In his message to congress announcing the expulsion of Pinckney and Marshall, Adams had declared "that he would never send another minister to France without assurances that he would be received." This was on the 21st of July, 1798. When, there-fore, on the 18th of February following, with-out consulting his cabinet or giving them any intimation of his intentions, he sent into the senate the nomination of Vans Murray as minister to France, this act took the country by surprise, and hastened the downfall of the federal party. Some previous acts of Adams, such as the appointment of Gerry, which his cabinet officers had striven to prevent, and his disinclination to make Hamilton second in command of the army till forced into it by Washington, had strengthened the distrust entertained of Adams by Hamilton and many of his friends; and Adams was now accused of seeking, in his attempt to reopen diplomatic intercourse with France, to reconcile his political opponents of the republican party, and to secure by unworthy and impolitic concessions his own reelection as president.

The opposition to Murray's nomination so far prevailed that Murray received two colleagues, Ellsworth of Connecticut and Davie of North Carolina; but the president would not authorize the departure of Ellsworth and Davie till he had received explicit assurances from Talleyrand that they would be duly received as ministers. On arriving in France they found the directory superseded and Napoleon Bonaparte first consul, with whom they managed to arrange the matters in dispute. But, however beneficial to the country, this mission proved very disastrous to Adams personally, and to the political party to which he belonged. He justified its appointment on the ground of assurances conveyed to him through a variety of channels that France desired peace, and he excused himself for not having consulted his cabinet by the fact that he knew what their opinion was without asking them - decidedly hostile, that is, to any such attempt as he had determined to make. The masses of the federalists, fully confident of Adams's patriotism, were well enough disposed to acquiesce in his judgment; but many of the leaders were implacable. The quarrel was further aggravated by Adams's dismissal at this time of his cabinet officers and the construction of anew cabinet.

The pardon of Fries, convicted of treason for armed resistance in Pennsylvania to the levy of certain direct taxes, was also re-garded by many at the time as a piece of misplaced lenity on the part of Adams, dictated, it was said, by a mean desire of popularity in a case in which severe example was needed. But Adams will hardly suffer with posterity from his unwillingness to be the first president to sign a death warrant for treason, especially as there was room for grave doubts whether the doings of this person amounted to treason as defined by the constitution of the United States. - In this divided condition of the federal party the presidential election came on. Adams was still too popular with the mass of the party to encourage any attempt to drop him altogether, and the malcontents were reduced to the old expedient of attempting by secret understanding and arrangement to reduce his vote in the electoral college below that of C. 0. Pinckney, the other of the two candidates voted for by the federalists. The republicans, on the other hand, under the prospect of an arrangement with France, rapidly recovered from the blow inflicted upon them by the violence and mercenary rapacity lately charged upon their French friends, but which they now in-stated was a charge without foundation.

Taking advantage of the dissatisfaction at the heavy taxes necessarily imposed to meet the expenses of warlike preparations, and especially of the unpopularity of the alien law and the sedition law - two acts of congress to which the pros- pect of war had led - they pushed the canvass i with great energy; while in Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr they had two leaders unsurpassed for skill in party tactics, and in Burr, at least, one little scrupulous as to the means which he employed. Not only was the whole blame of the alien and sedition acts, to which he had merely assented without ever having: recommended them, laid on Adams's shoulders, but he was the object of most vehement and bitter attacks for having surrendered up, under one of the provisions of Jay's treaty, one Thomas Nash, an English sailor, charged with mutiny and murder. Having been recognized; and arrested in Charleston, S. C, Nash had endeavored to save himself by assuming the name and character of Jonathan Bobbins, an American citizen, in the light of which assumed character the greater part of Adams's political opponents insisted upon exclusively regarding him, and Adams himself as having basely yielded up an American citizen, who, it was argued, even if guilty of mutiny as charged, | had been justified in it by the fact of having been, as it was alleged, previously pressed into the British naval service.

Nor was it against his public acts alone, nor even to his political opponents, that these assaults upon Mr. Adams were confined. With strong feeling and busy imagination, loving both to talk and write, Adams had been betrayed into many confidences i and into free expression of feelings, opinions, | and even conjectures and suspicions - a weak- ness very unsuited to the character of a politi-cian, and which he had frequent occasion to rue. During Washington's first term of office he had thus been led into a confidential correspondence with Tench Coxe, who held at that time the place of assistant secretary of the treasury, and had afterward been appointed supervisor of the internal revenue, but who since Adams's accession had been dismissed from this place on the charge of being a spy upon the treasury department in the service of the "Aurora," the principal newspaper organ of the opposition, with which party Coxe sym- pathized, and since his recent dismissal from office had acted. In this state of mind Coxe betrayed a private confidential letter of Adams, which, after having been handed about in manu- script for some time, to the great damage of Adams with his own party, was finally printed in the "Aurora," of which Coxe had become one of the principal contributors.