dent of $11,870.50. It was a strange mix-up,
and the more committees examined it the worse appeared the muddle.
After Van Buren had reported, the question arose, should the
Comptroller be sustained, or should the report of Van Buren's
committee be accepted? It was a long drop from $130,000 claimed by
Tompkins to $11,780.50 awarded him by Van Buren, yet it was better to
take that than accept a settlement which made him a defaulter, and the
Senate approved the Van Buren report. But Thomas J. Oakley, chairman
of the Assembly committee to which it was referred, did not propose to
let the candidate for governor escape so easily. In an able review of
the whole question he sustained the Comptroller, maintaining that the
Vice President must seek relief under the law like other parties, and
instructing the Comptroller to sue for any balance due the State,
unless Tompkins reimbursed it by the following August. This ended
legislation for the session.

Van Buren seems to have had no concern about Tompkins' canal record.
Possibly he thought the disappearance of Bucktail opposition took that
issue out of the campaign; but he was greatly worked up over the
unsettled accounts, and in his usual adroit manner set influences to
work to discourage Tompkins' acceptance of the nomination, and to
secure the consent of Smith Thompson, then secretary of the navy, to
make the race himself. He had little difficulty in accomplishing this
end, for Thompson was not at all unwilling. But to get rid of Tompkins
was another question. "The Republican party in this State never was
better united," he wrote Smith Thompson, on January 19, 1820, three
days after Tompkins' nomination; "they all love, honour and esteem the
Vice President; but such is their extreme anxiety to insure the
prostration of the Junto, who have stolen into the seats of power,
that they all desire that you should be the candidate. They will
support Tompkins to the bat's end if you refuse, or he should not
decline; but if he does, and you consent to our wishes, you will be
hailed as the saviour of New York."[198] On the same day Van Buren
also wrote Rufus King: "Some of our friends think it is dangerous to
support the Vice President under existing circumstances.... A few of
us have written him freely on the subject and to meet the event of his
having left the city of Washington, I have sent a copy of our letter
to Secretary Thompson, of which circumstance the Secretary is not
informed.