tures to insure their bets. Five hundred thousand dollars? With half the money, they could beat the strongest candidate ever presented by any party!

The knowledge of the existence of a powerful majority of the people, equivalent to a similar majority in the electoral colleges, against the party of corruption and fraud, had caused deliberate preparations on their part to nullify the popular will, in the very opening of the year 1844. At that time, their prospects were darkest; and it was amid the alarm of multiplied and accumulating defeats that their desperate resolution was taken never to be defeated for lack of votes, though they lacked voters. In the National Capital, while external dangers and internal strifes shook and rent that once formidable party almost to dissolution, was formed the most awful conspiracy against popular liberty ever known since that of Catiline. The more imminent the peril of that threatened overthrow with its consequent damnation, dreary, hopeless, irretrievable, eternal-the more energetic was the movement to avert such destruction, and the more reckless were the actors as to the moral character of the means necessary for their preservation. This, the details, in due time and place forthcoming, will show.

The spring of 1844 brought a material change of events and movements,-especially of those which centred in the commercial metropolis, by the organization of a third party." Originally operating only to the division and injury of that corrupt party which had been in the ascendency in 1843, had been made, by treachery and folly, a means of disorganizing and weakening the other great party, which was then making preparations for the mighty contest for the recovery of the power in the nation and State, that had been meanly stolen from them after they had so nobly won it in 1840. The original nucleus of rejected office-seekers, in whose revengeful and envious covetousness the new party had its origin, might have been content to secure the overthrow of the faction from which they had seceded, by withholding their 5000 votes from their old associates, and thus allowing the just cause of the other party to succeed. But a want of unity and confidence prevented that unfortunate party from availing themselves of such an opportunity. Unable to appreciate the strength and advantage of their position, they were led to abandon

it and assume all the responsibility of that malignant hostility to naturalized citizens that originated the new movement, and which was before confessedly imputable only to a revolted section of their opponents. They at once sacrificed that respectable portion of the naturalized voters whose confidence in the justice and wisdom of their policy was then strong and fast increasing, and drove them to hostile measures of self-preservation. The coalition with an unprincipled faction, on the assumption of a new and un-republican principle, was fatal to the rising energy of the great national cause.

But while many were induced to commit this folly in thoughtlessness and ignorance, there were others who in part foreknew and purposed the evil. There was a small body of men nominally connected with the betrayed party, insignificant in numbers and influence, odious to the great mass of their old political associates from their opposition to the Presidential candidate who had for years been justly regarded by millions as the representative and embodiment of their principles, and as the man most capable of realizing their hopes and effecting their objects. This little faction, knowing that they had nothing to hope from the man whom they had so long opposed, and so often sought to betray, beheld with small satisfaction the prospect of his election without their aid, in a manner which would render him free from all obligation to them. Few though they were, they were formidable by their great wealth, being almost the only persons in the city who were both able and willing to employ their money freely in politics; and it was their desire and policy that the party with which they were connected should be so placed as to triumph only by their assistance. As soon as the new movement attracted their attention in the autumn of 1843, they saw in it at once the means of creating a powerful independent force, and sought to make the third party a rallying point for their future operations. They joined the new faction, encouraged it by word and by pecuniary contributions, and labored vigorously to give it firmness, consistency and permanence. Their object was to wield a mass of votes which should be essential to the success of the National party with which they were formerly associated, and to elect to the State and National legislatures a separate

body of representatives who would hold the balance of power, and keep the President in check, unless he should yield to their dictation or recognize their claims. Looking still farther forward, they saw in the new party a basis for their operations on the next succeeding Presidential election, when their own favorite candidate, obnoxious to multitudes of his former associates, would be enabled to stand on his own peculiar ground, as the champion of a new cause, independent of that which he had once deserted. These purposes would have been accomplished, but for the success of the system of fraud which was put in operation for the defeat of their enterprise, as well as of the National party on whose triumph their own objects depended. Such a defeat they did not anticipate. They were so confident of the success of the great candidate, that they had imagined it safe to diminish his strength, in order to make him seem to owe his success to the votes which they claimed to control through the new party. This fatal movement was marked by the desperate foe-so vigilant and suspicious; and they did not fail to use all means to profit by it. They immediately roused the whole mass of adopted citizens throughout the Union to a sense of their danger from the success of the new coalition. They everywhere denounced the proposed exclusion of naturalized citizens from office and from the elective franchise, and placed themselves boldly in view as the protectors of the threatened rights of that portion of the people. They thus secured to themselves, in solid mass, many tens and scores of thousands of voters totally indifferent to all other political questions in comparison with the vital interests of their own class. Thousands of educated foreigners, who were before content with a residence under the protection of equal laws, and had neglected the privilege of voting, now rushed with animated zeal into the great political struggle, in which they would otherwise have taken no part. Many others, whose strong personal admiration of the greatest man of the nation had always made them resolve to aid his election, were suddenly driven back from his support by seeing his friends associated with their avowed, malignant enemies.

