Page:Life of Henry Clay (Schurz; v. 2).djvu/274

264 be allowed to vote for him. I believe his letter will lose us more than two hundred votes in this county (Niagara). Cassius Clay's powerful usefulness is much weakened by the last letter of Mr. Clay. I dread with all his efforts he may not counteract the influence of the letter, coming as it does at this critical moment, when half the abolitionists were on a pivot.”

Polk carried the State of New York over Clay by a majority of 5,080 votes. Birney, the candidate of the Liberty party, received in the same state 15,812 votes, more than twice as many as had been cast for him in 1840 in the whole Union. There is no reasonable doubt that more than half of Birney's vote in New York — two thousand more than were required to give him the state — would have been cast for Clay but for his Alabama letter; and that would have made him President of the United States; for, with Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Vermont, New Jersey, Ohio, Delaware, Maryland, North Carolina, Kentucky, and Tennessee, which he carried, New York would have given him a majority of the electoral college. “The abolition vote lost you the election,” wrote Ambrose Spencer of New York to Clay, “as three fourths of them were firm Whigs converted into abolitionists.” The perpetration of gross and extensive election frauds was charged upon the Democratic party, especially in New York and in Louisiana, through fraudulent naturalizations, organized repeating, and ballot-box