It was an ugly letter, not up to Hamilton's best work. The vindication of himself and the Pinckneys lost itself in the severity of the attack upon Adams, whose career was reviewed from the distant day of an unsound judgment ventured in military affairs during the Revolution, to the latest display of a consuming egotism, vanity, and jealousy as President. In a word, all the quarrels, resentments, and antagonisms which had torn and rent the Federal party for four years, but which, thanks to Washington, had not become generally known, were now, in a moment, officially exposed to the whole country, to the great astonishment of most Federalists, and to the great delight of all Republicans. "If the single purpose had been to defeat the President," said John Adams, "no more propitious moment could have been chosen." Fisher Ames declared that "the question is not how we shall fight, but how we shall fall." In vain did Hamilton journey through New England, struggling to gain votes for Pinckney; in vain did the "Essex Junto" deplore the appearance of a document certain to do their Jacobin opponents great service. The party, already practically defeated by its alien and sedition legislation, and now inflamed with angry feelings, hastened on to the inevitable catastrophe like a boat sucked into the rushing waters of Niagara, while the party of Jefferson, united in principle, and encouraged by the divisions of their adversaries, marched on to easy victory. When the result was known, Jefferson and Burr had each seventy-three electoral votes, Adams sixty-five, Pinckney sixty-four, and Jay one. It is difficult to realise the arguments which persuaded Hamilton to follow the suggestion of the fallen minister. Hot-tempered and impatient of restraint as he was, he knew Adams' attack had only paid him in kind. Nor is mitigation of Hamilton's conduct found in the statement, probably true, that the party could not in any case have carried the election. The great mass of Federalists believed, as Hamilton wrote Jay when asking an extra session of the Legislature, that the defeat of Jefferson was "the only means to save the nation from more disasters," and they naturally looked to him to accomplish that defeat. Of all men that ever led a political party, therefore, it was Hamilton's duty to sink personal antipathy, but in this attack upon Adams he seems deliberately to have sinned against the light. This was the judgment of men of his own day, and at the end of a century it is the judgment of men who cherish his teachings and revere his memory.