skilled masters of the political art, confident of success,
fearless of criticism, unscrupulous in methods, and indefatigable in
attention to details. They controlled the Council of Appointment, its
appointees controlled the Assembly, and the Assembly elected the
Council, an endless chain of links, equally strong and equally
selfish. To make opposition the more fruitless, the distrust of Burr,
hammered into the masses by Cheetham's pen, practically amounted to a
forfeiture of party confidence. One cannot conceive a more inopportune
time for Burr to have challenged a test of strength, yet Lansing's
selection had hardly sounded in the people's ears before Burr's
"Little Band," burning with indignation and resentment at his
treatment, gathered about the tables in the old Tontine Coffee House
at Albany and launched him as an independent candidate.

Rarely has a candidate for governor encountered greater odds; but with
Burr, as afterward with DeWitt Clinton, it was now or never. In one of
his dramas Schiller mourns over the man who stakes reputation, health,
everything upon success--and no success in the end. Even Robert Yates,
the coalition candidate in 1789, started with the support of a
Federalist machine and the powerful backing of Hamilton. But in 1804
Burr found himself without a party, without a machine, and bitterly
opposed by Hamilton.

When the sceptre passed from Federalist to Republican in 1801,
Hamilton gave himself to his profession with renewed zeal, earning
fifteen thousand dollars a year, and a reputation as a lawyer scarcely
surpassed by Daniel Webster. "In creative power Hamilton was
infinitely Webster's superior," says Chief Justice Ambrose Spencer,
before whom both had practised.[132] Erastus Root, possibly looking
through the eyes of Theodosia, thought Burr not inferior to Hamilton
as a lawyer, although other contemporaries who knew Burr at his best,
regarded him as an indefatigable, tireless, adroit lawyer rather than
a profound and learned one. This put him in a different class from
Hamilton. As well might one compare Offenbach with Mozart as Burr with
Hamilton.

[Footnote 132: H.C. Lodge, _Life of Alexander Hamilton_, pp. 276-7.]

Hamilton journeyed to Albany in February, 1804, to argue the case of
Harry Croswell, so celebrated and historic because of Hamilton's
argument. Croswell, the editor of the _Balance_, a Federalist
newspaper published at Hudson, had been convicted of libelling
President