ley, the
Radical leaders, chastened by the defeat of Wadsworth and the election
of Morgan to the Senate, did not now forget the value of discretion.
Hunt's selection as temporary chairman had been a concession, and in
the choice of a permanent presiding officer, although absolutely
unyielding in their hostility to Morgan, they graciously accepted
Abraham Wakeman, an apostle of the conservative school.[911] Their
attitude toward Morgan, however, cost Opdyke a place on the State
Committee, and for a time threatened to exclude the Radicals from
recognition upon the ticket.

[Footnote 911: Wakeman was postmaster at New York City.]

The refusal of men to accept nominations greatly embarrassed
Conservatives in harvesting their victory. Thomas W. Olcott of Albany
was nominated for comptroller in place of Lucius Robinson. Of all the
distinguished men who had filled that office none exhibited a more
inflexible firmness than Robinson in holding the public purse strings.
He was honest by nature and by practice. Neither threats nor ingenious
devices disturbed him, but with a fidelity as remarkable as it was
rare he pushed aside the emissaries of extravagance and corruption as
readily as a plow turns under the sod. After two years of such
methods, however, the representatives of a wide-open treasury noisily
demanded a change. But Olcott, a financier of wide repute, wisely
declined to be used for such a purpose, and Robinson was accepted.

Daniel S. Dickinson, after the inconsequential treatment accorded him
in the recent contest for United States senator, suddenly discovered
that domestic reasons disabled him from serving longer as
attorney-general. Then James T. Brady declined, although tendered the
nomination without a dissenting voice. This reduced the convention,
in its search for a conspicuous War Democrat, to the choice of John
Cochrane, the well-known orator who had left the army in the preceding
February. In choosing a Secretary of State the embarrassment
continued. Greeley encouraged the candidacy of Chauncey M. Depew, but
concluded, at the last moment, that Peter A. Porter, the colonel of a
regiment and a son of the gallant general of the war of 1812, must
head the ticket.[912] Porter, however, refused to exchange a military
for a civil office, and Depew was substituted.

[Footnote 912: "Porter received 213 votes to 140 for Depew, who made a
remarkable run under the circumstances."--New York _Herald_, September
3, 186