Republican governor; and confidence of success, mingled with an
unusual desire to make no mistake, characterised the selection of a
nominee for chief executive. Myron H. Clark, a man of the people, had
made a good governor, but he was too heavily weighted with prohibition
to suit the older public men, who did not take kindly to him. They
turned to Moses H. Grinnell, whose pre-eminence as a large-hearted,
public-spirited merchant always kept him in sight. Grinnell was now
fifty-three years of age. His broad, handsome face showed an absence
of bigotry and intolerance, while the motives that controlled his life
were public and patriotic, not personal. Probably no man in New York
City, since the time John Jay left it, had ever had more admirers. He
was a favourite of Daniel Webster, who appointed Washington Irving
minister to Spain upon his request. This interest in the famous
author, as well as his recent promotion of Dr. Kane's expedition to
the Arctic seas in search of Sir John Franklin, indicated the broad
philanthropy that governed his well-ordered life. But he declined to
accept office. The distinguished house that had borne his name for
twenty-seven years, decided that its senior member could not be
spared, even temporarily, to become governor of the State, and so
Grinnell's official life was limited to a single term in Congress,
although his public life may be said to have spanned nearly two-thirds
of his more than three score years and ten.

Grinnell's decision seemed to leave an open field, and upon the first
ballot John A. King received 91 votes, James S. Wadsworth 72, Simeon
Draper 23, Myron H. Clark 22, and Ira Harris 22. Thurlow Weed and the
wheel horses of Whig descent, however, preferring that the young party
have a governor of their own antecedents, familiar with political
difficulties and guided by firmness and wisdom, had secretly
determined upon King. But Wadsworth, although he quickly felt the
influence of their decision, declined to withdraw. Wadsworth was a
born fighter. In the Free-soil secession of 1847, he proclaimed
uncompromising hostility to the extension of slavery, and he never
changed his position until death ended his gallant and noble service
in the Civil War.

Wadsworth descended from a notable family. His father, James
Wadsworth, a graduate of Yale, leaving his Connecticut home in young
manhood, bought of the Dutch and of the Six Nations twenty thousand
acres in the Genesee Valley, and