defence met a storm of personal denunciation that broke from
the ranks of the Know-Nothings; but his speech minimised their
opposition and inspired Seward's forces to work out a magnificent
victory. "Our friends are in good spirits and reasonably confident,"
wrote Seward. "Our adversaries are not confident, and are out of
temper."[456] Finally, on February 1, the caucus met. Five Whig
senators and twenty assemblymen, representing the bulk of the
opposition, were absent; but of the eighty present, seventy-four voted
for Seward. This stifled the hope of the Silver-Gray Know-Nothings.
Indeed, several of Seward's opponents now fell into line, giving him
eighteen out of thirty-one votes in the Senate and sixty-nine out of
one hundred and twenty-six in the Assembly. The five dissenting Whig
senators voted for Fillmore, Ullman, Ogden Hoffman, Preston King, and
George R. Babcock of Buffalo. Of the nineteen opposing Whig votes in
the Assembly, Washington Hunt received nine and Fillmore four. When
the two houses compared the vote in joint session, Henry J. Raymond,
the lieutenant-governor, announced with evident emotion to a
sympathetic audience which densely packed the Assembly chamber, that
"William H. Seward was duly elected as a senator of the United States
for six years from the fourth of March, 1855."

[Footnote 456: F.W. Seward, _Life of W.H. Seward_, Vol. 2, p. 243.]

Seward did not visit Albany or Auburn during the contest. A patent
suit kept him busy in New York City until the middle of January, after
which he returned to his place in the Senate. He professed to "have
the least possible anxiety about it," writing Weed early in December
that "I would not have you suffer one moment's pain on the ground
that I am not likely to be content and satisfied with whatever may
happen;"[457] yet a letter written five months afterward, on his
fifty-fifth birthday, gives a glimpse of what defeat would have meant
to him. "How happy I am," he says, "that age and competence bring no
serious and permanent disappointment to sour and disgust me with
country or mankind."[458] To Weed he shows a heart laden with
gratitude. "I snatch a minute," he writes, "to express not so much my
deep and deepened gratitude to you, as my amazement at the magnitude
and complexity of the dangers through which you have conducted our
shattered bark, and the sagacity and skill with which you have saved
us from so imminent a wreck."[459] But Seward was not more