Buren's bucolic tastes, and no doubt greatly mitigated the anguish
arising from bitter defeat, the proscription of friends, and the loss
of party regard which he was destined to suffer during the next
decade.

CHAPTER IV

HUMILIATION OF THE WHIGS

1841-1842

The Whig state convention, assembled at Syracuse on October 7, 1842,
looked like the ghost of its predecessor in 1840. The buoyancy which
then stamped victory on every face had given place to fear and
forebodings. Eighteen months had left nothing save melancholy
recollections. Even the log cabins, still in place, seemed to add to
Whig depression, being silent reminders of the days when melody and
oratory, prophetic of success, filled hearts which could no longer be
touched with hope and faith. This meant that the Whigs, in the
election of 1841, had suffered a decisive defeat, losing the Assembly,
the Senate, and most of the congressmen. Even Francis Granger, whose
majority usually ran into the thousands, was barely elected by five
hundred. Orleans County, at one time the centre of the anti-masonic
crusade, sent Sanford E. Church to Albany, the first Democrat to break
into the Assembly from the "infected district" since the abduction of
William Morgan.

Several reasons accounted for this change. Harrison's death, within a
month after his inauguration, made John Tyler President, and Tyler
first refused appointments to Whigs, and then vetoed the bill, passed
by a Whig Congress, re-establishing the United States Bank. He said
that he had been opposed, for twenty-five years, to the exercise of
such a power, if any such power existed under the Constitution. This
completed the break with the party that elected him. Henry Clay
denounced his action, the Cabinet, except Webster, resigned in a body,
and the Whigs with great unanimity indorsed the Kentucky statesman for
President in 1844. To add to the complications in New York, John C.
Spencer, who now became secretary of war, so zealously espoused and
warmly defended the President that feelings of mutual distrust and
ill-will soon grew up between him and Weed. It is doubtful if any New
York Whig, at a time of such humiliation, could have accepted place in
Tyler's Cabinet and remained on terms of political intimacy with Weed;
but, of all men, John C. Spencer was the least likely to do so. In
Freeman's celebrated cartoon, "The Whig Drill," Spencer is the only
man in the squad out of step with Thurlow Weed, the d