for governor, and
Nicholas Fish for lieutenant-governor. Fish is little known to the
present generation except as the father of Hamilton Fish, the able
secretary of state in President Grant's Cabinet; but in his day
everybody knew of him, and everybody admitted his capacity and
patriotism. His distinguished gallantry during the Revolution won him
the confidence of Washington and the intimate friendship of Hamilton,
after whom he named his illustrious son. For many years he was
adjutant-general of the State, president of the New York Society of
the Cincinnati, and a representative Federalist. It is said that Aaron
Burr felt rebuked in his presence, because he recognised in him those
high qualities of noble devotion to principle which the grandson of
Jonathan Edwards well knew were wanting in his own character. Just now
Fish was fifty-two years old, a member of the New York Board of
Aldermen, and an inveterate opponent of Republicanism, chafing under
DeWitt Clinton's dictatorship in the State and Tammany's control in
the city.

Jonas Platt had borne an important part in propping up falling
Federalism. He was a born fighter. Though somewhat uncouth in
expression and unrefined in manner, he had won for himself a proud
position at the bar of his frontier home, and was rapidly writing his
name high on the roll of New York statesmen. He had proved his
popularity by carrying his senatorial district in the preceding
election; and he had demonstrated his ability as a debater by replying
to the arguments of DeWitt Clinton with a power that comes only from
wide information and a consciousness of being in the right. He could
not be turned aside from the real issue. Whatever or whoever had
provoked the British Orders in Council, he declared, one thing was
certain, those orders could not have driven American commerce from the
ocean had not the embargo established British commerce in its place.
This was the weak point in the policy of Jefferson, and the strong
point in the argument of Jonas Platt. Five hundred and thirty-seven
vessels, aggregating over one hundred and eighty thousand tons, had
been tied up in New York alone; and the public revenues collected at
its custom house had dropped from four and a half millions to nothing.
History concedes that embargo, since it required a much greater
sacrifice at home than it caused abroad, utterly failed as a weapon
for coercing Europe; and with redoubled energy and prodigious effect,
Plat