“The destruction of Hamilton.”
As Aaron speaks the hated name it is like the opening of a furnace door. One is given a flash of the flaming tumult within. Then the door closes; all is again dark, passionless, inscrutable.
Aaron runs his experienced eye along the local array. The Hamilton forces are in the ascendant. Jay is governor; having beaten North-of-Ireland Clinton, who was unable to explain how he came to sell more than three millions of the public’s acres to McComb for eightpence.
And yet, for all that supremacy of the Hamilton influence—working out its fortunes with the cogent name of Washington—Aaron’s practiced vision detects here and there the seams of weakness. Old Clinton is as angry as any sore-head bear over that gubernatorial beating, which he lays to Hamilton. The clan-Livingston is sulking among its hills because its chief, the mighty chancellor, was kept out of the President’s cabinet by the secret word of Hamilton—whose policies are ever jealous and double-jointed. Aaron, wise in such coils, sees all about him the raw materials wherefrom may be constructed a resistless opposition to the Party-of-things-as-they-are—which is the party of Hamilton.
One thing irks the pride of Aaron—a pride ever impatient and ready for mutiny. In dealing with the Livingstons and the Clintons, these gentry—readily eager indeed to take their revenges with the help of Aaron—never omit a patrician attitude of overbearing importance. They make a merit of accepting Aaron’s aid, and proceed on the assumption that he gains honor by serving them. Aaron makes up his mind to remedy this.
“I must have a following,” says he. “I will call about me every free lance in the political hills. There shall be a new clan born, of which I must be the Rob Roy. Like another McGregor, I with my followers shall take up position between the Campbell and the Montrose—the Clintons and the Livingstons. By threatening one with the other, I can then control both. Given a force of my own, the high-stomached Livingstons and the obstinate Clintons must obey me. They shall yet move forward or fall back, march and countermarch by my word.”
When Aaron sets up as a Rob Roy of politics, he is not compelled to endless labors in constructing a following. The thing he looks for lies ready to his hand. In the long-room of Brom Martling’s tavern, at Spruce and Nassau, meets the “Sons of Tammany or the Columbian Order.” The name is overlong, and hard to pronounce unless sober; wherefore the “Sons of Tammany or the Columbian Order,” as they sit swigging Brom Martling’s cider, call themselves the “Bucktails.”
The aristocracy of the Revolution—being the officers—created unto themselves the Cincinnati. Whereupon, the yeomanry of the Revolution—being the privates—as a counterpoise to the perfumed, not to say gilded Cincinnati, brought the Sons of Tammany or the Columbian Order, otherwise the Bucktails, into being.
The Bucktails, good cider-loving souls, are solely a charitable-social organization, and have no dreams of politics. Aaron becomes one of them—quaffing and exalting the Martling cider. He takes them up into the mountaintop of the possible, and shows them the kingdoms of the political world and the glories thereof. Also, he points out that Hamilton, the head of the hated Cincinnati, is turning that organization of perfume and purple into a power. The Bucktails hear, see, believe, and resolve under the chiefship of Aaron to fight their loathed rivals, the Cincinnati, in every ensuing battle of the ballots to the end of time.
The word that Aaron has brought the Buck-tails to political heel is not long in making the rounds. It is worth registering that so soon as the Clintons and the Livingstons learn the political determinations of this formidable body of cider drinkers—with Aaron at its head—they conduct themselves toward our young exsenator with profoundest respect. They eliminate the overbearing element in their attitudes, and, when they would confer with him, they go to him not he to them. Where before they declared their intentions, they now ask his consent. It falls out as Aaron forethreatened. Our Rob Roy at the head of his bold Bucktails is sought for and deferred to by both the Clintons and the Livingstons—the Campbell and the Montrose.