If Tompkins was handicapped with a shortage and a canal record, Clinton was harassed for want of a party. To conceal the meagreness of his strength in a legislative caucus, Clinton was renominated with John Taylor at a meeting of the citizens of Albany. He had a following and a large one, but it was without cohesion or discipline. Men felt at liberty to withdraw without explanation and without notice. Within eight months after his election as a Clintonian senator, Benjamin Mooers of Plattsburg accepted the nomination for lieutenant-governor on the ticket with Governor Tompkins, apparently without loss of political prestige, or the respect of neighbours. The administration at Washington recognised the Bucktails as the regular Republican party, and showered offices among them, until Clinton later made it a matter of public complaint and official investigation. Other disintegrating influences were also at work. The "high minded" Federalists, in a published document signed by forty or fifty leading men, declared the Federal party dissolved and annihilated, and pronounced the Clinton party simply a personal one. To belong to it independence must be surrendered, and to obtain office in it, one must laud its head and bow the knee, a system of sycophancy, they said, disgusting all "high minded" men. But DeWitt Clinton's strength was not in parties nor in political management. He belonged to the great men of his time, having no superior in New York, and, in some respects, no equal in the country. He possessed a broader horizon, a larger intellect, a greater moral courage, than most of his contemporaries. It is probably true that, like a mountain, he appeared best at a distance, but having confidence in his ability and integrity, people easily overlooked his rough, unpopular manners. The shrewd, sagacious Yankee farmers who were filling up the great western counties of Ontario and Genesee believed in him. The Bucktails did not know, until the eastern and western districts responded with five thousand eight hundred and four majority for Clinton, as against four thousand three hundred and seventy-seven for Tompkins in the middle and southern districts, what a capital cry Clinton had in the canal issue; what a powerful appeal to selfish interests he could put into voice; and what a loud reply selfish interests would make to the appeal. It was not, in fact, a race between parties at all; it was not a question of shortage or settlement. It is likely the shortage affected the result somewhat; but the majority of over fourteen hundred meant approval of Clinton and his canal policy rather than distrust of Tompkins and his unsettled accounts. The question in 1820 was, shall the canal be built? and, although the Bucktails had ceased their hostility, the people most interested in the canal's construction wanted Clinton to complete what he had so gloriously and successfully begun.