ton, ambitious to become
Vice President, declined re-election;[130] and the Federalists, beaten
into a disunited minority, refused to put up a candidate. This
apparently left the field wide open to John Lansing, with John Broome
for lieutenant-governor.

[Footnote 130: "DeWitt Clinton was annoyed at his uncle's conduct, and
tried to prevent the withdrawal by again calling Jefferson to his aid
and alarming him with fear of Burr. But the President declined to
interfere. No real confidence ever existed between Jefferson and the
Clintons."--Henry Adams, _History of the United States_, Vol. 2, pp.
173, 174.]

For many years the Lansing family had been prominent in the affairs of
the State and influential in the councils of their party. The
Chancellor, some years younger than Livingston, a large, handsome,
modest man, was endowed with a remarkable capacity for public life.
The story of his career is a story of rugged manhood and a tragic,
mysterious death. He rose by successive steps to be mayor of Albany,
member of the Assembly of which he was twice speaker, member of
Congress under the Confederation, judge and chief justice of the
Supreme Court, and finally chancellor. Indeed, so long as he did the
bidding of the Clintons he kept rising; but the independence that
early characterised his action at Philadelphia in 1787 and at
Poughkeepsie in 1788 became more and more pronounced, until it
separated him at last from the faction that had steadily given him
support. Perhaps his nearest approach to a splendid virtue was his
stubborn independence. Whether this characteristic, amounting almost
to stoical indifference, led to his murder is now a sealed secret. All
that we know of his death is, that he left the hotel, where he lived
in New York, to mail a letter on the steamer for Albany, and was never
afterward seen. That he was murdered comes from the lips of Thurlow
Weed, who was intrusted with the particulars, but who died with the
secret untold. Lansing disappeared in 1829 and Weed died in 1882, yet,
after the lapse of half a century, the latter did not feel justified
in disclosing what had come to him as a sort of father confessor,
years after the tragedy. "While it is true that the parties are beyond
the reach of human tribunals and of public opinion," he said, "yet
others immediately associated with them, and sharing in the strong
inducement which prompted the crime, survive, occupying high positions
and enjoying public con