Volume I Part 5 (1/2)

If Clinton thought himself fortunate in gaining Burr, he was still more fortunate in the defection of the influential Livingstons. What Caesar said of Gaul used to be said of the Empire State, that all New York was divided into three parts--the Clintons, the Livingstons, and the Schuylers. Parton said ”the Clintons had power, the Livingstons had numbers, and the Schuylers had Hamilton.”[53] In 1788 seven members of the Livingston family, with the Schuylers, had overthrown the Clintons, and turned the Confederation into the Union. Robert R.

Livingston, standing at their head, was the exponent of a liberal policy toward all American citizens, and the champion of a broader national life. His a.s.sociates were the leading Federalists; his principles were the pillars of his party; and his ambitions centred in the success and strength of his country.

[Footnote 53: James Parton, _Life of Aaron Burr_, Vol. 1, p. 169. ”New York, much more than New England, was the home of natural leaders and family alliances. John Jay, the governor; the Schuylers, led by Philip Schuyler and his son-in-law, Alexander Hamilton; the Livingstons, led by Robert R. Livingston, with a promising younger brother, Edward, nearly twenty years his junior, and a brother-in-law, John Armstrong, besides Samuel Osgood, Morgan Lewis and Smith Thompson, other connections by marriage with the great Livingston stock; the Clintons, headed by George, the governor, and supported by the energy of DeWitt, his nephew,--all these Jays, Schuylers, Livingstons, Clintons, had they lived in New England, would probably have united in the support of their cla.s.s; but being citizens of New York they quarrelled.”--Henry Adams, _History of the United States_, Vol. 1, pp. 108-09.]

Prudence, therefore, if no higher motive, required that the Livingstons be not overlooked in the division of federal patronage.

There was much of it to divide. Besides cabinet positions and judicial appointments, the foreign service offered rare opportunities to a few accomplished statesmen and recognised scholars. Robert R. Livingston, as chancellor of New York, stood in line of promotion for chief justice of the United States Supreme Court, but John Jay stood nearer to Hamilton, just as Philip Schuyler did when United States senators were chosen. Other honourable and most desirable positions, however, were open. John Quincy Adams thought a mission to England or France better than the Cabinet, but Gouverneur Morris went to France, Thomas Pinckney to England, William Short to Spain, and David Humphreys to Portugal. The Livingstons were left out.

Hamilton's funding system, especially the proposed a.s.sumption of state debts, then dividing the public mind, afforded plausible cause for opposing federalism; and ostensibly for this reason, the Livingstons ceased to be Federalists. Some of the less conspicuous members, residents of Columbia County, continued their adherence, but the statesmen who give the family its name in history wanted nothing more of a party whose head was a ”young adventurer,” a man ”not native to the soil,” a ”merchant's clerk from the West Indies.” The story is that the Chancellor convened the family and made the separation so complete that Was.h.i.+ngton's subsequent offer of the mission to France failed to secure his return.

The first notice of the Livingston break was in the election of a United States senator in 1791. Philip Schuyler, Hamilton's father-in-law, confidently expected a re-election. His selection for the short term was with this understanding. But several members of the a.s.sembly, nominally Federalists, were friendly to Clinton, who preferred Aaron Burr to Schuyler because of Hamilton's influence over him;[54] and when the Governor promised Morgan Lewis, the Chancellor's brother-in-law, Burr's place as attorney-general, Livingston's disposition to injure Hamilton became intensified, and to the disappointment of Schuyler, the vote of the Legislature disclosed a small majority for Burr.

[Footnote 54: In a letter to Theodorus Bailey, Chancellor Kent, then a member of the a.s.sembly, expressed the opinion that ”things look auspicious for Burr. It will be in some measure a question of northern and southern interests. The objection of Schuyler's being related to the Secretary has weight.”--William Kent, _Memoirs and Letters of James Kent_, p. 39.]

It is easy to conjecture that the haughty, unpopular, aristocratic old General[55] would not be as acceptable as a young man of thirty-five, fascinating in manner, gifted in speech, and not yet openly and offensively partisan; but it needed something more than this charm of personality to line up the hard-headed, self-reliant legislator against Hamilton and Philip Schuyler, and Burr found it in his appeal to Clinton, and in the clever brother-in-law suggestion to Livingston.

[Footnote 55: ”The defeat of Schuyler was attributed partly to the unprepossessing austerity of his manner.”--_Ibid._, p. 38.]

The defeat of Schuyler was a staggering blow to Hamilton. The great statesman had achieved success as secretary of the treasury, but as a political manager, his lack of tact, impatience of control, and infirmity of temper, had crippled the organisation. In less than three years the party had lost a United States senator, suffered the separation of a family vastly more important than federal appointees, and sacrificed the prestige of victory, so necessary to political success.

