Associated with Skidmore were Robert Dale Owen and Frances Wright
of the "Free Enquirer," a paper advocating all sorts of extreme
social and economic doctrines. It was not strange, therefore,
that the new party was at once connected, in the public mind,
with all the erratic vagaries of these Apostles of Change. It was
called the "Fanny Wright ticket" and the "Infidel Ticket." Every
one forgot that it aimed to be the workingman's ticket. The
movement, however, was supported by "The Working Man's Advocate,"
a new journal that soon reached a wide influence.
There now appeared an eccentric Quaker, Russell Comstock by name,
to center public attention still more upon the new party. As a
candidate for the legislature, he professed an alarmingly
advanced position, for he believed that the State ought to
establish free schools where handicrafts and morals, but not
religion, should be taught; that husband and wife should be
equals before the law; that a mechanics' lien and bankruptcy law
should be passed; and that by wise graduations all laws for the
collection of debts should be repealed. At a meeting held at the
City Hall, for the further elucidation of his "pure
Republicanism," he was greeted by a great throng but was arrested
for disturbing the peace. He received less than one hundred and
fifty votes, but his words went far to excite, on the one hand,
the interest of the laboring classes in reform, and, on the other
hand, the determination of the conservative classes to defeat "a
ticket got up openly and avowedly," as one newspaper said, "in
opposition to all banks, in opposition to social order, in
opposition to rights of property.
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