Gerry it is claimed that he was able to accomplish important results through his influence with Adams.  At any rate, Adams gave unrestrained expression to his feelings against Hamilton, and finally Hamilton was aroused to action.  On August 1, 1800, he wrote to Adams demanding whether it was true that Adams had “asserted the existence of a British faction in this country” of which Hamilton himself was said to be a leader.  Adams did not reply.  Hamilton waited until October 1, and then wrote again, affirming “that by whomsoever a charge of the kind mentioned in my former letter, may, at any time, have been made or insinuated against me, it is a base, wicked, and cruel calumny; destitute even of a plausible pretext, to excuse the folly, or mask the depravity which must have dictated it.”

Hamilton, always sensitive to imputations upon his honor, was not satisfied to allow the matter to rest there.  He wrote a detailed account of his relations with Adams, involving an examination of Adams’s public conduct and character, which he privately circulated among leading Federalists.  It is an able paper, fully displaying Hamilton’s power of combining force of argument with dignity of language, but although exhibiting Adams as unfit for his office it advised support of his candidacy.  Burr obtained a copy and made such use of parts of it that Hamilton himself had to publish it in full.

In this election the candidate associated with Adams by the Federalists was Charles Cotesworth Pinckney of South Carolina.  Though one Adams elector in Rhode Island cut Pinckney, he would still have been elected had the electoral votes of his own State been cast for him as they had been for Thomas Pinckney, four years before; but South Carolina now voted solidly for both Republican candidates.  The result of the election was a tie between Jefferson and Burr, each receiving 73 votes, while Adams received 65 and Pinckney 64.  The election was thus thrown into the House, where some of the Federalists entered into an intrigue to give Burr the Presidency instead of Jefferson, but this scheme was defeated largely through Hamilton’s influence.  He wrote:  “If there be a man in this world I ought to hate, it is Jefferson.  With Burr I have always been personally well.  But the public good must be paramount to every private consideration.”

The result of the election was a terrible blow to Adams.  His vanity was so hurt that he could not bear to be present at the installation of his successor, and after working almost to the stroke of midnight signing appointments to office for the defeated Federalists, he drove away from Washington in the early morning before the inauguration ceremonies began.  Eventually he soothed his self-esteem by associating his own trials and misfortunes with those endured by classical heroes.  He wrote that Washington, Hamilton, and Pinckney formed a triumvirate like that of Antony, Octavius, and Lepidus, and “that Cicero was not sacrificed to the vengeance of Antony more egregiously than John Adams was to the unbridled and unbounded ambition of Alexander Hamilton in the American triumvirate.”