lutes him thus: "Glorious, delightful, honest John Adams! An American John Bull! The Comic Uncle of this exciting drama!" He then calls him "a high-mettled game-cock," and says "he made a splendid show of fight."
Such little foibles and vanities might easily be pardoned, if the book had no more important defects. It professes to explain portions of our history hitherto not perfectly understood, and it contains many statements for the truth of which we must rely upon the good sense and accuracy of the writer; yet it is full of errors, and often evinces a disposition to exaggeration little calculated to produce confidence in its reliability.
Our space will not permit us to point out all the mistakes which Mr. Parton has made, and we will mention only a few which attracted our attention upon the first perusal of his book. His hero was appointed Lieutenant-Colonel when only twenty-one years of age, and the author says that he was "the youngest man who held that rank in the Revolutionary army, or who has ever held it in an army of the United States." Alexander Hamilton and Brockholst Livingston both reached that rank at twenty years of age.—Mr. Parton tells us that Burr's rise in politics was more "rapid than that of any other man who has played a conspicuous part in the affairs of the United States"; and that "in four years after fairly entering the political arena, he was advanced, first, to the highest honor of the bar, next, to a seat in the National Council, and then, to a competition with Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Clinton, for the Presidency itself." He could hardly have crowded more errors into a single paragraph. Burr never attained the highest honor of the bar. His first appearance in politics was as a member of the Legislature of New York, in 1784, when twenty-eight years old; five years after, he was appointed Attorney-General; in 1791 he was elected to the Senate of the United States; and in 1801, at the age of forty-five, seventeen years after he fairly entered public life, he became Vice-President. Hamilton was a member of Congress at twenty-five, and at thirty-two was Secretary of the Treasury; Jefferson wrote the great Declaration when only thirty-two years old; and the present Vice-President is a much younger man than Burr was when he reached that station. The statement, that Burr was the rival of Washington and Adams for the Presidency, is absurd. Under the Constitution, at that time, each elector voted for two persons,—the candidate who received the greatest number of votes (if a majority of the whole) being declared President, and the one having the next highest number Vice-President. In 1792, at which time Burr received one vote in the Electoral College, all the electors voted for Washington; consequently the vote for Burr, upon the strength of which Mr. Parton makes his magnificent boast, was palpably for the Vice-Presidency. In 1796, the Presidential candidates were Adams and Jefferson, for one or the other of whom every elector voted,—the votes for Burr, in this instance thirty in number, being, as before, only for the Vice-Presidency. Even in 1800, when the votes for Jefferson and Burr in the Electoral College were equal, it is notorious that this equality was simply the result of their being supported on the same ticket,—the former for the office of President, and the latter for that of Vice-President. Mr. Parton says, that, in the House of Representatives, Burr would have been elected on the first ballot, if a majority would have sufficed; and that Mr. Jefferson never received more than fifty-one votes in a House of one hundred and six members. Had he taken the trouble to examine Gales's "Annals of Congress" for 1799-1801, he would have found that the House consisted of one hundred and four members, two seats being vacant; and that on the first ballot Jefferson received fifty-five votes, a majority of six.—We are several times told that Robert R. Livingston was one of the framers of the Constitution. Mr.
