aker 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]

[Footnote 91: _Hamilton's Works_ (Lodge), Vol. 8, p. 549.]

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