e, trembling lest he rouse the sleeping opposition of the
Radicals, or fail to meet the expectation of friends. But the
recommendation, too expressionless to cheer his friends and too
energetic to suit his opponents, foreshadowed the pitfalls into which
he was to tumble. He had been the first to suggest the Erie
enlargement, and he knew better than any other man in the State how
important was its completion; yet he said as little in its favour as
could be said, if he said anything at all, and that little seemed to
be prompted, not so much for the good of the State, as to satisfy the
demands of ardent friends, who had contributed to his nomination and
election.

Severe criticism of the message, by the radical press, quickly showed
that not even a temporary reconciliation had been effected by the act
of 1842. Had the Governor now been sufficiently endowed with a faculty
for good management, he must have strengthened himself and weakened
his enemies with the vast amount of patronage at his command. Not
since the days of Governor Lewis, had the making of so many
appointments been committed to an executive. The Whigs, under Seward,
had taken every office in the State. But Bouck, practising the
nepotism that characterised Lewis' administration forty years before,
took good care of his own family, and then, in the interest of
harmony, turned whatever was left over to the members of the
Legislature, who selected their own friends regardless of their
relations to the Governor. There is something grim and pathetic in the
picture of the rude awakening of this farmer governor, who, while
working in his own weak way for harmony and conciliation, discovered,
too late, that partisan rivalries and personal ambition had surrounded
him with a cordon of enemies that could not be broken. To add to his
humiliation, it frequently happened that the nominations of those whom
he greatly desired confirmed, were rejected in the Senate by the
united votes of Radicals and Whigs.

The controversy growing out of the election of a state printer to
succeed Thurlow Weed increased the bitterness between the factions.
Edwin Croswell had been removed from this office in 1840, and the
Conservatives now proposed to reinstate him. Croswell had carefully
avoided taking part in the factional contests then beginning to rend
the party. He had supported, apparently in good faith, the "stop and
tax law" of 1842, and, in the campaigns of 1841 and 1842, had been
a