what course their party should pursue, were well calculated to arouse
Governor Tompkins, who welcomed the privilege of upholding the general
government. He did not minimise the gravity of the situation. Perhaps
he did not feel the alarm expressed in Jefferson's letter to Gallatin,
a year after the crisis had passed; for he now had behind him a
patriotic Legislature and the nucleus of an invincible army under
trained leadership. But if the war had continued, and, as the
Washington authorities anticipated, the British had prevailed at New
Orleans, he would have found a New England confederacy to the east of
him as well as an army of English veterans on the north.

The conditions that faced Madison made peace his last hope. American
commissioners were already in Europe; but as month after month passed
without agreement, the darkest hour of the war seemed to have settled
upon the country. Suddenly, on the 4th of February, 1815, the
startling and glorious news of General Jackson's decisive victory at
New Orleans electrified the nation. A week later, a British sloop of
war sailed into New York harbour, announcing that the treaty of Ghent
had been signed on the 24th of the preceding December. Instantly
Madison's troubles disappeared. The war was over, the Hartford
commissioners were out of employment, and the happy phrase of Charles
J. Ingersoll of Pennsylvania became the popular summing up of the
treaty--"not an inch ceded or lost." Jackson's victory had not entered
into the peace negotiations; but intelligent men knew that the superb
fighting along the Canadian frontier during the campaign of 1814, had
had much to do in bringing about the result. Beginning with the battle
of Chippewa, where equal bodies of troops met face to face, in broad
daylight, on an open field, without advantage of position, the
American army faced British troops with the skill and desperate
courage that characterised the struggle between the North and the
South forty years later.

Among civilians most admired for their part in the struggle, Daniel D.
Tompkins stood first. The genius of an American governor had never
been more nobly employed, and, although he was sometimes swayed by
prejudice and the impulses of his personal ambition, he did enough to
show that he was devotedly attached to his country.

CHAPTER XXI

CLINTON OVERTHROWN

1815

The election of a Republican Assembly in the spring of 1814 opened the
way for a Republican Coun