ng
Journal_ have manifold reasons for cherishing grateful recollections
of the liberal and abiding confidence and patronage of their party and
friends.

"In conclusion, we cannot withhold an expression of sincere regret
that this letter has been called out. After remaining six years in
'blissful ignorance' of its contents, we should have preferred to have
ever remained so. It jars harshly upon cherished memories. It destroys
ideals of disinterestedness and generosity which relieved political
life from so much that is selfish, sordid, and rapacious."

Henry B. Stanton once asked Seward, directly, if he did not think it
would have been better to let Greeley have office. "Mr. Seward looked
at me intently, rolled out a cloud of tobacco smoke, and then slowly
responded: 'I don't know but it would.'"[578] It is doubtful, however,
if Seward ever forgave a New Yorker who contributed to his defeat.
Lincoln spoke of him as "without gall," but Stanton declared him a
good hater who lay in wait to punish his foes. Greeley, James S.
Wadsworth, William Cullen Bryant, and David Dudley Field,
conspicuously led the opposition, and if he failed to annihilate them
all it is because some of them did not give him a chance to strike
back. Greeley caught the first knockout blow in February, 1861; and in
1862, says Stanton, "he doubtless defeated James S. Wadsworth for
governor of New York. Wadsworth, who was then military commander of
Washington, told me that Seward was 'dead against him' all through the
campaign."[579]

[Footnote 578: H.B. Stanton, _Random Recollections_, pp. 199, 200.]

[Footnote 579: _Ibid._, p. 216.]

CHAPTER XXIV

THE FIGHT OF THE FUSIONISTS

1860

After the return of the Softs from Baltimore the condition of the
Democratic party became a subject of much anxiety. Dean Richmond's
persistent use of the unit rule had driven the Hards into open
rebellion, and at a great mass-meeting, held at Cooper Institute and
addressed by Daniel S. Dickinson, it was agreed to hold a Breckenridge
and Lane state convention at Syracuse on August 8. At the appointed
time three hundred delegates appeared, representing every county, but
with the notable exception of the chairman, Henry S. Randall, the
biographer of Thomas Jefferson, who had advocated the Wilmot Proviso
in 1847, written the Buffalo platform in 1848, and opposed the
fugitive slave law in 1850, practically all of them had steadily
opposed the Free-soil influence