‘You pay heavy taxes this year.’
‘Yes, Massa, me pay ten dollars.’
‘Well, if you vote the Republican ticket you will have little or no taxes to pay next year; for if we Republicans succeed, the standing army will be disbanded, which cost us almost a million of money last year.’
The peanut vendor promised to appear at the polls ‘with six more free-born sons of the African race.’[1733] Whereupon the campaigner had a tale to tell to the boys at the Wigwam that night.
The polls opened on April 29th and closed at sunset on May 2d. Days of intense ceaseless activity. Hamilton and Burr took the field. From one polling-place to another they rushed to harangue the voters. When they met, they treated each other with courtly courtesy. Handbills were put out, flooding the city during the voting. In the midst of the fight Matthew L. Davis found time at midnight to send a hasty report to Gallatin in Philadelphia. ‘This day he [Burr] has remained at the polls of the Seventh ward ten hours without intermission. Pardon this hasty scrawl. I have not ate for fifteen hours.’[1734] The result was a sweeping triumph for the Democrats. When the news reached the Senate at Philadelphia, the Federalists were so depressed and the Democrats so jubilant that the transaction of business was impossible, and it adjourned.[1735]
Hamilton was stunned, and ready for trickery to retrieve the lost battle. The next night he was presiding over a secret meeting of Federalists where it was agreed to ask Governor Jay to call an extra session of the Legislature to deprive that body of the power to choose electors. Hamilton approached Jay in a letter. ‘In times like these,’ he wrote, ‘it will not do to be over-scrupulous.’ There should be no objections to ‘taking of legal and constitutional steps to prevent an atheist in religion and a fanatic in politics from getting possession of the helm of state.’[1736] Jay read the letter with astonishment, made a notation that it was a plan to serve a party purpose, and buried it in the archives. It was the blackest blot on Hamilton’s record.
That victory elected Jefferson.
It destroyed Hamilton—and it made Burr Vice-President.
Scarcely had the polls closed when Burr’s friends, giving him the whole credit, as he deserved, began to urge on the leaders in Philadelphia his selection for the Vice-Presidency. Davis wrote Gallatin that the Democrats of New York were bent on Burr.[1737] Admiral James Nicholas, the father-in-law of Gallatin, wrote that the triumph was a miraculous ‘intervention of Supreme Power and our friend Burr, the agent.’ It was his ‘generalship, perseverance, industry, and execution’ that did it, and he deserved ‘anything and everything of his country.’ He had won ‘at the risk of his life.’[1738] On May 12th Gallatin wrote his wife: ‘We had last night a very large meeting of Republicans, in which it was unanimously agreed to support Burr for Vice-President.’
That was a bitter month for the Federalists. In the gubernatorial contests in New Hampshire and Massachusetts the Democrats had polled an astonishing vote. Painfully labored were the efforts of the Federalist press to explain these remarkable accessions. The ‘Centinel’ in Boston had previously sounded a note of warning under the caption, ‘Americans, Why Sleep Ye?’ The Democrats, it said, were ‘organized, officered, accoutered, provided, and regularly paid.’ They were ‘systematized in all points.’ In Pennsylvania a Jeffersonian Governor had thrown Federalist office-holders ‘headlong from their posts.’ In New Hampshire the Democrats were fighting ‘under cover of an ambuscade.’ In all States new Jeffersonian presses were established, ‘from Portsmouth in New Hampshire to Savannah in Georgia,’ through which ‘the orders of Generals of the faction are transmitted with professional punctuality; which presses serve as a sounding board to the notes that issue through that great speaking trumpet of the Devil, the Philadelphia Aurora.’ Did not Duane get the enormous salary of eight hundred dollars a year? ‘Why Sleep Ye?’