te, the removal
awakened a cyclone of resentment, the members who voted for it being
the storm-centres. At Canandaigua, personal indignities were
threatened.[230] "Several members," says Weed, "were hissed as they
came out of the capitol. Tallmadge received unmistakable evidence, on
his way through State Street to his lodgings, of the great error he
had committed. His hotel was filled with citizens, whose rebukes were
loudly heard as he passed through the hall to his apartment, and as he
nervously paced backward and forward in his parlour, 'the victim of
remorse that comes too late,' he perceived both the depth and the
darkness of the political pit into which he had fallen."[231]

[Footnote 230: _Ibid._, p. 114.]

[Footnote 231: _Ibid._, p. 113.]

Immediately, the tide began setting strongly in favour of Clinton for
governor. Clintonian papers urged it, and personal friends wrote and
rode over the State in his interest. Clinton himself became sanguine
of success. "Tallmadge can scarcely get a vote in his own county," he
wrote Post on the 21st of April. "He is the prince of rascals--if
Wheaton does not exceed him."[232]

[Footnote 232: DeWitt Clinton's Letters to Henry Post, in _Harper's
Magazine_, Vol. 50, p. 569. Clinton seems to have taken a particular
dislike to Henry Wheaton. Elsewhere, he writes to Post: "There is but
one opinion about Wheaton, and that is that he is a pitiful
scoundrel."--_Ibid._, p. 417.]

Meanwhile, a sensation long foreseen by those in the Governor's inner
circle, was about to be sprung. Yates was not a man to be rudely
thrust out of office. He knew he had blundered in opposing an
electoral law, and he now proposed giving the Legislature another
opportunity to enact one. The Regency did not believe there would be
an extra session, because, as Attorney-General Talcott suggested, the
power to convene the Legislature was a high prerogative, the exercise
of which required more decision and nerve than Yates possessed; but,
on the 2nd of June, to the surprise and consternation of the Van Buren
leaders, Yates issued a proclamation reconvening the Legislature on
August 2. It was predicated upon the failure of Congress to amend the
Constitution, upon the recent defeat of the electoral bill in the
Senate, and upon the just alarm of the people, that "their undoubted
right" of choosing presidential electors would be withheld from them.
Very likely, it afforded the Governor much satisfaction to make t