an G. Younglove for speaker. They were dominated,
also, by the favourite doctrine of political leaders that organisation
must be maintained and victory won at any cost save by a revolution in
party policy, and they entered the senatorial contest with a courage
as sublime as it was relentless. Their chief, too, possessed the
confidence of the party. His radicalism needed no sponsors. Besides,
his four years' service as governor, strengthened by the veto of
several bills calculated to increase the public burdens, had received
the unmistakable approval of the people.

Nevertheless he was heavily handicapped. Greeley, still smarting under
Fenton's failure to support him for governor in 1868, declared for
Marshall O. Roberts, while Noah Davis, surprised at his insincerity,
aided Morgan. If Greeley's grievance had merit, Davis' resentment was
certainly justified. The latter claimed that after Conkling's election
in 1867, Fenton promised to support him in 1869, and that upon the
Governor's advice, to avoid the prejudice against a judge who engaged
in politics, he had resigned from the Supreme Court and made a winning
race for Congress.[1213]

[Footnote 1213: New York _World_, January 6, 1869.]

But the _Commercial Advertiser_, a journal then conducted by
Conservatives, placed the most serious obstacle in Fenton's pathway,
charging that an intimate friend of the Governor had received $10,000
on two occasions after the latter had approved bills for the New York
Dry Dock and the Erie Railroad Companies.[1214] Although the _Sun_
promptly pronounced it "a remarkable piece of vituperation,"[1215] and
the _Tribune_, declaring "its source of no account," called it "a most
scurrilous diatribe,"[1216] the leading Democratic journal of the State
accepted it as "true."[1217] The story was not new. In the preceding
summer, during an investigation into the alleged bribery of members of
the Legislature of 1868, Henry Thompson, an Erie director, was asked
if his company paid Governor Fenton any money for approving the bill
legalising the acts of its directors in the famous "Erie war."
Thompson refused to answer as the question fell without the scope of
the committee's jurisdiction. Thereupon Thomas Murphy testified that
Thompson told him that he saw two checks of $10,000 each paid to
Hamilton Harris, the Governor's legal adviser, under an agreement that
Fenton should sign the bill. Murphy added that afterwards, as chairman
of a Republican