For a hundred years men have regretted and mourned that he did not dare to stand alone against duelling, as he had dared to stand alone for economic and patriotic principles against the clamour of mobs and the malice of enemies.

But absurd and barbarous as was the custom, it flourished in Christian America, as it did in every other Christian country, in spite of Christian ethics; and it would not permit a proud, sensitive nature, jealous of his honour, especially…

Proof of his valour at Monmouth and at Yorktown would no more placate the popular contempt and obloquy sure to follow an avoidance of its demands than would the victory at Waterloo have excused Wellington had he declined to challenge Lord…

If Washington and Lincoln be excepted, it is doubtful if an American was ever more deeply mourned.

Had he been President, he could not have been buried with greater pomp, or with manifestations of more profound sorrow.

Although he had been hated by his enemies, and at times misunderstood by some of his friends, at his death the people, without division, instantly recognised that his life had been passionately devoted to his country, and they paid him the…

The sorrow became national; speeches, sermons, and poems without number, were composed in his honour; in every State, some county or town received his name; wherever an American lived, an expression of sympathy found record.

The preservation of letters to satisfy an erotic mind is low enough, but deliberately to identify each anonymous or initialled letter with the full name of the writer, for the use of a biographer, is an act of treachery of which few men…

He was, however, the ardent champion of nothing that made for the public good.

Indeed, the record of his whole life indicates that he never possessed a great thought, or fathered an important measure.

In the very hours when he was the most famous and the most flattered, he described himself as most unhappy.

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…

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Lewis seems to have had neither gifts nor capacity.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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