her candidate on the federal ticket.

The Republicans, on the other hand, under the prospect of an arrangement
with France, rapidly recovered from the blow inflicted upon them by the
violence and mercenary rapacity lately charged upon their French
friends, but which they now insisted, was a charge without foundation.
Taking advantage of the dissatisfaction at the heavy taxes necessarily
imposed to meet the expenses of warlike preparations, and especially of
the unpopularity of the alien and sedition laws--two acts of congress to
which the prospect of war had led--they pushed the canvass with great
energy; while in Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr they had two leaders
unsurpassed for skill in party tactics, and in Burr at least, one little
scrupulous as to the means to be used.

Not only was the whole blame of the alien and sedition acts, to which he
had merely assented without even recommending, laid on Adams' shoulders,
but he was the object of vehement and most bitter attacks for having
surrendered, under one of the provisions of Jay's treaty, one Thomas
Nash, an English sailor, charged with mutiny and murder. Nor was it
against his public acts alone, nor even to his political opponents, that
these assaults on Mr. Adams were confined. With strong feeling and busy
imagination, loving both to talk and write, Adams had been betrayed into
many confidences and into free expressions of feeling, opinions, and
even conjectures and suspicions--a weakness very unsuited to the
character of a statesman, and one which Adams had during his life many
times the occasion to rue.

During Washington's first term of office, Adams had thus been led into a
confidential correspondence with Tench Coxe, who at that time held the
position of assistant secretary of the treasury and had afterward been
appointed supervisor of the internal revenue. Since Adam's accession he
had been dismissed from his place on the charge of being a spy upon the
treasury department in the service of the _Aurora_, the principal
newspaper organ of the opposition,--with which party Coxe sympathized,
and, since his recent dismissal from office, acted.

In this state of mind Coxe betrayed a confidential letter to him from
Adams; which, after being handed around in manuscript for some time, to
the great damage of Adams with his own party, was finally printed in the
_Aurora_, of which Coxe had become one of the principal contributors.

The purport of this letter, writt