CHAPTER VI

GEORGE CLINTON DEFEATS JOHN JAY

1792-1795

Burr's rapid advancement gave full rein to his ambition. Not content with the exalted office to which he had suddenly fallen heir, he now began looking for higher honours; and when it came time to select candidates for governor, he invoked the tactics that won him a place in the United States Senate. He found a few anti-Federalists willing to talk of him as a stronger candidate than George Clinton, and a few Federalists who claimed that the moderate men of both parties would rally to his support. In the midst of the talk Isaac Ledyard wrote Hamilton that ”a tide was likely to make strongly for Mr. Burr,”[56]

and James Watson, in a similar strain, argued that Burr's chances, if supported by Federalists, would be ”strong.”[57]

[Footnote 56: James Parton, _Life of Aaron Burr_, Vol. 1, p. 187.]

[Footnote 57: _Ibid._, 188.]

Clinton's firm hold upon his party quickly checked Burr's hope from that quarter, but the increasing difficulty among Federalists to find a candidate offered opportunity for Burr's peculiar tactics, until his adherents were everywhere--on the bench, in the Legislature, in the drawing-rooms, the coffee-houses, and the streets. Hamilton had only to present him and say, ”Here is your candidate,” and Aaron Burr would cheerfully have opposed the friend who, within less than two years, had appointed him attorney-general and elected him United States senator. But Hamilton deliberately snuffed him out. The great Federalist had finally induced John Jay to become the candidate of his party. This was on February 13, 1792. Two days later, the anti-Federalists named George Clinton and Pierre Van Cortlandt, the old ticket which had done service for fifteen years.

In inducing John Jay to lead his party, Hamilton made a good start.

Heretofore Jay had steadily refused to become a candidate for governor. ”That the office of the first magistrate of the State,” he wrote, May 16, 1777, ”will be more respectable as well as more lucrative than the place I now fill is very apparent; but my object in the course of the present great contest neither has been nor will be either rank or money.”[58] After his return from Europe, when Governor Clinton's division of patronage and treatment of royalists had become intensely objectionable, Jay was again urged to stand as a candidate, but he answered that ”a servant should not leave a good old master for the sake of more pay or a prettier livery.”[59] If this was good reasoning in 1786 and 1789, when he was secretary of foreign affairs, it was better reasoning in 1792, when he was chief justice of the United States; but the pleadings of Hamilton seem to have set a presidential bee buzzing, or, at least, to have started ambition in a mind until now without ambition. At any rate, Jay, suddenly and without any apparent reason, consented to exchange the most exalted office next to President, to chance the New York governors.h.i.+p.

[Footnote 58: William Jay, _Life of John Jay_, Vol. 1, p. 162.]

[Footnote 59: _Ibid._, p. 198.]

There had never been a time since John Jay entered public life that he was not the most popular man in the city of New York. In 1788 he received for delegate to the Poughkeepsie convention, twenty-seven hundred and thirty-five votes out of a total of twenty-eight hundred and thirty-three. John Adams called him ”a Roman” because he resembled Cato more than any of his contemporaries. Jay's life divided itself into three distinct epochs of twenty-eight years each--study and the practice of law, public employment, and retirement. During the years of uninterrupted public life, he ran the gamut of office-holding. It is a long catalogue, including delegate to the Continental Congress, framer of the New York Const.i.tution, chief justice of the New York Supreme Court, president of the Continental Congress, minister to Spain, member of the Peace Commission, secretary of foreign affairs, chief justice of the United States Supreme Court, negotiator of the Jay treaty, and finally governor of New York. No other American save John Quincy Adams and John Marshall ever served his country so continuously in such exalted and responsible place. On his return from Europe after an absence of five years, Adams said he returned to his country ”like a bee to its hive, with both legs loaded with merit and honour.”[60]

[Footnote 60: To Thos. Barclay, May 24, 1784, _Hist. Mag._, 1869, p.

358.]

Jay accepted the nomination for governor in 1792, on condition that he be not asked to take part in the campaign. ”I made it a rule,” he wrote afterward, ”neither to begin correspondence nor conversation upon the subject.”[61] Accordingly, while New York was deeply stirred, the Chief Justice leisurely rode over his circuit, out of hearing and out of sight of the political disturbance, apparently indifferent to the result.

[Footnote 61: William Jay, _Life of John Jay_, Vol. 1, p. 289.]

The real political campaign which is still periodically made in New York, may be said to have had its beginning in April, 1792. Seldom has an election been contested with such prodigality of partisan fury. The rhetoric of abuse was vigorous and unrestrained; the campaign lie active and ingenious; the arraignment of cla.s.s against cla.s.s sedulous and adroit, and the excitement most violent and memorable. If a weapon of political warfare failed to be handled with craft and with courage, its skilful use was unknown.