Everything pivots on the legislature; since it is the legislature which will select the electors.
Hamilton, bearing in mind his intended steal of the State, prepares his list of candidates for Albany. He does not pick them for either wisdom or moral worth; what he is after are legislators whom he can certainly manhandle to match his designs, and who will give him electors--he himself will furnish the names--of a Pinckney not an Adams complexion. He makes up his slate to that treasonable end; and the swift Aaron gets a copy before the ink is dry.
Aaron smiles when he runs down the ignoble muster of Hamilton’s boneless nonentities.
“They are the least in the town!” he mutters. “I shall pit against them the town’s greatest.”
Aaron with his Bucktails, now makes ready his own legislative ticket. At the head he places old North-of-Ireland Clinton--a local Whittington, ten times governor of the State. General Gates--for whom Aaron, when time was, plotted the downfall of Washington, and who received the sword of the vanquished Burgoyne and sent that popinjay back to England to fail at play-writing--comes next. After General Gates the wily Aaron writes “Samuel Osgood”--who was Washington’s postmaster general--“Henry Rutgers, Elias Neusen, Thomas Storms, George Warner, Philip Arcularius, James Hunt, Ezekiel Robbins, Brockholst Livingston, and John Swartwout”--every name a tower of strength.
Hamilton cannot repress a flutter of fear as he reads the noble roster; but his unflagging vanity, which serves him instead of a more reasonable optimism, rushes to his rescue. None the less it jars on him a bit strangely, albeit, he laughs at it for a jest, that the best regarded of the town should make up the ticket of the yeomanry and the crude Bucktails, while the aristocratical Federals and the equally aristocratical Cincinnati--that coterie of perfume and patricianism!--search the gutters for theirs.
Seeing himself on the Jefferson ticket, old North-of-Ireland Clinton makes trouble. He sends for Aaron and his committee, and notifies them that he cannot consent to run.
“If you, Colonel Burr, were the candidate,” he says, “I should run gladly; but Jefferson I hate.”
In his hope’s heart, old North-of-Ireland Clinton---who, for all his North-of-Ireland blood, was born in America--thinks he himself may be struck by the presidential lightning, and does not intend to place any deflecting obstruction in the path of such descending bolt.