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 invol