The spring of 1801, when plans were laid for issuing the _Evening Post_, was the blackest season the Federalists of New York had yet known. Jefferson was inaugurated as President on March 4, and the upper as well as the lower branch of Congress had now become Democratic. In April the State election was held, and the ticket headed by gouty old George Clinton won a sweeping victory over the Federalists, so that at Albany the Democrats took complete control; the Governorship, Legislature, and Council of Appointment were theirs. Many Federalists sincerely believed that the nation and State had been put upon the road to ruin. They were convinced that the party of Washington, Hamilton, and Adams, which had built up a vigorous republic out of a ramshackle Confederation, was the only party of construction; and that Democracy meant ruin to the public credit, aggressions by the States upon a weak central government, and national disintegration. Hamilton wrote Gouverneur Morris after the election, in all seriousness, that the Constitution had become “a frail and worthless fabric.” For Hamilton himself, inasmuch as many of his own party deemed him responsible for the disaster which had overtaken it, the hour was doubly black. No other leader approached him in brilliance, but his genius was not unmixed with an erratic quality. He and John Adams, men of wholly different temperaments, tastes, and habits, had always instinctively disliked each other; and during Adams’s Administration the latter had provoked an open breach with Hamilton, which meant a division of the Federalists into two factions. Hamilton, stung by Adams’s hostility and in especial by the charge that he was too Anglophile to be patriotic, had so far lost control of himself as to commit a capital political blunder. He had written just before the election of 1800 a bitter analysis of “The Public Conduct and Character of John Adams,” and though he designed this attack for confidential circulation only, it soon became public. The Democrats, their victory already assured, had made the most of it, and the resentment of Adams’s adherents was intense. The party schism was widened when it fell to the House of Representatives early in 1801 to decide the tie for the Presidency between Jefferson and Burr. Of the two, Hamilton patriotically preferred Jefferson, and used his influence to persuade the Federalist Representatives to vote for him. But the New England Federalists, Adams’s friends, opposed this view, and to Hamilton’s disgust, all the New England States save Vermont went into Burr’s column.