• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

“That’s right,” Mahoney said. He was the supreme vice president.

“Some of its members in this part of the state are prominent in the Democratic Party and are delegates to state conventions?”

“They are,” agreed Mahoney.

“I’ll have Erie County solid for me, of course. But other counties around here will have to be rounded up. Would you write your fraternal friends and—”

“I’ll do that, and better,” Mahoney said. “I’ll have them call on you at City Hall, and you can talk to them face-to-face.”

Over the next three weeks, Cleveland quietly drummed up support. Thanks to Mahoney’s lobbying efforts, he won pledges from sixty-six delegates, most of them Irish Americans from Buffalo and Rochester affiliated with the Catholic Mutual Benefit Association. Western New York was an isolated region that had a long history of political inferiority because no United States senator and only one governor had ever been elected from there. Western New York delegates rallied around Cleveland as their favorite son.

It would take 193 delegates to win the nomination. The front-runners were Congressman Roswell P. Flower of upstate Watertown and Major General Henry W. Slocum of Brooklyn. Slocum was a by-the-book military commander ridiculed for indecision at the Battle of Gettysburg, where he had earned the insulting epithet “General Slow Come.” Flower and Slocum could count on 100 delegates each. Snubbed by Cleveland, state party chairman Daniel Manning had thrown his support behind Slocum. In the Byzantine world of New York politics, Manhattan Democrats were split between reformers and Tammany Hall. The reformers backed Flower, even though Cleveland in theory would seem a natural partner. Tammany Hall, under the domination of Boss Jim Kelly, who had taken leadership after the incarceration of the notorious Boss Tweed, was noncommittal. Strategically, Boss Kelly was determined to serve as kingmaker at the convention. He was playing the waiting game.

Cleveland’s candidacy was front-page news in Buffalo and other cities in Western New York, but downstate he was essentially ignored. As The New York Times dispatch put it, “Only one candidate is mentioned who resides West of Albany, and that is Mayor Cleveland of Buffalo.... No one here expresses any confidence in his nomination.”

William C. Hudson, a reporter who covered state politics for The Brooklyn Eagle under the pen name Seacoal, was sent to Buffalo to evaluate the candidate. Hudson was the kind of correspondent who always knew more than what he reported. That discretion earned him access because politicians could rely on Hudson never to publish anything they didn’t want to see in print. As a journalist once said of Hudson, “Deposits placed in his mind were as safe as those made in a bank, and more safe, because they were never, even indirectly, put into circulation.”

Charley McCune, the owner of the Courier, escorted Hudson to Cleveland’s law office, where the reporter was introduced to the dark-horse candidate for governor. Wilson Bissell was also present. Everyone knew that Hudson was a plugged-in guy. They also suspected that as the representative of The Brooklyn Eagle, he was a Slocum man. But Hudson surprised everyone in the room when he said he thought Cleveland had a decent shot at the nomination, provided he stayed “aloof ” from the internecine divisions tearing the party apart. The smartest move for Cleveland was to sit back and wait until the “inevitable break,” at which point the entire convention would rally around him.

Cleveland listened more than he spoke. It just so happened that Hudson’s tactic fit his own, so the two men clicked. He asked Hudson to join him for a carriage ride the next day when they could talk some more.

Cleveland sounded glum about his chances when he and Hudson were alone in the carriage the following afternoon.

Hudson begged to differ. “Mr. Cleveland, you will be the nominee. I can see no other outcome of the situation.”

Cleveland wasn’t buying it. He tried to explain how he had found himself