Unrestrained by precedent and unruled by fear for the future, he spoke with confidence to a people whom he delighted with the breadth and liberality of his views, lifting them onto heights from which they had never before surveyed their…

The ridiculous character of these prosecutions is illustrated by a fine of one hundred dollars because one defendant wished that the wadding used in a salute to John Adams had lodged in the ample part of the President's trousers.

Burr was smooth, polished, concise, never diffuse or declamatory, always serious and impressive.

If we may accept contemporary judgment, he was a good speaker whom everybody was curious to hear, and from whom no one turned away in disappointment.

On the other hand, Hamilton was an acknowledged orator, diffuse, ornate, full of metaphor, with flashes of poetical genius, revelling in exuberant strength, and endowed with a gift of argumentative eloquence which appealed to the intellect…

All this does not lessen the wrong involved in Hamilton's proposed violation of moral ethics, but it places the suggestion in the environment to which it properly belongs, making it appear no worse if no better than the political practices…

It is not easy to suggest the greater sufferer, Burr with his victory, or Hamilton with his defeat.

Of all men that ever led a political party, therefore, it was Hamilton's duty to sink personal antipathy, but in this attack upon Adams he seems deliberately to have sinned against the light.

As to my friends, they would dishonour my views and insult my feelings by a suspicion that I would submit to be instrumental in counteracting the wishes and the expectations of the people of the United States.

If he be elected by the Federalists against the hearty opposition of the Jacobins, the wounds mutually given and received will probably be incurable.

To such a course Hamilton was bitterly opposed, not only because he distrusted Burr more than he did Jefferson, but because the Federalists should leave the responsibility of a selection to the Republicans and thus in nowise be answerable…

Burr must become, in fact, the man of our party; and if he acts ill, we must share in the blame and disgrace.

In vain did Hamilton combat these points, insisting that Burr was a man of extreme and irregular ambition, selfish to a degree which even excluded social affection, and decidedly profligate.

He admitted that he was far more artful than wise, far more dexterous than able, but held that artfulness and dexterity were objections rather than recommendations, while he thought a systematic statesman should have a theory.

Gradually the truth began to dawn as men talked and compared notes, and before three months had elapsed Jefferson's estimate of Burr's character corresponded with Hamilton's.

Whatever was fair for Federalists then, they argued, could not be unfair for Republicans now.

In spite of his love for science, DeWitt Clinton was a born politician, with all the characteristic incongruities incident to such a life.

Unlike most other men of his party, he did not rely wholly upon discipline and organisation, or upon party fealty and courtesy.

He was not a mere day-dreamer, a theorist, a philosopher, a scholar, although he possessed the gifts of each.

He was, rather, a man of action--self-willed, self-reliant, independent--as ambitious as Burr without his slippery ways, and as determined as Hamilton with all his ability to criticise an opponent.

Clinton relied not more upon men than upon measures, and in the end the one thing that made him superior to all his contemporaries of the nineteenth century was a never-failing belief in the possibility of success along lines marked out…

Attachment to his interests was the one supreme and only test of fitness for favours or friendship, and at one time or another he quarrelled with every friend who sought to retain independence of action.

Yet he was a noble illustration of what may be accomplished by an indomitable will, backed by a fearless independence and a power to dominate people in spite of antagonism of great and successful rivals.

Nevertheless, it was the purity of his life, the probity of his actions, the excellence of his public purposes, that commended him to the affectionate regard of everybody.

The absence of violent democratic innovations was the Constitution's remarkable feature.