The conditions that faced Madison made peace his last hope. American commissioners were already in Europe; but as month after month passed without agreement, the darkest hour of the war seemed to have settled upon the country. Suddenly, on the 4th of February, 1815, the startling and glorious news of General Jackson's decisive victory at New Orleans electrified the nation. A week later, a British sloop of war sailed into New York harbour, announcing that the treaty of Ghent had been signed on the 24th of the preceding December. Instantly Madison's troubles disappeared. The war was over, the Hartford commissioners were out of employment, and the happy phrase of Charles J. Ingersoll of Pennsylvania became the popular summing up of the treaty--"not an inch ceded or lost." Jackson's victory had not entered into the peace negotiations; but intelligent men knew that the superb fighting along the Canadian frontier during the campaign of 1814, had had much to do in bringing about the result. Beginning with the battle of Chippewa, where equal bodies of troops met face to face, in broad daylight, on an open field, without advantage of position, the American army faced British troops with the skill and desperate courage that characterised the struggle between the North and the South forty years later. Among civilians most admired for their part in the struggle, Daniel D. Tompkins stood first. The genius of an American governor had never been more nobly employed, and, although he was sometimes swayed by prejudice and the impulses of his personal ambition, he did enough to show that he was devotedly attached to his country. CHAPTER XXI CLINTON OVERTHROWN 1815 The election of a Republican Assembly in the spring of 1814 opened the way for a Republican Council of Appointment, composed of Jonathan Dayton, representing the southern district, Lucas Elmendorff the middle, Ruggles Hubbard the eastern, and Ferrand Stranahan the western. Elmendorff had been two years in the Assembly, six years in Congress, and was now serving the first year of a single term in the State Senate; but like his less experienced colleagues he was on the Council simply to carry out the wishes of the leaders. It had been three years since Republicans had tasted the sweets of office, and a hungrier horde of applicants never besieged the capital. Yet so dextrous had politicians become in making changes from one party to the other, that the Council's work must have ended in a week had not the jealousies, until now veiled by the war, quickly developed into a conflict destined to reconcile Ambrose Spencer and DeWitt Clinton, and to rivet the friendly relations between Governor Tompkins and Martin Van Buren.