Mr. President
Page 27
Defeat of the Ross bill averted a national disaster, for it would have undercut the authority of the president by delegitimizing the electoral process. But other dangers lurked. The contentious political environment that produced the Ross bill and allowed it to advance as far as it did would produce another crisis not so readily circumvented.
To understand the election of 1800, we need to know the playing field and the time line. Congress had stipulated that electors would meet at their respective state capitals to cast their votes on December 3. Since each state was at liberty to decide how and when electors would be chosen, “election day” in 1800 could be anytime before then. Four years earlier, eight states had permitted the people to choose their electors, but now that number had dwindled to five. In these states the election could be as late as November, but in the eleven states in which the legislatures chose electors, the people’s only say in the matter would come during the annual election for state legislators, which could be up to a year earlier; after that, the choice of electors, and therefore the president, was in the hands of those we would today call politicians.
In several states, politicians in the legislatures altered the rules of the game to favor their particular party, which, under the Constitution, they were perfectly entitled to do. In Massachusetts and New Hampshire, Federalist legislatures took the decision out of the hands of the people and gave it to themselves, thereby ensuring a complete slate of Federalist electors. The Republican legislature in Georgia did likewise. In Virginia, the Republican-dominated legislature changed from district voting to statewide voting to keep Federalists from capturing a few seats. The Federalist legislature in Maryland wanted to eliminate popular elections by district, which had produced a split group of electors in 1796, and choose the electors themselves to produce a Federalist sweep, but this itself became a major campaign issue, and in October Republicans gained control of the legislature. In Pennsylvania the Republican assembly quarreled with the Federalist senate, and only at the last minute did the two bodies arrive at a compromise that split the state’s electors almost equally, eight Republicans and seven Federalists.31
New York was a special case, and very consequential. As the law stood early in 1800, electors were to be chosen by the legislature, which Federalists controlled. Unless that changed, New York would end up totally in the Federalist column, as it had in 1796. Hoping to take a few votes this time around, Republicans took the high ground and pushed for district elections by the people, but the Federalist legislature held firm. Then, in the April state election, aggressive door-to-door campaigning by Republicans placed the legislature unexpectedly in their hands. Each party immediately switched its position: Federalists favored district elections so they could capture a few seats, while Republicans thought it best to keep the decision with the legislature. Real-world politics trumped political theory. What counted was the result, not the process.
Alexander Hamilton took the shift of power in his home state hard. Like any astute observer at the time, he saw that the loss of New York’s twelve electoral votes would be difficult to make up elsewhere and his party might very likely lose. In a panic, he wrote to the state’s governor, John Jay, his friend, political ally, and co-author of The Federalist. Immediately, Jay should call an emergency session of the outgoing Federalist legislature in order to institute district elections, Hamilton proposed, thereby preempting the appointment of electors by the incoming Republicans. Recognizing his blatantly political proposal might be viewed harshly, he tried to muster some semblance of a moral argument to support it:
I’m aware there are weighty objections to the measure; but … in times like these it will not do to be overscrupulous. It is easy to sacrifice the substantial interests of society by a strict adherence to ordinary rules…. The scruples of delicacy and propriety … ought to yield to the extraordinary nature of the crisis. They ought not hinder the taking of a legal and constitutional step, to prevent an Atheist in religion and a Fanatic in politics from getting possession of the helm of the State.
Pressuring Jay as best he could, Hamilton concluded, “Appreciate the extreme danger of the crisis, and I am unusually mistaken in my view of the matter, if you do not see it right and expedient to adopt the measure.” The governor saw it differently. At the bottom of Hamilton’s letter he scribbled, “Proposing a measure for party purposes wh. I think it wd. not become me to adopt.”32
While much of the political maneuvering in the early going was independent of the actual candidates, neither party could succeed without settling on a standard-bearer; if either party split its votes, it would likely lose. Selecting a candidate, of necessity, was an insiders’ game. The framers had tried to decentralize the choice of president by requiring electors to meet separately and simultaneously in the state capitals, but the emerging parties undercut their intention. If parties were national, as they had to be in order to have any chance of success, they needed to gather in some central location to nominate candidates, and the most logical place was Philadelphia, the nation’s temporary capital. There, congressmen separated into their respective parties and caucused. On May 3, Federalists gathered within the Senate chamber and decided to support John Adams for president and Charles Cotesworth Pinckney for vice president, and they discussed strategies to get them elected. On May 11, at Maraché’s boardinghouse nearby, Republicans tapped Thomas Jefferson for president and Aaron Burr for vice president.
Jefferson’s nomination was uncontested. He was currently vice president, he had almost been elected president four years earlier, and he was willing. As in 1796, Burr was added to provide regional balance, but this time his inclusion seemed to make more sense, for he had played a major hand in delivering New York to the Republicans. His nomination did present one problem, however. In the previous election, numerous southern Republicans had balked and left him off their tickets, and if they did so again, John Adams might come in second and become vice president, which no Republican wanted. Party loyalty was therefore paramount, and Republicans vowed to make sure their electors voted for both nominees.
