Page:Henry Adams' History of the United States Vol. 2.djvu/207

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188
HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES.
Ch. 8.

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 short and earnest warning against disunion, addressed to Theodore Sedgwick, one of the sternest Massachusetts Federalists of Pickering's class.[1]

"Dismemberment of our empire," said Hamilton, "will be a clear sacrifice of great positive advantages, wihtout 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 concentrated 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,

  1. Hamilton to Sedgwick, July 10, 1804; Works, vi. 567.