Page:Life of Henry Clay (Schurz; v. 2).djvu/275

Rh stuffing; and there was much to prove the justice of these complaints. It was also said that the excitement produced by the war of the “Native Americans” against the Catholics, which in May had led to bloody riots in Philadelphia, had driven the whole “foreign vote” upon the Democratic side, and thereby injured Clay, — especially through the unpopularity in that quarter of the Whig candidate for the vice-presidency, Theodore Frelinghuysen, who was a stern anti-Catholic. But all these causes would not have been sufficient to defeat Clay had he held on his side that anti-slavery vote which his Alabama letter drove from the Whigs to Birney. It is absurd to attribute the result of an election to accident, when it clearly appears that a number of voters sufficient to turn the scale were determined in their action by the character or conduct of one of the candidates with regard to the principal matter at issue. The object of Clay's highest ambition escaped him because, at the decisive moment, he was untrue to himself.

The masses of the Whig party, while the managers noticed the adverse current, firmly expected success to the very last. It seemed impossible to them that Henry Clay could be defeated by James K. Polk. Everything hung on New York. The returns from the interior of the state came slowly. There seemed to be still a possibility that heavy Whig majorities in the western counties might overcome the large Democratic vote in the eastern.