Adams proved more problematic. He had softened his stance on France and disbanded the additional army, thereby widening the rift with High Federalists, but he had strong support in New England, and by avoiding a war with France, he had even placated some moderate Republicans. To leave the sitting president off the ticket would be suicidal, the caucus concluded—but could they get him elected? As they had done four years earlier, they tried to make inroads into the Republican South by nominating a Pinckney from South Carolina for vice president—not Thomas Pinckney this time, but his brother. Yet Adams’s supporters worried, with good reason, that Hamilton and his allies might try to play the same trick as they had in 1796, when they tried to get Pinckney elected over Adams. At the caucus, New Englanders vowed to hold true and get their electors to vote for both candidates, but would that happen? What if it did, and Pinckney out-polled Adams in South Carolina to elevate him to the presidency? The alliance between moderate Federalists, dubbed Adamsites, and High Federalists, led by Hamilton, was tenuous at best.
Note the featured factors in these debates and decisions: nominating caucuses, tickets with regional balance, party loyalty, pledged electors. None of these had been anticipated at the Federal Convention, yet all would become fixtures in presidential politics.
So thorough was the obsession with capturing the presidency that it competed with actual governance. “Our parties in Congress seem to regard the approaching election as the only object of attention,” wrote Fisher Ames, a High Federalist. A year before electors were to meet and cast their votes, Speaker of the House Theodore Sedgwick offered proof of Ames’s assessment in a letter to a fellow Federalist: “In all our measures, we must never lose sight of the next election of President.”33
By mid-October elections had been held in all eleven states in which legislatures chose the electors, but the national outcome was still very much in doubt. The five states with popular elections h
ad yet to weigh in, while the results in Pennsylvania and South Carolina had been indecisive. Voters in Pennsylvania had produced a Federalist senate and Republican assembly, and unless these two bodies could agree, Pennsylvania would have no electors—a major loss to Republicans, who had carried the state in 1796. South Carolinians had given Republicans a slim edge in the legislature, but party loyalties there were more tenuous than elsewhere, and nobody could safely predict whether Republican electors would vote for Pinckney and possibly even his running mate.
Then suddenly, on October 24, Alexander Hamilton reentered the mix. On that day the New-York Gazette and General Advertiser published a fifty-four-page pamphlet titled Letter from Alexander Hamilton, Concerning the Public Conduct and Character of John Adams, Esq., President of the United States. It was a remarkably vindictive work and potentially a game changer. Instead of promoting the virtues of his party’s candidate for president, he issued a damning indictment:
There are great and intrinsic defects in his [Adams’s] character, which unfit him for the office of Chief Magistrate…. He is often liable to paroxysms of anger, which deprive him of self command…. He has made great progress in undermining the ground which was gained for the government by his predecessor, and … it might totter, if not fall, under his future auspices.
Although the campaign of 1800, like that of 1796, was replete with character assassination and negative campaigning, shots were usually fired in the direction of the opposing party. That Hamilton would treat the Federalists’ nominal leader in such a manner seemed at first glance to constitute a serious breach of party discipline—but that’s not how Hamilton saw it. In its own convoluted way, his letter presented a reasoned argument, even if embedded within a free-flowing stream of inflammatory rhetoric.
Hamilton’s diatribe was as much a vindication of his own behavior as a denunciation of Adams’s. He told how he had wanted to give Thomas Pinckney an “equal chance” in the previous election to ensure a Federalist victory, but his warning had been ignored by those supporting Adams, and this allowed Jefferson to become vice president and almost president. Adams’s resistance to running equally with Pinckney created “in a great measure … the serious schism which has since grown up in the Federal Party,” Hamilton claimed. For several pages, he defended the Pinckney brothers and himself from charges of being under “British influence.” He then indicted the president for ignoring “the advice of his Ministers” and firing two of them—Hamilton’s allies McHenry and Pickering—not for “misconduct” but for “collateral inducements,” or what we might call today political gain. (This contradicted his earlier position; Hamilton had supported giving the president the discretionary power of removal when the issue was debated in the First Federal Congress.) Finally, Hamilton admitted to his own reasons for “personal discontent” with Adams’s actions. Contrary to “the express stipulation of General wASHINGTON,” Adams had resisted making Hamilton second-in-command of the additional army, and upon Washington’s death the president had refused to promote him to the top spot.
