Hamilton gladly turned in April, 1801, from his pre-occupation with politics to his law practice. Forty-three years old, with eight children and a wife to support, with no savings, and ambitious of building himself a country home on the upper part of Manhattan, he needed the $12,000 a year which he could earn at the city bar. When he thought of public affairs, he felt not tired--he was too intense for that--but chagrined, and misused. After all, the real causes of Adams’s defeat were the alien and sedition laws, the persecuting temper of the Administration, its hot and cold policy in dealing with French outrages, and Adams’s vanity, caprice, and irascibility. But Hamilton by his pamphlet attack on the President had seriously damaged his own reputation for generalship. His friend, Robert Troup, wrote that this misstep had been most unfortunate. “An opinion has grown out of it, which at present obtains almost universally, that his character is radically deficient in discretion. Hence, he is considered as an unfit head of the party.” Hamilton himself admitted, Troup says, “that his influence with the Federal party was wholly gone.” He might well think of the assistance a newspaper would lend in defending himself from the Adams faction, restoring Federalist prestige, and attacking the triumphant Democrats. Hamilton had many local companions in defeat, ready to support such a journal. Troup himself, and one other close friend, the cultivated merchant, William W. Woolsey, had been beaten for the Assembly. A general removal of Federalists from office followed the overturn. Though President Jefferson proved milder than had been feared, he made a number of changes, the most notable being that by which the wealthy Joshua Sands, with a store at 118 Pearl Street, lost the Collectorship of the Port. As for the new authorities at Albany, they were merciless. The Council of Appointment was dominated by young De Witt Clinton, the Governor’s pushing nephew, and its guillotine worked night and day till every obnoxious head was off. In place of the tall and dignified Richard Varick, who had been one of Washington’s secretaries, and to whose public spirit the American Bible Society, which he founded, is still a monument, it appointed Edward Livingston to be Mayor. In place of the scholarly Cadwallader Colden, it made Richard Riker the Attorney-General. Sylvanus Miller was brought down from Ulster to be Surrogate, and Ruggles Hubbard from Rensselaer to be Sheriff. The very Justiceships of the Peace were transferred. The Clerkship of the Circuit Court whose jurisdiction covered the city was taken from William Coleman and given to John McKesson. A majority of the people of the city were Federalists, and they watched all these transfers with pain.