their candidate,
and if here and there the faint voice of a Conservative suggested that
emancipation was premature and arbitrary arrests were unnecessary, a
shout of offended patriotism drowned the ignoble utterance.

[Footnote 859: New York _Tribune_, October 31, 1862.]

Wadsworth and his party were too much absorbed in the zeal of their
cause not to run counter to the prejudices of men less earnest and
less self-forgetting. In a contest of such bitterness they were
certain to make enemies, whose hostilities would be subtle and
enduring, and the October elections showed that the inevitable
reaction was setting in. Military failure and increasing debt made the
avowed policy of emancipation more offensive. People were getting
tired of bold action without achievement in the field, and every
opponent of the Administration became a threnodist. However,
independent papers which strongly favoured Seymour believed in
Wadsworth's success. "Seymour's antecedents are against him," said the
_Herald_. "Wadsworth, radical as he is, will be preferred by the
people to a Democrat who is believed to be in favour of stopping the
war; because, whatever Wadsworth's ideas about the negro may be, they
are only as dust in the balance compared with his hearty and earnest
support of the war and the Administration."[860] This was the belief
of the Radicals,[861] and upon them the news of Seymour's election by
over 10,000 majority fell with a sickening thud.[862] Raymond declared
it "a vote of want of confidence in the President;"[863] Wadsworth
thought Seward did it;[864] Weed suggested that Wadsworth held "too
extreme party views;"[865] and Greeley insisted that it was "a gang of
corrupt Republican politicians, who, failing to rule the nominating
convention, took revenge on its patriotic candidate by secretly
supporting the Democratic nominee."[866] But the dominant reason was
what George William Curtis called "the mad desperation of
reaction,"[867] which showed its influence in other States as well as
in New York. That Wadsworth's personality had little, if anything, to
do with his overthrow was further evidenced by results in
congressional districts, the Democrats carrying seventeen out of
thirty-one. Even Francis Kernan carried the Oneida district against
Conkling. The latter was undoubtedly embarrassed by personal enemies
who controlled the Welsh vote, but the real cause of his defeat was
military disasters, financial embarrassments, and