Now for the clever logic, evident to Hamilton but confusing to readers then and now. Despite all these reasons not to support Adams, Hamilton still would. Torn between “the unqualified conviction of his [Adams’s] unfitness for the station contemplated, and a sense of the great importance of cultivating harmony among the supporters of the Government [Federalists], on whose firm union hereafter will probably depend the preservation of order, tranquility, liberty, property, [and] the security of every social and domestic blessing,” he would choose the latter. Party unity trumped all other considerations, even the “unfitness” of the president. So if he was willing to go that far to preserve “harmony” among Federalists, shouldn’t all Federalist electors support the full party ticket, Adams and Pinckney? That was his closing argument. Explicitly, his intent was to keep Federalist electors in line; implicitly, he no doubt hoped that after hearing about Adams’s shortcomings, one or two might choose Pinckney and not Adams, thereby delivering the presidency to his preferred candidate.34
Hamilton’s argument, logical as it was, obviously backfired. Adams supporters were furious, High Federalists embarrassed, and Republicans elated. Unwittingly, Hamilton endangered the support Pinckney already enjoyed and gained him no more, and he certainly did Adams no favors. If Hamilton had meant to mend the schism that divided Federalists, he didn’t. As one Federalist put it, “Gen. Hamilton’s letter on the conduct & character of the President … will administer oil rather than water to the fire.”35
Hamilton’s letter probably had little impact on the popular elections in Virginia, North Carolina, Maryland, Kentucky, and Rhode Island, all held between November 3 and 19, nor in the ongoing contest within the Pennsylvania legislature, which ended in a virtual stalemate that yielded eight Republican and seven Federalist electors. Yet the letter might have played some role, even if indirectly, in South Carolina, where the election would eventually be decided.
Without South Carolina, each party had in its column precisely sixty-five electors. While Jefferson and Adams could count on that many votes from their parties, some votes for their running mates might still be “thrown away.” All this would come into play in Columbia during the ten days preceding the December 3 deadline, when electors would cast their ballots. In and out of chambers, legislators debated and caucused in preparation for choosing electors. Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, popularly known as General Pinckney or C.C., was certainly a local favorite, a low-country patrician with as much prestige and honor as any in the state and connected to nearly everybody who wielded power or influence. Opposing him, though, was the U.S. senator Charles Pinckney, the vice presidential candidate’s cousin who had argued so vociferously against the Federalist-sponsored Ross bill in Congress. Absenting himself from the national body in order to participate in the wrangling, “Blackguard Charley” (as his Federalist family and peers called the Republican renegade) lobbied against his own kin. With allegiances torn, the most popular alternative was to put forth electors pledged to a split ticket of Pinckney and Jefferson, a result that would have pleased Hamilton. Yet Hamilton had made that impossible. Such a ticket would need the support of General Pinckney himself, and after the controversial letter, he was boxed in; at the risk of appearing Hamilton’s tool, he needed to retain strict party loyalty. Without the candidate’s assent, the compromise faltered, and on December 2, with not a day to spare, the South Carolina legislature chose eight electors, all pledged to Jefferson and Burr. Even in South Carolina, where party organization and allegiances were weaker than anywhere else in the nation and personal connections particularly strong, party trumped family and local loyalties.36
On December 3, electors met as stipulated in their state capitals, and though the voting was supposed to be secret until ballots were opened on the Senate floor two months hence, this constitutional stipulation had been ignored from the time of the first presidential election. As soon as communications across distances would permit, within weeks rather than months, everybody knew the results: the Republicans had prevailed by exactly eight votes.
Note the plural, Republicans. Jefferson and Burr had garnered 73 votes each, Adams 65, and Pinckney 64. It was an amazing display of party unity on both sides. Back in 1796, 46 of 138 electors had voted for candidates not on their party’s ticket. In 1800, only one did—an elector from Rhode Island who voted for John Jay rather than Pinckney to ensure that Adams and Pinckney would not wind up in a tie. Republicans, recalling how Federalists had lost the vice presidency in 1796 by not staying united, failed to take that precaution. Every single one voted diligently for the two candidates, and that produced a result the framers had not foreseen but Hamilton had during the very first presidential election: the avowed winner would have to face a runoff with his presumed vice president in the House of Representatives, as required by Article II, Section 1, Paragraph 3 of the Constitution.
This would have been merely a technical glitch, easily rectified by a simple vot
e in the House of Representatives, if parties had not rigidified. In a winner-take-all game, however, all strategies make sense, as long as one plays by the rules, and there was nothing in the rules that prevented Federalists in Congress from voting for Burr over Jefferson. With Burr they would have considerable influence, with Jefferson none.
The rest of the story is legion and need not be detailed here; a simple outline will suffice to reveal the stark truths. The Constitution stipulated that voting in the House would be by state delegations and that a majority was necessary to produce a winner. Of the sixteen delegations, eight were Republican, six Federalist, and two evenly divided. To gain the critical ninth vote, Republicans needed to persuade just a single Federalist from either of the divided states, or a few from one of the others, not to back Aaron Burr for president. This they could not do, even though Burr had neither the personal credentials nor the political persuasion that would normally appeal to them. All that mattered was foiling their political opponents.
One prominent Federalist refused to play along with this game. Long opposed to Burr for a multitude of personal and political reasons, Alexander Hamilton sounded the alarm to his fellow Federalists: Burr was altogether without “public principles,” an opportunist who would “plunder” his country, “disturb our institutions,” and seek for himself “permanent power.” Much as he had preferred Adams to Jefferson even though he detested them both, he now argued that Jefferson was “by far not so dangerous a man” as his longtime antagonist from New York. “For heaven’s sake,” he pleaded, “let not the Foederal party be responsible for the elevation of this man.” (Four years later, when Burr ran for governor of New York, Hamilton again derided him in public; this time Burr challenged Hamilton to a duel, Hamilton accepted, and Burr prevailed.)37