Martling
opposition has ruined them forever. The public mind was never in a
better train for useful operations. John Townsend has just come from
the west. There is but one sentiment."[204] Yet, when the battle
ended, it looked like a Clintonian defeat and Bucktail victory; for
the latter had swept the Legislature, adding to their control in the
Senate and capturing the Assembly by a majority of eighteen over all.
It was only the presence of Tompkins among the slain that transferred
the real glory to Clinton, whose majority was fourteen hundred and
fifty-seven in a total vote of ninety-three thousand four hundred and
thirty-seven. This exceeded any former aggregate by nearly ten
thousand.[205]

[Footnote 202: Charles R. King, _Life and Correspondence of Rufus
King_, Vol. 6, p. 331.]

[Footnote 203: _Ibid._, Vol. 6, p. 332.]

[Footnote 204: DeWitt Clinton to Henry Post, in _Harper's Magazine_,
Vol. 50, p. 413.]

[Footnote 205: DeWitt Clinton, 47,444; Daniel D. Tompkins,
45,990.--_Civil List, State of New York_ (1887), p. 166.]

Daniel D. Tompkins took his defeat much to heart. He believed his
unsettled accounts had occasioned whispered slanders that crushed him.
After his angry controversy with Comptroller McIntyre, in the
preceding year, he seriously considered the propriety of resigning as
Vice President; for he sincerely believed his figures were right and
that the Comptroller's language had classed him in the public mind
with what, in these latter days, would be called "grafters." "Our
friend on Staten Island is unfortunately sick in body and mind,"
Clinton wrote to Post in September, 1819. "His situation upon the
whole is deplorable and calculated to excite sympathy."[206] It was,
indeed, a most unfortunate affair, for the State discovered, years
after it was too late, that it did owe the War Governor ninety-two
thousand dollars.

[Footnote 206: DeWitt Clinton's Letters to Henry Post, in _Harper's
Magazine_, Vol. 50, p. 413.]

Tompkins' public life continued four years longer. In the autumn of
1820, the Legislature balanced his accounts and the country re-elected
him Vice President. The next year his party made him a delegate to the
constitutional convention, and the convention made him its president;
but he never recovered from the chagrin and mortification of his
defeat for the governorship. Soon after the election, melancholy
accounts appeared of the havoc wrought upon a frame once so full of
animal spi