It contains no stipulation for satisfaction of the injuries we have received [Sedgwick wrote in wrath].  It makes the treaty of ’78 a subject for future negotiation.  It engages that we shall return, in the condition they now are, all our captures.  It makes neutral bottoms a protection to their cargoes, and it contains a stipulation directly in violation of the 25th article of our treaty with Great Britain.  Such are the blessed effects of our mission!  These are the ripened fruits of this independent Administration!  Our friends in the Senate are not enough recovered from their astonishment to begin to reflect on the course they shall pursue.

This treaty was a far more deadly weapon in Hamilton’s hands than the entire arsenal he had manipulated in his pamphlet, for campaign literature is often pickled and retired with the salt of its readers.  But did this mission fail, did Adams lose his only chance of justification for sending the commission at all, did the Senate refuse to ratify, and war break out, or honourable terms of peace be left to the next President, then Adams’s Administration must be stamped in history as a failure, and he himself retire from office covered with ignominy.  But had Hamilton not recovered his balance and trimmed to their old steady duty the wicks of those lamps whose brilliance had dimmed in a stormy hour, his statesmanship would have controlled him in such a crisis as this.  He knew that the rejection of the treaty would shatter the Federal party and cause national schisms and discords; that, if left over to a Jacobin administration, the result would be still worse for the United States.  It was a poor thing, but no doubt the best that could have been extracted from triumphant France; nor was it as bad in some respects as the irritated Senate would have it.  Such as it was, it must be ratified, peace placed to the credit of the Federalists, and the act of the man they had made President justified.  Hamilton was obliged to write a great many letters on the subject, for the Federalists found it a bitter pill to swallow; but he prevailed and they swallowed it.

Meanwhile, the Electoral College had met.  Adams had received sixty-five votes, Pinckney sixty-four, Jefferson and Burr seventy-three each.  That threw the decision upon the House of Representatives, for Burr refused to recognize the will of the people, and withdraw in favour of the man whom the Democratic hemisphere of American politics had unanimously elected.  Burr had already lost caste with the party by his attempts to secure more votes than the leaders were willing to give him, and had alarmed Jefferson into strenuous and diplomatic effort, the while he piously folded his visible hands or discoursed upon the bones of the mammoth.  When Burr, therefore, permitted the election to go to the House, he was flung out of the Democratic party neck and crop, and Jefferson treated him like a dog until he killed Hamilton, when he gave a banquet