These concluding words were the usual form in which men expressed themselves when they intended to accept a challenge to a duel. At first sight, no sufficient reason for accepting a challenge was shown by Hamilton’s letter, which disavowed Dr. Cooper’s report so far as Burr was warranted in claiming disavowal. Hamilton might without impropriety have declined to give further satisfaction. In truth, not the personal but the political quarrel drew him into the field; he knew that Burr meant to challenge, not the man, but the future political chief, and that an enemy so bent on rule must be met in the same spirit. Hamilton fought to maintain his own right to leadership, so rudely disputed by Burr, Pickering, and Griswold. He devoted some of his moments before the duel to the task of explaining, in a formal document, that he fought only to save his political influence.[122] “The ability to be in future useful, whether in resisting mischief or effecting good, in those crises of our public affairs which seem likely to happen, would probably be inseparable from a conformity with public prejudice in this particular.” Always the crisis! Yet this crisis which brought Hamilton in July to the duelling-ground at Weehawken was not the same as that which Pickering and Griswold had so lately tried to create. Pickering’s disunion scheme came to a natural end on Burr’s defeat in April. The legislatures of the three Federalist States had met and done nothing; all chance of immediate action was lost, and all parties, including even Pickering and Griswold, had fallen back on their faith in the “crisis”; but the difference of opinion between Hamilton and the New Englanders was still well defined. Hamilton thought that disunion, from a conservative standpoint, was a mistake; nearly all the New Englanders, on the contrary, looked to ultimate disunion as a conservative necessity. The last letter which Hamilton wrote, a few hours before he left his house for the duelling-ground, was a short and earnest warning against disunion, addressed to Theodore Sedgwick, one of the sternest Massachusetts Federalists of Pickering’s class.[123] “Dismemberment of our empire,” said Hamilton, “will be a clear sacrifice of great positive advantages, without any counterbalancing good; administering no relief to our real disease, which is _democracy_,--the poison of which, by a subdivision, will only be the more concentred in each part, and consequently the more virulent.” The New Englanders thought this argument unsound, as it certainly was; for a dissolution of the American Union would have struck a blow more nearly fatal to democracy throughout the world than any other “crisis” that man could have compassed. Yet the argument showed that had Hamilton survived, he would probably have separated from his New England allies, and at last, like his friends Rufus King and Oliver Wolcott, would have accepted the American world as it was.