Hot-tempered and
impatient of restraint as he was, he knew Adams' attack had only paid
him in kind. Nor is mitigation of Hamilton's conduct found in the
statement, probably true, that the party could not in any case have
carried the election. The great mass of Federalists believed, as
Hamilton wrote Jay when asking an extra session of the Legislature,
that the defeat of Jefferson was "the only means to save the nation
from more disasters," and they naturally looked to him to accomplish
that defeat. Of all men that ever led a political party, therefore, it
was Hamilton's duty to sink personal antipathy, but in this attack
upon Adams he seems deliberately to have sinned against the light.
This was the judgment of men of his own day, and at the end of a
century it is the judgment of men who cherish his teachings and revere
his memory.

While Hamilton wrote and worried and wrestled, Aaron Burr rested on
the well-earned laurels of victory. It had been a great fight. George
Clinton did not take kindly to Thomas Jefferson, and stubbornly
resisted allowing the use of his name to aid the Virginian's
promotion; Horatio Gates and other prominent citizens who had left the
political arena years before, if they could be said ever to have
entered it, were also indisposed to head a movement that seemed to
them certain to end in rout and confusion; but Burr held on until
scruples disappeared, and their names headed a winning ticket. It was
the first ray of light to break the Republican gloom, and when, six
months later, the Empire State declared for Jefferson and Burr it
added to the halo already surrounding the grandson of Jonathan
Edwards.

It was known that Jefferson and Burr had run very evenly, and by the
middle of December, 1800, it became rumoured that their vote was a
tie. "If such should be the result," Burr wrote Samuel Smith, a
Republican congressman from Maryland, "every man who knows me ought to
know that I would utterly disclaim all competition. Be assured that
the Federalist party can entertain no wish for such an exchange. As to
my friends, they would dishonour my views and insult my feelings by a
suspicion that I would submit to be instrumental in counteracting the
wishes and the expectations of the people of the United States. And I
now constitute you my proxy to declare these sentiments if the
occasion should require."[94] At the time this letter was much
applauded at public dinners and other Republican gatherings