im: "You know the old
ecclesiastical observation that the blood of the martyrs was the seed of
the church." From the Federalist point of view these editors were "lying
Jacobins," incendiaries, anarchists. "Should Jacobinism gain the
ascendency," an orator at Deerfield, Massachusetts, warned his auditors,
in the midst of the elections of 1800, "let every man arm himself, not
only to defend his property, his wife, and children, but to secure his
life from the dagger of his Jacobin neighbor." In vain Republicans
protested that they had a right to form a party to oppose measures which
they deemed destructive to public liberty. They were not opposing the
Constitution but the Administration; not government in general, but the
existing Government, of men who were employing despotic methods.

In the presidential election of 1800 only four of the sixteen States
provided for a choice of the electors directly by the people. The
outcome depended upon the action of the legislatures in a comparatively
few States. New England was so steadfast in the Federalist faith that
the Republicans gave up all hope of contesting the control of the
legislatures. After an electioneering tour through Connecticut, Aaron
Burr is said to have remarked that they might as well attempt to
revolutionize the Kingdom of Heaven. On the other hand, Jeffersonian
Republicanism was deeply rooted in Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, and
Georgia. The contestable area lay in the Middle States and in the
Carolinas.

In the early spring, both parties began to burnish their armor for the
first encounter in New York. It was generally believed that the May
elections to the Assembly would determine the vote of the presidential
electors, and that the vote of the city of New York would settle the
control of the Assembly. The task of carrying the legislative districts
of the city for the Republicans fell to Aaron Burr, past-master of the
art of political management and first of the long line of political
bosses of the great metropolis. How he concentrated the party vote upon
a ticket which bore such names as those of George Clinton, Horatio
Gates, and Henry Rutgers; how he wooed and won voters in the doubtful
seventh ward among the laboring classes,--these are matters which elude
the most painstaking researches of the historian. The outcome was a
Republican Assembly which beyond a peradventure would give the
electoral vote of the State to the Republican candidates.

In anoth