r and voted for the bill. His close friend, Silas
Wright of New York, also voted for it. Benton says he deemed both the
votes to be political and given from policy. So they probably were....
Van Buren never deserved to be called a 'Northern man with Southern
principles.' But this vote came nearer to an excuse for the epithet
than did any other act of his career."--Edward M. Shepard, _Life of
Martin Van Buren_, p. 277.]

Van Buren's prompt action gave him the confidence and support of
three-fourths of the slave-holding States, without losing his hold
upon the Democracy of the free States. Indeed, there was nothing new
that the Whigs could oppose to Van Buren. They were not ready to take
the anti-slavery side of the issue, and questions growing out of the
bank controversy had practically been settled in 1832. This,
therefore, was the situation when the two parties in New York
assembled in convention, in September, 1836, to nominate state
candidates. Marcy and John Tracy were without opposition. From the
first moment he began to administer the affairs of the State, Marcy
must have felt that he had found his work at last.

The Whigs were far from being united. Henry Clay's disinclination to
become a nominee for President resulted in two Whig candidates, Hugh
L. White of Tennessee, the favourite of the southern Whigs, and
William Henry Harrison, preferred by the Eastern, Middle, and Western
States. This weakness was soon reflected in New York. Thurlow Weed was
full of forebodings, and William H. Seward found his law office more
satisfactory than a candidate's berth. Like Clay he was perfectly
willing another should bear the burden of inevitable defeat. So the
Whigs put up Jesse Buel for governor, Gamaliel H. Barstow for
lieutenant-governor, and an electoral ticket favourable to Harrison.

Jesse Buel was not a brilliant man. He was neither a thinker, like
Seward, nor an orator, like Granger; but he was wise, wealthy, and
eminently respectable, with enough of the statesman in him to be able
to accept established facts and not to argue with the inexorable.
Years before, he had founded the Albany _Argus_, editing it with
ability and great success. Through its influence he became state
printer, succeeding Solomon Southwick, after the latter's quarrel with
Governor Tompkins over the Bank of America. This was in 1813. Three
years later Thurlow Weed, then a young man of nineteen, worked for him
as a journeyman printer. "From Janu