Opdyke, with the first war enthusiasm behind him, won the Mayoralty election from the egregious Wood. But the strength of the Democrats, which in large degree meant the strength of the anti-war party, was thereafter triumphant in every election till Grant took Richmond. The State and Congressional campaign of 1862, coming during the dark period after the Peninsular campaign and the drawn battle of Antietam, aroused the _Evening Post_, _Times_ and _Tribune_ to great exertions. Horatio Seymour, the “submissionist” candidate, contested the Governorship with Gen. James Wadsworth. His speeches, wrote Bryant, have a direct tendency to discourage our loyal troops and sustain the hopes of the South. The _Post_ denied his echo of the _World’s_ and _Herald’s_ statements that the Administration was a failure. “It has been a grand and brilliant success. History will so account it.” Lincoln, predicted the _Post_, need only give rein to the Northern determination, and his name “will stand on the future annals of his country illustrated by a renown as pure and undying as that of George Washington.” But Seymour easily won, obtaining 54,283 votes in New York city against 22,523 given Wadsworth; and the Democrats swept the Congressional districts, including one in which they had nominated Fernando Wood. One factor in this result, said the _Evening Post_, was the alarm many had taken at the threat of the draft. The _World_ played upon this alarm, and both it and the _Herald_ attacked the emancipation proclamation as a change in the objects of the war; to which Bryant replied that the Revolution had begun to assert the rights of the Colonies within the British Empire, and had shortly become a war to take them out of it. Bryant in the spring of 1863 characterized the _Express_ as an organ “which has called repeatedly upon the mob to oust the regular government at Washington, and upon the army to proclaim McClellan its chief at all hazards”; while the _Journal of Commerce_, he said, “has always denounced the war, and even now argues ... that the allegiance of the citizens is due to the State, and not to the Federal Government.” Some of the most prominent men of the city--Tilden, James Brooks, S. F. B. Morse, August Belmont, David E. Wheeler, and others--met at Delmonico’s on Feb. 6, 1863, and formed a plan for circulating copperhead doctrines, or, as they put it, for “the diffusion of knowledge”; whence the _Post_ nicknamed them “diffusionists.”