The friends of Van Buren had not simply beaten Cass at the polls, they had discredited him as a party leader.

In the pithy phrase of John Van Buren, they had exposed him to the country as the candidate "powerful for mischief, powerless for good." The total vote of New York was, for Taylor, 218,603; for Cass, 114,318; for Van Buren, 120,510.

The canvass for the governorship was scarcely less exciting than that for the Presidency.

Hamilton Fish was the Whig candidate; John A.Dix, then a senator of the United States, ran as the representative of Mr.Van Buren's Free- soil party; while the eminent Chancellor Walworth, who had recently lost his judicial position, was nominated as a supporter of Cass by the Regular Democracy.

Mr.Fish had been candidate for Lieutenant- governor two years before on the Whig ticket with John Young, and was defeated because of his outspoken views against the Anti-Renters.
Those radical agitators instinctively knew that the descendant of Stuyvesant would support the inherited rights of the Van Rensselaers, and therefore defeated Mr.Fish while they elected the Whig candidates for other offices.