Page:History of Journalism in the United States.djvu/215

Rh in getting copies of the sheets of Hamilton's composition as they were set up by the printer, and scattered them through the anti-Federalist press. In the last week of October the pamphlet itself was released and made certain the defeat of Adams and the election of Thomas Jefferson. William Duane, writing to his friend, General Collot, who had been driven to the other side of the Atlantic by the Alien Law, said: "This pamphlet has done more mischief to the parties concerned than all the labors of the Aurora."

The anomaly of Hamilton's using Burr, the man by whom he was afterward killed, to bring about the elevation to the presidency of his bitterest enemy, Jefferson, is not more strange than the manner in which John Adams passed out of political life. One would have expected from the glorious associate of Sam Adams, the man who urged Edes and Gill to hold fast and not be swayed from the true path of patriotic printers, that he would have sensed the folly of the course on which he had embarked. That it was Hamilton, the brilliant editorial writer and manager, who administered to him the final stroke, shows how uncertain and temperamental were the ties. But one leaves the second president with the feeling that he was a lovable old blunderer, and a fine, God-given American, the very best of that great New England stock.