Philip Schuyler
headed the Council of 1793.

This arbitrary proceeding led to twenty years of corrupt methods and
political scandals. Schuyler's justification was probably the
conviction that poetic justice required that Clinton, having become
governor without right, should have his powers reduced to their lowest
terms; but whatever the motive, his action was indefensible, and his
reply that the Governor's practices did not correspond to his precepts
fell for want of proof. Clinton had then been in office seventeen
years, and, although he took good care to select members of his own
party, only one case, and that a doubtful one, could be cited in
support of the charge that appointments had been made solely for
political purposes.

In a published address, on January 22, 1795, Governor Clinton declined
to stand for re-election in the following April because of ill health
and neglected private affairs. Included in this letter was the
somewhat apocryphal statement that he withdrew from an office never
solicited, which he had accepted with diffidence, and from which he
should retire with pleasure. The reader who has followed the story of
his career through the campaigns of 1789 and 1792 will scarcely
believe him serious in this declaration, although he undoubtedly
retired with pleasure. At the time of his withdrawal, he had an attack
of inflammatory rheumatism, but he was neither a sick man nor an old
one, being then in his fifty-fifth year, with twelve years of
honourable public life still before him. It is likely the reason in
the old rhyme, "He who fights and runs away, lives to fight another
day," had more to do with his retirement than shattered health and
crippled fortune. Defeat has never been regarded helpful to future
political preferment, and this shrewd reader of the signs of the
times, his ambition already fixed on higher honours and more exalted
place, saw the coming political change in New York as clearly and
unmistakably as an approaching storm announced itself in an increase
of his rheumatic aches.

CHAPTER VII

RECOGNITION OF EARNEST MEN

1795-1800

With Clinton out of the race for governor in 1795, his party's
weakness discovered itself in the selection of Chief Justice Robert
Yates, Hamilton's coalition candidate in 1789. It was a makeshift
nomination, since none cared to run after Clinton's declination
sounded a note of defeat. Yates' passion for office led him into
strange blunders. He s