t_ was to come. Van Buren understood well
enough that Clinton's strength with the people was not as a politician
or Republican leader, but as a stubborn, indefatigable advocate of the
canal; and that, so long as the Bucktails opposed his scheme, their
control of appointments could not overthrow him. Van Buren, therefore,
determined to silence this opposition. Just how he did it is not of
record. It was said, at the time, that a caucus was held of Clinton's
opponents; but, however it was done, it must have required all Van
Buren's strength of will and art of persuasion to sustain him in the
midst of so many difficulties--difficulties which were greatly
increased by the unfriendly conduct of Erastus Root, and two or three
senators from the southern district, including Peter Sharpe,
afterward speaker of the Assembly. Yet the fact that he accomplished
it, and with such secrecy that Clinton's friends did not know how it
was brought about, showed the quiet and complete control exercised by
Van Buren over the members of the Bucktail party. The _National
Advocate_, edited by Mordecai Manesseh Noah, a conspicuous figure in
politics for forty years and one of the most unrelenting partisans of
his day, had supported Tammany in its long and bitter antagonism to
the canal with a malevolence rarely equalled in that or any other day.
He measured pens with Israel W. Clarke of the Albany _Register_, who
had so ably answered every point that Noah charged their authorship to
Clinton himself. But after Van Buren had spoken, the _Advocate_,
suddenly, as if by magic, changed its course, and, with the rest of
the Bucktail contingent, rallied to the support of Clinton's pet
scheme with arguments as sound and full of clear good sense as the
Governor himself could wish. The people, however, had good reason to
know that statesmen were not all and always exactly as they professed
to be; and the immediate effect of the Bucktail change of heart
amounted to little more than public notice that the canal policy was a
complete success, and that Tammany and its friends had discovered that
further opposition was useless.

CHAPTER XXIV

RE-ELECTION OF RUFUS KING

1819-1820

Although Clinton's canal policy now dominated Bucktails as well as
Clintonians, eliminating all differences as to public measures, the
bitterness between these factions increased until the effort to elect
a United States senator to succeed Rufus King resulted in a complete