rty leaders. The ridiculous character of these
prosecutions is illustrated by a fine of one hundred dollars because
one defendant wished that the wadding used in a salute to John Adams
had lodged in the ample part of the President's trousers.

But the sedition law had a more serious enemy than rash subordinates.
John Armstrong, author of the celebrated "Newburgh Letters," and until
recently a Federalist, wrote a vitriolic petition for its repeal,
which Jedediah Peck circulated for signatures. This incited the
indiscreet and excitable Judge Cooper, father of the distinguished
novelist, to begin a prosecution; and upon his complaint, the United
States marshal, armed with a bench-warrant, carried off Peck to New
York City for trial. It is two hundred miles from Cooperstown to the
mouth of the Hudson, and in the spring of 1800 the marshal and his
prisoner were five days on the way. The newspapers reported Peck as
"taken from his bed at midnight, manacled, and dragged from his home,"
because he dared ask his neighbours to petition Congress to repeal an
offensive law. "The rule of George Third," declared the press, "was
gracious and loving compared to such tyranny." In the wildest delirium
of revolutionary days, when patriots were refusing to drink tea, and
feeding it to the fishes, New York had not been more deeply stirred
than now. "A hundred missionaries in the cause of democracy, stationed
between New York and Cooperstown," says Hammond, the historian, "could
not have done so much for the Republican cause as this journey of
Jedediah Peck from Otsego to the capital of the State. It was nothing
less than the public exhibition of a suffering martyr for the freedom
of speech and the press, and for the right of petition."[89]

[Footnote 89: Jabez D. Hammond, _Political History of New York_, Vol.
1, p. 132.]

This was the political condition when Aaron Burr, in the spring of
1800, undertook to gain twelve electoral votes for the Republicans by
carrying the Legislature of New York. It required seventy electoral
votes to choose a President, and outside of New York the
anti-Federalists could count sixty-one. The capture of this State,
therefore, would give them a safe majority. Without advertising his
purposes, Burr introduced the sly methods that characterised his
former campaigns, beginning with the selection of a ticket that would
commend itself to all, and ending with an organisation that would do
credit to the management o