fitness for the
high office to which he had suddenly fallen heir by several excellent
appointments to the Superior Court, just then created for the city of
New York. He honoured himself further by restoring the rule, so rudely
broken by Clinton, of offering the chancellorship to Chief Justice
Savage, and, upon his declining it, to Reuben H. Walworth, then a
young and most promising circuit judge. Later in the year, he named
Daniel Mosely for the seventh circuit vacated by the resignation of
Enos T. Throop, soon to become lieutenant-governor. These appointments
marked him as a wise and safe executive. Van Buren understood this,
and his correspondence with Hamilton, and others, while absent in the
west, affords many interesting glimpses into his political methods in
their immodest undress. As the candidate for governor, he was very
active just now. His letters indicate that he gave personal attention
to the selection of all delegates, and that he wanted only those in
whom reliance could be absolutely placed. "Your views about the
delegates are correct," he says to Hamilton. "It would be hazarding
too much to make out a list." A list might contain names of men who
could not be safely trusted at such a supreme moment; and Van Buren
naturally desired that his nomination should be enthusiastically
unanimous. The slightest protest from some disappointed friend of
Nathaniel Pitcher, who was to be sacrificed for Throop, or of Joseph
C. Yates, who was spending his years in forced retirement at
Schenectady, would take away the glory and dull the effect of what was
intended to be a sudden and unanimous uprising of the people's free
and untrammelled delegates in favour of the senior United States
senator, the Moses of the newly-born Democratic party.

The anticipated trouble at the Herkimer convention, however, did not
appear. Delegates were selected to nominate Martin Van Buren and Enos
T. Throop, and, after they had carried out the programme with
unanimity, Pitcher ceased to act with the Jackson party. But the
contest between the opposing parties proved exceedingly bitter and
malevolent. It resembled the scandalous campaign of John Adams and
Thomas Jefferson in 1800, and the more recent Blaine and Cleveland
canvass of 1884. Everything that could be tortured into apparent wrong
was served up to listening thousands. Van Buren had about him the
genius of Edwin Croswell, the unerring judgment of Benjamin F. Butler,
the wisdom of Will