A war with that dusky corsair, the Bey of Tripoli, clouded the very commencement of the new administration, breaking finally, after lasting three years, into a heavy shower, February 9, 1804, from the cannonading guns of young Decatur’s ship, the “Intrepid”,—a shower followed by blue-skied peace. Commodore Preble, who with his fleet had been dealing with Morocco, assisted in tanning, by some of Bellona’s bleaching-powders, the sable-peltried Tripolitan. The result was that the Bey turned to another complexion in his treatment of Christian captives. In 1802 Ohio doffed the pantalets and appeared around the Union board as a full-grown State. Some of her settlements had grown so fast, and so threatened to absorb the land into building-lots, that it was feared for a time that the surface would be insufficient for farming purposes. The exodus of population farther westward, however, relieved the anxieties of its genesis, and marked the first chapter of its growth. The bivouac that had encamped on her grandly rolling rivers began soon to join the westering caravan which pitched their tents across the Mississippi against the sunsettings. A Hoosier who borrows money at two per cent a month to buy land with may be trusted to pay it back in a short time. Two to nothing that he will add from his generosity a bonus with the return of the loan. Bonaparte, now Consul for life, and in sore need of money, sold to us, for $15,000,000, that tract of country stretching undefinedly towards the Pacific, and called Louisiana. Some of the wits of that day raised the question whether the purchase lawfully included alligators of such length that they stretched over the boundary lines. Neither this great question, nor the secondary one of the right of our government to buy foreign territory, was mooted in the Supreme Court, and thus we were spared an extra volume of majority essays and longer dissenting opinions. The foreign pill was too sugar-coated to cause any wry faces. It was a very big sell—for France. In July, 1804, Aaron Burr, Vice-President, murdered Alexander Hamilton at Hoboken. Some biographers have attempted, since the death of the future exile and fugitive from justice, to lighten the heavy burden which he carried for thirty-three years afterwards, but in vain. The public rarely reverses its first verdict. They can seldom be made to believe that its first look at the piece was on the wrong side, and no new napping or glossing will convince it that the other is the right side. The Presidency took such a fancy to Mr. Jefferson that, at his re-election, in 1804, he received 162 out of 176 votes cast; C. C. Pinckney, Esquire, of South Carolina getting the other 14. South Carolina then had the pleasant little conceit of voting for herself,—a harmless pastime that kept up her peculiar idea of resistance to Federal subjugation, and made a variety for the tellers in counting the contents of the electoral urn.