"A Band of Brigands": Albany Lawmakers and Republican National Politics, 1860

"A BAND OF BRIGANDS": ALBANY LAWMAKERS AND REPUBLICAN NATIONAL POLITICS, 1860 Mark W. Summers Ever a jaundiced ohskhveh of New York politics, former Whig leader and elder statesman D. D. Barnard had more reason than usual to fulminate as he examined the 1860 legislature. Republican lawmakers had turned it into a "robber encampment," he wrote Hamilton Fish. "It has been a band of brigands. . . . Those who have fallen into their hands & been held for ransom have of course been obliged to buy their liberty and peace at the best terms they could make." Long alienated from antislavery leadership, Barnard always saw his enemies as freebooters, but in this case, he simply echoed a universal sentiment. "The Legislature is rotten to the core," wrote editor Horace Greeley."' 1 D.D. Barnard to Hamilton Fish, April 16, Fish Papers, LC; Horace Greeley to Edwin Morgan, March 22, 1860, Morgan Papers, New York State Department of Archives and History. The corruption issue in 1860 has been covered well by David E. Meerse, "Buchanan, Corruption and the Election of 1860," Civil War History 12 (June 1966): 116-31, and G. S. Boritt, "Was Lincoln a Vulnerable Candidate in 1860?" Civil War History 27 (March 1981): 32-48, though neither of them gives more than a few lines to the connection between Seward and New York corruption—nor is that their intention. On the nomination of Lincoln, fundamental works include Reinhard H. Luthin, The First Lincoln Campaign (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1944), pp. 136-67 (who never brings up the corruption issue at all) and David M. Potter, The Impending Crisis (New York: 1976). A more valuable and revealing account of the convention sessions appears in William B. Hesseltine, ed., Three Against Lincoln: Murat Habtead Reports the Caucuses of I860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1960). Glydon Van Deusen's William Henry Seward (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967) does not discuss the corruption, though it admits that some delegates may have been influenced by tales of peculation, "perhaps only a few" (p. 225). Jeter Allen lsely's Horace Greeley and the Republican Party, 1853-1861:A Study of the New York Tribune (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1947), pp. 277-84,suggests that one of these so influenced may have been Greeley, and recounts the editor's rage at the nefarious doings in Albany. On the "Gridiron Legislature," the best work is still the few pages in Van Deusen's balanced biography of Thurlow Weed. As will be obvious, this papers sees corruption differently than Boritt or Meerse. Conceding the tactical disadvantages of running shady candidate, 1 believe that there were strong ideological underpinnings to Republicans' objection to the nomination of a man so closely tied to the "Gridiron Legislature's" guiding spirit, and that the sense of repulsion and outrage was very real; certainly it did not die once Seward's bid for the nomi- 102CIVIL WAR history Compared to the issues of slavery and secession, grafting assemblymen seem too parochial a concern for historians to discuss. Nor would the "Gridiron Legislature's" sins compare with the sensational plundering by the Tweed Ring a decade later. Historians have noted the tactical value of Democratic corruption to the Republican canvass of 1860; they have mentioned in passing the influence of New York's unsavory reputation on the Republicans' choice of nominees before hastening on to matters of greater significance. But all of them treat that corruption as a trivial, if tawdry, affair. In its own way, however, the 1860 legislature and the 1860 election returns were indissolubly linked: the pillage could not have taken place without the realities of the coming campaign , and the campaign itself turned on the way in which Republicans responded to the corruption of their own officials. In the process, party members revealed much about themselves, none more so than former Democrats and present radicals. From the first thump of the Speaker's gavel, the 1860 General Assembly had a shady reputation among radical Republicans. The 1859 elections had been won through a coalition with former Know-Nothings and independent Whigs, whose interest in antislavery had come second to their love for the Union. The New York Evening Post branded...