ent of torture. It
bristled with history and character sketches. Whatever the Vice
President knew, or thought he knew, was poured into those eighty pages
with a staggering fulness and disregard of consequences that startled
the political world and captivated all lovers of the brilliant and
sensational in literature. Confidences were revealed, conversations
made public, quarrels uncovered, political secrets given up, and the
gossip of Council and Legislature churned into a story that pleased
every one. What Hamilton's attack on Adams did for Federalists,
"Aristides'" reply to Cheetham did for the Republicans; but the latter
wrote with a ferocity unknown to the pages of the great Federalist's
unfortunate letter.

"Aristides" struck at everybody and missed no one. The Governor "has
dwindled into the mere instrument of an ambitious relative;"
Tillotson was "a contemptible shuffling apothecary, without ingenuity
or devise, or spirit to pursue any systematic plan of iniquity;"
Richard Riker was "an imbecile and obsequious pettifogger, a vain and
contemptible little pest, who abandoned the Federal standard on the
third day of the election, in April, 1800;" John McKisson, "an
execrable compound of every species of vice," was the man whom Clinton
"exultingly declared a great scoundrel." The attack thus daringly
begun was steadily maintained. Ambrose Spencer was "a man as
notoriously infamous as the legitimate offspring of treachery and
fraud can possibly be;" Samuel Osgood, "a born hypocrite, propagated
falsehood for the purpose of slander and imposition;" Chancellor
Livingston, "a capricious, visionary theorist," was "lamentably
deficient in the practical knowledge of a politician, and heedless of
important and laborious pursuits, at which his frivolous mind
revolted."

The greatest interest of the pamphlet, however, began when
"Aristides," taking up the cause of Burr, struck at higher game than
Richard Riker or Ambrose Spencer. DeWitt Clinton was portrayed as
"formed for mischief," "inflated with vanity," "cruel by nature," "an
object of derision and disgust," "a dissolute and desperate
intriguer," "an adept in moral turpitude, skilled in all the
combination of treachery and fraud, with a mind matured by the
practice of iniquity, and unalloyed with any virtuous principle." "Was
it not disgraceful to political controversy," continues "Aristides,"
with an audacity of denunciation and sternness of animosity, "I would
develop