When the "public good was paramount"....

     Hamilton and Burr had been rivals in New York politics since the early 1790s.  During the endgame of the presidential election of 1800, when Federalists hoped to use the tie vote in the Electoral College to make Burr president, Hamilton had urged them to accept Jefferson.  "Of there be a man in the world I ought to hate," he wrote Gouverneur Morris, "it would be Jefferson.  With Burr I have always been personally well.  But the public good must be paramount."  Why was Hamilton so hostile toward Burr?  For a reason that might have interested Madison, if he had known of it.  Jefferson had bad principles, from Hamilton's point of view, but Burr had none.  "Is it a recommendation to have no theory?" Hamilton asked another Federalist.  Without theory, Burr, he believed, must be ruled entirely by ambition.

-Richard Brookhiser,  James Madison