Page:Henry Adams' History of the United States Vol. 2.djvu/207

188 Griswold had so lately tried to create. Pickering's disunion scheme came to a natural end on Burr's defeat in April. The legislatures of the three Federalist States had met and done nothing; all chance of immediate action was lost, and all parties, including even Pickering and Griswold, had fallen back on their faith in the "crisis"; but the difference of opinion between Hamilton and the New Englanders was still well defined. Hamilton thought that disunion, from a conservative standpoint, was a mistake; nearly all the New Englanders, on the contrary, looked to ultimate disunion as a conservative necessity. The last letter which Hamilton wrote, a few hours before he left his house for the duelling-ground, was short and earnest warning against disunion, addressed to Theodore Sedgwick, one of the sternest Massachusetts Federalists of Pickering's class.


 * "Dismemberment of our empire," said Hamilton, "will be a clear sacrifice of great positive advantages, wihtout any counterbalancing good; administering no relief to our real disease, which is democracy,—the poison of which, by a subdivision, will only be the more concentrated in each part, and consequently the more virulent."

The New Englanders thought this argument unsound, as it certainly was; for a dissolution of the American Union would have struck a blow more nearly fatal to democracy throughout the world than any other "crisis" that man could have compassed. Yet the argument showed that had Hamilton survived,