ned the Administration with all
classes of people; Jefferson and George Clinton had received 162
electoral votes to 14 for Pinckney and Rufus King; Burr had gone into
retirement and was soon to go into obscurity; the Livingstons, filling
high places, were distinguishing themselves at home and abroad as able
judges and successful diplomatists; DeWitt Clinton, happy and
eminently efficient as the mayor of New York, seemed to have before
him a bright and prosperous career as a skilful and triumphant party
manager; while George Clinton, softened by age, rich in favouring
friends, with an ideal face for a strong, bold portrait, was basking
in the soft, mellow glow that precedes the closing of a stormy life.
Never before, perhaps never since, did a governor enter upon his
duties, neither unusual nor important, under more favourable auspices;
yet the story of Lewis' administration is a story of astonishing
mistakes and fatal factional strife.

The Governor inaugurated his new career by an unhappy act of
patronage. The appointment of Maturin Livingston, his son-in-law, and
the removal of Peter B. Porter, the friend of Burr, showed a selfish,
almost malevolent disregard of public opinion and the public service,
a trait that, in a way, characterised his policy throughout.
Livingston was notoriously unfitted for recorder of New York. He was
unpopular in his manners, deficient in a knowledge of law, without
industry, and given to pleasure rather than business, but, because of
his relationship, the Governor forced him into that responsible
position. In like manner, although until then no change had occurred
within the party for opinion's sake, Lewis voted for the removal of
Peter B. Porter, the young and popular clerk of Ontario County.
Porter's youth indicated an intelligence that promised large returns
to his country and his party, and the Governor lived long enough to
see him honourably distinguished in Congress, highly renowned when his
serious career began on the Niagara frontier in the War of 1812, and,
afterward, richly rewarded as secretary of war in the Cabinet of John
Quincy Adams. But in 1805 the Governor cheerfully voted for his
removal, thus establishing the dangerous precedent that a member of
one's political household was to be treated with as little
consideration as a member of the opposite party.

Although Lewis' conduct in the case of Maturin Livingston and Peter B.
Porter was not the most foolish act in a career