Americans, he would have come down to posterity as a great man, with a record of services to his country which would have scattered his few mistakes into the unswept corners of oblivion.  But autocratic, irritable, and jealous, all the infirmities of his temper as brittle with years as the blood-vessels of his brain, the most exacting office in the civilized world taxed him too heavily.  It is interesting to speculate upon what he might have been in this final trial of his public career, had Hamilton died as he took the helm of State.  If Hamilton’s enemies very nearly ruined his own character, there is no denying that he exerted an almost malign influence upon them.  To those he loved or who appealed to the highest in him he gave not only strength, but an abundance of sweetness and light, illuminating mind and spirit, and inspiring an affection that was both unselfish and uplifting.  But his enemies hated him so frantically that their characters measurably deteriorated; to ruin or even disconcert him they stooped and intrigued and lied; they were betrayed into public acts which lowered them in their own eyes and in those of all students of history.  Other hatreds were healthy and stimulating by comparison; but there is no doubt that Adams, Jefferson, and Madison fell far lower than they would have done had Hamilton never shot into the American heavens, holding their fields at his pleasure, and paling the fires of large and ambitious stars.

The political excitement in the country by this time surpassed every previous convulsion to such an extent that no man prominent in the contest could appear on the street without insult.  Although he never knew it, Hamilton, every time he left the house, was shadowed by his son Philip, Robert Hamilton, Troup, John Church, or Philip Church.  For the Democratic ammunition and public fury alike were centred on Hamilton.  Adams came in for his share, but the Democrats regarded his doom as sealed, and Hamilton, as ever, the Colossus to be destroyed.  The windows of the bookshops were filled with pamphlets, lampoons, and cartoons.  The changes were rung on the aristocratical temper and the monarchical designs of the leader of the Federalists, until Hamilton was sick of the sight of himself with his nose in the air and a crown on his head, his train borne by Jay, Cabot, Sedgwick, and Bayard.  The people were warned in every issue of the Aurora, Chronicle, and other industrious sheets, that Hamilton was intriguing to drive the Democratic States to secession, that he might annihilate them at once with his army and his navy.  The Reynolds affair was retold once a week, with degrading variations, and there was no doubt that spies were nosing the ground in every direction to obtain evidence of another scandal to vary the monotony.  Mrs. Croix, being Queen of the Jacobins, was safe, so press and pamphlet indulged in wild generalities of debauchery and rapine.  It must be confessed that Jefferson fared no better in the Federalist sheets.  He was a huge and hideous spider, spinning in a web full of seduced citizens; he meditated a resort to arms, did he lose the election.  As to his private vices, they saddled him with an entire harem, and a black one at that.