is
competitor, the probability, in my judgment, inclines to Burr."[141]

[Footnote 141: _Hamilton's Works_ (Lodge), Vol. 8, p. 608.]

Burr's friends, knowing his phenomenal shrewdness in cloaking bargains
and intrigues until the game was bagged, now relied upon him with
confidence to bring victory out of the known discord and jealousy of
his opponents, and for a time it looked as if he might succeed.
Lansing's withdrawal and Hamilton's failure to put up Rufus King as he
contemplated, gave Burr the support of Lansing's sympathy and a clear
field among Federalists, except as modified by Hamilton's influence.
In addition, his friends cited his ability and Revolutionary services,
his liberal patronage of science and the arts, his distinguished and
saintly ancestry, his freedom from family connections to quarter upon
the public treasury, and his honest endeavour to free himself from
debt by disposing of his estate. Especially in New York City did he
meet with encouragement. His headquarters in John Street overflowed
with ward workers and ward heelers, eager to elect the man upon whom
they could rely for favours and with whom they doubtless sincerely
sympathised. It was the contest of April, 1800, over again, save that
Hamilton did not speak or openly oppose.

As the fight continued it increased in bitterness. Cheetham pounded
Burr harder than ever, accusing him of seduction and of dancing with a
buxom wench at a "nigger ball" given by one of his coloured servants
at Richmond Hill. Jefferson was quoted as saying that Burr's party was
not the real democracy, a statement that the _American Citizen_
printed in capitals and kept standing during the three days of the
election. With great earnestness Hamilton quietly warned the
Federalists not to elevate a man who would use their party only to
strengthen their opponents. In the up-counties, where the influence of
the Clinton-Livingston-Spencer combine held the party together with
cords of steel, every appointee, from judge of the Supreme Court to
justice of the peace, was ranged on the side of Livingston's
brother-in-law.

But Burr, too, had powerful abettors. In Orange and Dutchess he had
always been a favourite; in Delaware, Erastus Root gave all his
influence and all his gifts with the devotion that animated John
Swartout and Marinus Willett in New York; in Ontario, Oliver Phelps,
the great land speculator, endowed with an unconquerable energy and
the strategy of a tacticia