Management was also used, by the same direction, to prevent any loss to their Presidential and Gubernatorial tickets from the adhesion of their dissatisfied

partisans merely to the third party's nominations for Congress and the State Legislature. Very little effort was necessary. The new party avowedly left its members free to act with their previous political associates severally, in the election of the executive officers of the State and General Government; and they did so. Whatever encouragement was given by knaves to dupes in regard to any proposed "bargain," by which the third party should give its votes to the Presidential Electors of one of the two National parties in return for votes given to their candidates for Congress and the Legisla ture, no man of sense needed any argument to expose a cheat so palpable. There could be no bargain where but one of the parties had anything to give. Every member of the new faction was at the same time a devoted adherent of that one of the two parties with which he had previously agreed, on all points save the boasted "one idea" of exclusion of all but natives from office. There was no power in the coalition, or in any set of men, to transfer a single vote from one of the two original parties to the other; and, since the election, they have declared that fact, and gloried in it.

The action of the great National Conventions of the two parties, for the nomination of candidates for the Presidency, which took place in Baltimore in May, 1844, had in both instances a great modifying effect on the aspect of the contest. In the first case, the nomination for the Presidency had fortunately been forestalled by the action of the people themselves, and was not entrusted to the hurried decision of an accidental assembly of ill-advised political aspirants, collected but for a day or two, and subjected to the management of a few artful manœuvrers and prejudiced, envious, shortsighted intriguers. The nomination for the Vice-Presidency, notwithstanding the woful experience of the time, had been left by the party, without reserve or instruction, to be determined by an incompetent body, who, in conformity with a principle almost universal in its application, hesitating between the three prominent candidates, solved the doubt by hastily throwing their votes for another whose claims had been but for two weeks suggested, and had never been canvassed. They nominated a most eminent, patriotic, and able man, of a fame so nobly elevated, that envious malignity had despaired of reaching it with calumny, yet

of a worth so modest and unobtrusive, that jealous ambition had never been aroused among his political associates by a competition for public honors with his exalted and immaculate excellence. The honor, unsought and unexpected by him, sought him, and was forced upon him with a power that left him no course but calmly and conscientiously to assume and sustain the responsibility. Through all the fiery trials of that merciless contest, he passed, with a purity unscathed, untouched. The only reproach uttered against him by the most malignant and daring political enmity, was-the imputation of virtues, good works, and religious merits, by which he was "made meet to be partaker of the inheritance of the saints in light," rather than to share the earthly dominion of " the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience." A better or purer man, one more unimpeachable, or unapproachable by falsehood, could not be named"his enemies themselves being judges.”

But the introduction of the name of such a candidate, at that peculiar moment, so critical in the evolution of the destiny of the nation and the world, was fraught with consequences most unfortunate and mortal to the hopes and purposes of the age. Timing, as it did, with the recent organization of a new party, between the two great natural moral and political divisions of American society, which developed a professedly religious and sectarian element, before dormant in civil relations, it bore the seeming of an attempt to conciliate, and associate with a cause already strong enough in its moral position, a faction base in the mercenary and prejudiced motives of its origin, and soon defiled with the blood of enslaved, alarmed victims of superstition, and blackened with the smoke of burning churches, in which God, the Son of God, was devoutly, though impurely and ignorantly worshiped. It aroused, moreover, in a hundred thousand hearts, the pulsations of a long slumbering animosity to certain peculiar forms of religious benevolence, with which that pure and honored name was associated. For, this enlightened country, like all Christendom, held within it many, who though gifted by God with the full knowledge of their duties to the commonwealth and to themselves, in all their noble relations to their race and kind, as affected by the action of republican electors, of sovereign yet mutually dependent freemen, had never

