In abandoning Roosevelt, New York’s Republican elite made him a footnote to the campaign. They joined both Tammany and the Democratic Swallowtails—the prosperous and largely Protestant opposition to Tammany within the Democratic Party whose derisive nickname came from the tails of their formal dress coats—to defeat George. They backed Democrat Abram Hewitt, the son-in-law of Peter Cooper—a rich antislavery industrialist and reformer who had run as the Greenback candidate for president in 1876.
