sal esteem throughout the municipality for his patriotic
unselfishness and unlimited generosity. Tompkins must have known that
such a man, already holding the rank of major-general in the militia,
would be absolute master of any situation. He was not the one to throw
up the cards because the chances of the game were going against him.
His was a fighting spirit, and his impulse was ever, like that of
Macbeth, to try to the last. But Tompkins could not fail to observe
the party's growing dislike for Clinton, and, much as he wanted
military success, he graciously declined Clinton's request, brought to
him by Thomas Addis Emmet, to be assigned to active service in the
field.

Tompkins had little to encourage him at the outset of the war. The
election in April, 1812, had turned the Assembly over to the
Federalists, who not only wasted the time of an extra session, called
in November of that year, but carried their opposition through the
regular session begun in January, 1813. The emergency was pressing.
New England Federalists had declined to make the desired loans to the
general government, and the governor of New York wished his State to
relieve the situation by advancing the needed money. It was a
patriotic measure. Whether right or wrong, the declaration of war had
jeopardised the country. Soldiers, poorly equipped, scantily clothed,
without organisation, and without pay, were scattered for hundreds of
miles along a sparsely settled border, opened to the attacks of a
powerful enemy; yet the Federalists refused to vote a dollar to equip
a man. Why should we continue a war from the prosecution of which we
have nothing to gain, they asked? The Orders in Council have been
repealed, England has shrunk from facing the consequences of its own
folly, and America has already won a complete triumph. What further
need, then, for bleeding our exhausted treasury?

The Governor's embarrassment, however, did not emanate from the
Federalists alone. The northern frontier of New York was to become the
great battle-ground, and it was conceded that capable generals and a
sufficient force were necessary to carry the war promptly into Canada.
But the President furnished neither. He appointed Henry Dearborn, with
the rank of major-general, to command the district from Niagara to the
St. Lawrence, thus putting all military operations within the State
under the control of a man in his sixty-second year, whose only
military experience had been