raised or widened their spiritual vision to the view of a Christian philanthropy, vast as the moral necessities of the world, and boundless as the interests of eternity. There were many, faithful and true to their country and their political duty, not prepared in Providence for this assumption of novel and untried responsibilities, whose warm and loyal hearts shrunk from this announcement of a name already half-forgotten in its connexion with temporal interests, and cherished only from its association with the honor of HIM whose " Kingdom is not of this world." That name added no strength to the cause of wise and righteous government, while it took much from it. Multitudes devoted to the faith of Rome, and others holding tenets not technically orthodox and evangelical, were led to forget their sense of duty to their political principles, by a new dread of promoting the triumph of what they considered heresy, bigotry and fanaticism. Though thousands were faithful, notwithstanding any or all of these deadly influences, "faithful even unto death," tens of thousands were driven from their only associations with the cause of peace, purity, justice and truth.

The melancholy moral of this movement was-that the first duty of all Christians in their political relations is to regard THE UNITY OF THE CAUSE,-to be content with giving and seeking only such votes as belong to the civil objects which they profess, and never to attempt to conciliate unpatriotic religious pretension, by offering to make such atonement for sin falsely imputed by disguised infidelity. It taught all who beheld and experienced the consequences of that wanton and vainly guileful scheme, that the basest and most wicked hypocrisy is the

homage" thus paid by virtue to vice, in comparison with which, common hypocrisy, "the homage that vice pays to virtue," is holy and honorable.

That nomination to the second office of the Federal Republic invited the repetition of every imaginable exploded calumnious device against the personal moral character of him who needed to ask no forgiveness of his country, which he had served so faithfully, however to the neglect of what every sinful man owes to his God. The professional gamblers, debauchees, cheats and murderers instantaneously broke out in accusation of a man who, had he been a thousand times worse than their lying slanders represented him, might have well denied their competency to judge him,

by saying to his profligate accusers"Let him that is without such sin among you, cast the first stone at me." Faithful and blameless in all his personal, domestic and social relations-unstained by even an imputation of falsehood, dishonesty, deception, double-dealing or hypocrisy-famed throughout his life for scrupulous compliance with every public and private engagement, and for the careful discharge of every pecuniary obligation, either legally expressed or remotely implied-frank, sincere, generous, unsuspicious, confiding, and boldly truthful-he presented in his character a model of many virtues especially rare among Americans, and nobly worthy of imitation by the rising generation of his enthusiastic compatriots, in whose hearts he reigned with an unequaled power, founded on love, reverence and respect for his moral traits, as well as on admiration for his great intellectual endowments.

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The gamblers, the speculators in fraud, the abettors of peculation and perjury, the shameless slaves of intemperance and licentiousness, the habitual cheats and liars, the extortioners, smugglers and dishonest bankrupts-all combined their means, and made pecuniary contributions to print and circulate papers and tracts on the MORALS of Politics," in which the character of the Presidential candidate of the party opposed to them was exhibited to the religious and conscientious portion of the community, as stained with the most odious, degrading vices, blackened with revolting crimes, and flagrant outrages on decency and piety, with corruption, treachery, deceit, mercenary violation of public obligations, and with a multiplicity and variety of wickedness unparalleled in any instance on record. While under agencies thus originated and directed, the consciences of rigid moralists and Evangelical Protestants were disturbed and perplexed, the jealousy of Papists, Liberal sects, philosophical sceptics and infidels, was kindled to perfect fury by similarly studious inventions, circulated among them, as to the bigoted zeal and gloomy, exclusive Calvinism of the candidate for the Vice-Presidency. From the nomination to the Election, this double system of calumny was in operation on the prejudices of the various religious divisions of the people in every county and town in the Union. Herod and Pilate, the Pharisees and Sadducees, the hypocrite and the blasphemer, were united in the harmonious enforcement of this

monstrous scheme of scurrilous abuse and sneaking detraction.

The grand plan of operations concerted before the close of 1843, and communicated in every portion of the Union, where an effort was needful and practicable, required, first, a complete and exact secret registration of the whole actual force of their own party, and of the other-with an estimate of the effect of all new causes, then in continuous operation, tending to increase or diminish either, and with due provision for the repeated correction of this account of moral agencies down to the very eve of the great election. The primary political position of each individual in the mass, as determined by his opinions, judgment, self-interest, prejudice, passion, or personal feeling, was but one item in the account-the fundamental element of the calculation. The final solution of the great problem was attained by numberless additions and subtractions of "disturbing causes." The influence of new questions (not originally partisan) as to "protection," naturalization, “annexation," was duly measured and reckoned. The operation of one-sided imputations made by themselves was also carefully weighed-of the terrors of abolition at the South, and the hatred of slavery in the North-of the abhorrence of fanaticism and hypocrisy by infidels and rationalists, and the dread of imputed immorality and licentiousness by "the most straitest sect." The effect of the attempted formation of a new "third party," and of the abortive coalition, was also counted;-all these varied agencies working for the diminution of the natural force of the party of peace, and to the increase of the party of corruption-without a single exception.

