This was the political condition when Aaron Burr, in the spring of 1800, undertook to gain twelve electoral votes for the Republicans by carrying the Legislature of New York. It required seventy electoral votes to choose a President, and outside of New York the anti-Federalists could count sixty-one. The capture of this State, therefore, would give them a safe majority. Without advertising his purposes, Burr introduced the sly methods that characterised his former campaigns, beginning with the selection of a ticket that would commend itself to all, and ending with an organisation that would do credit to the management of the later-day chiefs of Tammany. To avoid the already growing rivalry between the Clinton and Livingston factions, George Clinton and Brockholst Livingston headed the ticket, followed by Horatio Gates of Revolutionary fame, John Broome, soon to be lieutenant-governor, Samuel Osgood, for two years Washington's postmaster-general, John Swartout, already known for his vigorous record in the Assembly, and others equally acceptable. Burr himself stood for the county of Orange. For the first time in the history of political campaigning, too, local managers prepared lists of voters, canvassed wards by streets, held meetings throughout the city, and introduced other methods of organisation common enough nowadays, but decidedly novel then.
Hamilton was alive to the importance of the April election, but scarcely responsible for the critical character of the situation. He had not approved the alien and sedition measures, nor did he commit himself to the persecuting policy sanctioned by most Federal leaders, and although he favoured suppressing newspaper libels against the government, he was himself alien-born, and of a mind too broad not to understand the danger of arousing foreign-born citizens against his party on lines of national sentiment. "If we make no false step," he wrote Oliver Wolcott, "we shall be essentially united, but if we push things to extremes, we shall then give to faction body and solidity."[90] It was hasty United States attorneys and indiscreet local politicians rather than the greatest of the Federal leaders, who gave "to faction body and solidity."
Hamilton threw himself with energy into the desperate fight. For four days, from April 29 to May 2, while the polls were open, he visited every voting precinct, appealing to the public in his wonderfully persuasive and captivating manner. On several occasions Burr and Hamilton met, and it was afterward recalled that courtesy characterised the conduct of each toward the other, one champion waiting while the other took his turn. Rarely if ever in the history of the country have two men of such ability and astuteness participated in a local canvass. The rivalry was all the more exciting because it was a rivalry of styles as well as of capacities. Burr was smooth, polished, concise, never diffuse or declamatory, always serious and impressive. If we may accept contemporary judgment, he was a good speaker whom everybody was curious to hear, and from whom no one turned away in disappointment. On the other hand, Hamilton was an acknowledged orator, diffuse, ornate, full of metaphor, with flashes of poetical genius, revelling in exuberant strength, and endowed with a gift of argumentative eloquence which appealed to the intellect and the feelings at the same time. Erastus Root says Hamilton's words were so well chosen, and his sentences so finely formed into a swelling current, that the hearer would be captivated if not convinced, while Burr's arguments were generally methodised and compact. To this Root added a judgment, after thirty years' experience in public life at Washington and in New York, that "they were much the greatest men in the State, and perhaps the greatest men in the United States."
When the polls closed the Republicans had carried the Legislature by twenty-two majority on joint ballot. This secured to them the election of the needed twelve presidential electors. To recover their loss the Federalists now clamoured for a change in the law transferring the election of presidential electors from the Legislature to districts created for that purpose. Such an amendment would give the Federalists six of the twelve electors.
This was Hamilton's plan. In an earnest plea he urged Jay to convene the Legislature in extraordinary session for this purpose. "The anti-Federal party," he wrote to the Governor, "is a composition indeed of very incongruous materials, but all tending to mischief; some of them to the overthrow of the government by stripping it of its due energies; others of them by revolutionising it after the manner of Bonaparte. The government must not be confided to the custody of its enemies, and, although the measure proposed is open to objection, a popular government cannot stand if one party calls to its aid all the resources which vice can give, and the other, however pressing the emergency, feels itself obliged to confine itself within the ordinary forms of delicacy and decorum."[91]
Jay's response to Hamilton's proposal is not of record, but some time afterward the great Federalist's letter was found carefully filed among the papers in the public archives, bearing an indorsement in the Governor's handwriting: "This is a measure for party purposes which I think it would not become me to adopt."
The sincerity of Jay's action has been doubted. He was about to retire from public life, it was said, with no political future before him, and with that courage which inspires a man under such circumstances, he declined to act. But Jay's treatment of Hamilton's suggestion stands out conspicuously as his best judgment at the most trying moment in a long and eventful life. Jay was a stalwart Federalist. He had supported Washington and Hamilton in the making of a federal constitution; he had approved the alien and sedition laws; he had favourably reported to the Legislature the proposed amendments of Massachusetts, limiting service in Congress to native-born citizens; he regarded the advent of Jefferson and his ideas with as much alarm as Hamilton, and he knew as well as Hamilton that the adoption of the district plan of choosing electors would probably defeat the Virginian; but to call an extra session of the Legislature for the purpose indicated by Hamilton, would defeat the expressed will of the people as much as the action of the state canvassers defeated it in 1792. Should he follow such a precedent and save his party, perhaps his country, from the dire ills so vividly portrayed by Hamilton? The responsibility was upon him, not upon Hamilton, and he wisely refused to do what the people of the State had so generally and properly condemned in the canvassers.
Hamilton's proposition naturally provoked the indignation of his opponents, and later writers have used it as a text for unlimited vituperation; but if one may judge from what happened and continued to happen during the next three decades, not a governor who followed Jay in those eventful years would have declined under similar circumstances to concur in Hamilton's suggestion. It was undoubtedly a desperate proposal, but it was squarely in line with the practice of party leaders of that day. George Clinton countenanced, if he did not absolutely advise, the deliberate disfranchisement of hundreds of voters in 1792 that he might continue governor. A few years later, in 1816, methods quite as disreputable and unscrupulous were practised, that Republicans might continue to control the Council of Appointment. Hamilton's suggestion involved no concealment, as in the case of the Manhattan Bank, which Jay approved; no violation of law, as in the Otsego election case, which Clinton approved; no deliberate fraud, as in the Allen-Fellows case, which Tompkins approved. All this does not lessen the wrong involved in Hamilton's proposed violation of moral ethics, but it places the suggestion in the environment to which it properly belongs, making it appear no worse if no better than the political practices of that day.