De Alexander

As restraints increased, the Yankee skippers became sly and cunning--risking capture, using neutral flags, and finding other subterfuges for new restrictions.

For several years American commerce, centring chiefly in New England and New York, and occupying a neutral position toward European belligerents, had enjoyed unparalleled prosperity.

The sight of the dismantled Chesapeake, with its dead and dying, aroused the people irrespective of party into demanding reparation or war.

For three years this young judge, substituting sympathy for severity, had endeared himself to all who knew him.

The farmer boy's determined, patient preparation for public life, and his fortitude in the face of conscious disadvantages, ought also to have suggested that the young man was made of sterner stuff than the obedient Theodorus Bailey.

Tompkins, on the contrary, carried the tenderness of a wide humanity in his face.

A dullard could read his character at a glance.

It used to be said that Tompkins made more friends in refusing favours than Clinton did in granting them.

Although he often changed his associates, like Lord Shaftesbury, he never changed his purposes.

What the struggle between Stalwarts and Half Breeds was to our own time, the struggle between Clinton and Tompkins was to our ancestors of two and three generations ago.

Just now Clinton wanted a candidate with no convictions, no desires, no ambitions, and no purposes save to please him.

A place on the Supreme Court, valued then even more highly than now, had been lost to the party because of his arrogant and consuming nepotism, and men turned with enthusiasm to Daniel D.

But the steadfast, judicious qualities that commended him as a soldier seem to have forsaken him as a politician.

Less than a year before, in his efforts to educate the children of the poor, unprovided for in parochial schools, he had laid the foundation of the public school system, heading the subscription list for the purchase of suitable quarters.

It could even then be said of Clinton that his name was associated with every great enterprise for the public good.

They were discreditable to the Council and disgraceful to DeWitt Clinton; yet sentiment of the time seems to have approved them, regarding Clinton's conduct merely as a stroke of good politics.

Nothing could be less justifiable, or, indeed, more nefarious than such removals.

Lewis seems to have had neither gifts nor capacity.

DeWitt Clinton, with all his faults, and they were many and grave, had in him the gifts of a master and the capacity of a statesman.

The Governor may have thought so, but it was further evidence of his inability either to understand the sentiment dominating the party he sought to represent, or successfully to compete with Clinton in leadership.

It condemned him to a career of almost unbroken opposition for the rest of his life; it made precedents that lived to curse him; and it compelled alliances that weakened him.

He had done a great deal of harm, and, except as a Revolutionary soldier, no good whatever.

As he lived, so he died, a strange, lonely, unhappy man, out of tune with the beautiful world in which he was permitted to exist upward of four score years.

Yet one is shocked at the unnatural parent who instructs his daughter to read, in the event of his death in the duel with Hamilton, the confidential letters which came to him in the course of his love intrigues and affairs of gallantry.

There has hardly ever been in the world a more famous pair of lovers than Burr and his gifted, noble daughter, and there is nothing in history more profoundly melancholy than the loss of the ship, driven by the pitiless wind of fate, on…