Hamilton threw himself with energy into the desperate fight. For four days, from April 29 to May 2, while the polls were open, he visited every voting precinct, appealing to the public in his wonderfully persuasive and captivating manner. On several occasions Burr and Hamilton met, and it was afterward recalled that courtesy characterised the conduct of each toward the other, one champion waiting while the other took his turn. Rarely if ever in the history of the country have two men of such ability and astuteness participated in a local canvass. The rivalry was all the more exciting because it was a rivalry of styles as well as of capacities. Burr was smooth, polished, concise, never diffuse or declamatory, always serious and impressive. If we may accept contemporary judgment, he was a good speaker whom everybody was curious to hear, and from whom no one turned away in disappointment. On the other hand, Hamilton was an acknowledged orator, diffuse, ornate, full of metaphor, with flashes of poetical genius, revelling in exuberant strength, and endowed with a gift of argumentative eloquence which appealed to the intellect and the feelings at the same time. Erastus Root says Hamilton's words were so well chosen, and his sentences so finely formed into a swelling current, that the hearer would be captivated if not convinced, while Burr's arguments were generally methodised and compact. To this Root added a judgment, after thirty years' experience in public life at Washington and in New York, that "they were much the greatest men in the State, and perhaps the greatest men in the United States." When the polls closed the Republicans had carried the Legislature by twenty-two majority on joint ballot. This secured to them the election of the needed twelve presidential electors. To recover their loss the Federalists now clamoured for a change in the law transferring the election of presidential electors from the Legislature to districts created for that purpose. Such an amendment would give the Federalists six of the twelve electors. This was Hamilton's plan. In an earnest plea he urged Jay to convene the Legislature in extraordinary session for this purpose. "The anti-Federal party," he wrote to the Governor, "is a composition indeed of very incongruous materials, but all tending to mischief; some of them to the overthrow of the government by stripping it of its due energies; others of them by revolutionising it after the manner of Bonaparte. The government must not be confided to the custody of its enemies, and, although the measure proposed is open to objection, a popular government cannot stand if one party calls to its aid all the resources which vice can give, and the other, however pressing the emergency, feels itself obliged to confine itself within the ordinary forms of delicacy and decorum."[91] [Footnote 91: _Hamilton's Works_ (Lodge), Vol. 8, p. 549.]