To establish and maintain, in their own party, a solid basis of action, by securing through all these influences, and others unworthy of mention, a substantial mass of genuine legal voters, was another essentially important measure of the grand plan. To fix with equal exactness the veritable vote of their opponents, was of the same necessity, and, in like manner, indispensable to the advantageous formation and successful management of the best-arranged scheme of fraud. If the cheating game were tried on both sides, there would be an end at once of all certainty in the operations of politics. Thence, the unaffected horror and alarm excited among them in 1840 by the discovery of suspicious and supposed criminal move

ments made in 1838 by some persons connected with the opposing party in New York, in the introduction of voters from another city. If that party should cheat,and should organize a permanent effective system of frauds on the elective franchise, what would become of the party which justly claimed a monopoly of the business, and a patent-right for the machinery, on the ground of having invented and first used it? Every effort was therefore made by them, especially by those most active in fraud and most interested in its results, to prevent all danger of any renewal of such attempts by their opponents at that time or subsequently; and they succeeded in that prevention to their own entire satis faction. They have never pretended to suspect or accuse their adversaries of these crimes since. Those upon whom they then succeeded in fixing suspicion have since been excluded not only from the confidence and favor of their own party, but from all hope of power or reward in case of its success. The term "pipe-layer" now remains on the party to which it was first applied, whose more open frauds and least criminal tricks, it was first manufactured to designate. In October, 1840, the party then in possession of the city government and corporation patronage, boldly stepped forward, and took possession of the business of conducting the waters of the Croton into New York city, which was before that, in the exclusive possession of the party then commanding the patronage of the State. The construction of the aqueduct was originally under the direction of commissioners appointed by the State government, then in the hands of the party opposed to that which ruled in the city of New York. The Common Council, on the eve of the Presidential Election, assumed the power of constructing the channels through which the water should be conveyed within the bounds of the city. Large companies of foreigners were immediately employed in digging trenches for the large iron pipes which would be required, two years later, when the aqueduct and reservoirs were completed. The work was totally premature and unnecessary at the time; and the purpose of the managers of the City government, in thus introducing large bodies of foreigners from other places just before the election, was so apparent, that the workmen employed in "laying pipe" were instantly pointed out as the instruments of designed fraud; and the " pipe-layers"

were continually spoken of as non-residents brought in to give illegal votes. The term was subsequently thrown back, transferred, and applied by the guilty party to their opponents, in connexion with frauds said to have been committed, two years before the term was invented, by the party which always directed every power within its means to the prevention, detection, and punishment of fraud.

The word" pipe-layer," which had acquired its infamous signification from this flagrant abuse and cheat, was perverted by the fraudulent, to the purpose of fastening opprobrium and slander upon their opponents, as a part of their scheme for deterring them from ever attempting to resist fraud by fraud. The vote on one side must always be a fixed quantity, ascertainable by a fair canvass, in order to enable the other party to introduce illegal votes with any reasonable certainty of success. This basis of calculation being secured, the problem is extremely simple and practicable. Given the exact number of voters of one party, (for instance, 20,000,) and the exact number of the other party (for instance, 17,000,) the solution is-3,000 illegal votes, to counterbalance the majority, and 5,000, &c., or any other number additional, requisite to overcome majorities in other sections of the State.

Having surveyed the position of the two great parties and calculated the effect of agencies then in operation on public opinion, the managers and directors of fraud proceeded early to make a diligent canvass and enumeration of the legal voters of each party everywhere. In the city of New York, in the spring of 1844, this secret census stated the whole number of actual qualified electors, at 44,000. However surprising to many this result may seem, and though much smaller in proportion to the whole white population than is found in most other political divisions of the country, a careful examination of the various classes of people in the

city will confirm this statement, which, though often disputed and condemned, was always repeated and firmly maintained by those acquainted with the facts of this private enumeration. Its probability appears stronger as the inquiry proceeds to the exhibition of the vast number of persons resident in the city who, from various causes, are excluded from the elective franchise. There are in New York many thousand resident