Shippensburg, 3d October, 1796.
... The farther I go from you the more I feel how hateful absence is, and the stronger my resolution is not to be persuaded to continue in public life. Indeed, we must be settled and give up journeying. This design gives me but one regret, it is to part you and to part myself from your family; they are the only beings I will feel sorry to leave behind, but I will feel the want of them more than I can express....
New Geneva, 12th October, 1796.
... I arrived here last Friday without any accident.... As to politics, the four or five last newspapers are filled with the most scurrilous and abusive electioneering pieces for and against myself and Thomas Stokeley. This has raised the contention so high in the counties of Alleghany and Washington that my old friends have again taken me up very warmly, and I came too late to prevent it. There is, however, the highest probability that I will not be elected. The election took place yesterday, but we do not know the result. In this and Westmoreland County James Findlay, who was a great admirer of the treaty, has been prevailed upon by Addison & Co. to oppose William Findley, whom we have been supporting, notwithstanding all his weaknesses, because it became a treaty question, and I expect he must be elected by a majority of two to one....
New Geneva, 16th October, 1796.
... No, my Hannah, we shall not, so far as it can depend upon ourselves,—we shall not hereafter put such a distance between us. It is perfectly uncertain whether I am elected in Congress or not; but if I am, that shall not prevent the execution of our plans, and I will undoubtedly resign a seat which in every point of view is perfectly indifferent to me, and which is certainly prejudicial to my interest if it does interfere with the happiness of our lives.... Ambition, love of power, I never felt, and if vanity ever made one of the ingredients which impelled me to take an active part in public life, it has for many years altogether vanished away....
New Geneva, November 9, 1796.
... I will not put your patience and good nature to a much longer trial, and I know you will be glad to hear that this is the last letter I mean to write you from this place, and that next Tuesday, the 15th inst., is the day I have fixed for my departure. I have been tolerably industrious since I have been here, settling accounts, arranging some matters relative to the concerns of the copartnership, getting some essential improvements on our farm, getting rid of my tenants, and electioneering for electors of the President. Our endeavors to induce the people to turn out on that day have not been as successful as I might have wished. In this county our ticket got 406 votes, and Adams’s had 66. What the general result will be you will know before I do....
The Presidential election of 1796, which was to decide the succession to Washington, ended in the choice of John Adams over Thomas Jefferson and in a very evenly balanced condition of parties. The constitutional arrangement by which the President was not chosen by the people, but by electors themselves chosen by Legislatures, makes it impossible to decide where the popular majority lay; and the rule that the person having the highest number of electoral votes should be President, without regard to the intentions of the electors, at once began to throw discord into the ranks of both parties. John Adams thought with reason that he had been nearly made the victim of an intrigue to elect Thomas Pinckney; and Aaron Burr, the Republican leader in the North, as Jefferson was in the South, with equal reason believed himself to have been sacrificed as a candidate for the Vice-Presidency by the jealousy of Virginia. Both these suspicions, deeply rooted in sectional feeling, bore fruit during the next few years.
Mr. Gallatin, contrary to his expectation, was re-elected to the House of Representatives by the district which had chosen him two years before, although his long absences from the western country and his opposition to the British treaty threatened to destroy his popularity. After six weeks’ absence at New Geneva during the elections, he returned to Philadelphia to take part in the coming session.