like the first big raindrops that precede a downpour, the
changes in 1854 announced its presence. It had been so long in coming
that John W. Taylor of Saratoga, the champion opponent of the Missouri
Compromise, was dying when Horace Greeley, at the anti-Nebraska
convention held in Taylor's home in August, 1854, was writing into the
platform of the new Republican party the principles that Taylor tried
to write into the old Republican party in 1820. "Whoever reads
Taylor's speeches in that troubled period," says Stanton, "will find
them as sound in doctrine, as strong in