imated at twenty thousand
dollars, an extravagant sum in days when eight hundred dollars met the
expense of an average family, and the possessor of fifty thousand
dollars was considered a rich man. Besides, his wife had inherited
from her father, Walter Franklin, a wealthy member of the Society of
Friends, an estate valued at forty thousand dollars, making her one of
the richest women in New York.

But Clinton had more than rich fees and a wealthy wife. The foreign
element, especially the Irish, admired him because, when a United
States senator, he had urged and secured a reduction of the period of
naturalisation from fourteen years to five; and because he relieved
the political and financial distress of their countrymen, by aiding
the repeal of the alien and sedition laws. For a score of years,
America had invited to its shores every fugitive from British
persecution. But the heroes of 'Ninety-eight, who had escaped the
gibbet, and successfully made their way to this country through the
cordon of English frigates, were welcomed with laws even more
offensive than the coercion acts which they had left behind. The last
rebellious uprising to occur in Ireland under the Georges, had sent
Thomas Addis Emmet, brother of the famous and unfortunate Irish
patriot, a fugitive to the land of larger liberty. To receive this
brother with laws that might send him back to death, was to despise
the national sentiment of Irishmen; and the men, Clinton declared, who
had been indisposed or unable to take account of the force of a
national sentiment, were not and never could be fit to carry on the
great work of government.

Thoughtful, however, as DeWitt Clinton had been of the oppressed in
other lands, he lacked what Dean Swift said Bolingbroke needed--"a
small infusion of the alderman." If he thought a man stupid he let him
know it. To those who disagreed with him, he was rude and overbearing.
All of what is known as the "politician's art" he professed to
despise; and while Tammany organised wards into districts, and
districts into blocks, Clinton pinned his faith on the supremacy of
intellect, and on office-holding friends. The day the news of his
nomination for lieutenant-governor reached New York, Tammany publicly
charged him with attempting "to establish in his person a pernicious
family aristocracy;" with making complete devotion "the exclusive test
of merit and the only passport to promotion;" and with excluding
himself from the