The American Vice Presidency

by Jules Witcover

  Over the next three years as a fugitive, Burr became involved in a series of bizarre adventures that included leading an attempted secession of the western part of the country being expanded by the Louisiana Purchase and the creation of a buffer state between Louisiana and Mexico with himself as president. In 1806 he led a force of about sixty men on flatboard boats down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers on a mysterious mission. When a confederate informed Jefferson that Burr was intent on committing treason, Jefferson ordered him captured, and in 1807 he was indicted. In his trial, presided over by longtime adversary John Marshall, Burr won acquittal on the grounds that the prosecution had failed to produce the two witnesses constitutionally required to commit him of treason. He moved to Europe for a time but returned to practice law, discredited and destitute when he died at age eighty.

  Unlike the tenures of Adams and Jefferson before him, Burr’s vice presidency did not lead him to the presidency. Instead, like both of them, he occupied the office mostly devoid of official responsibilities and opportunities to shape and carry out the policies of the administration to which he was elected. His place in history was shaped not by the office he held but by a common political feud and the deadly resolution he insisted on, still honored at the time.

  GEORGE CLINTON

  OF NEW YORK

  With Aaron Burr banished from the Republican national ticket in 1804, another New Yorker, Governor George Clinton, was drafted to be Jefferson’s running mate, and upon election it fell to Burr as the departing president of the Senate to administer the vice presidential oath to Clinton as his replacement. The Jefferson-Clinton team was easily elected over the eroding Federalist Party slate of Charles Cotesworth Pinckney of South Carolina and Rufus King of New York. With the demise of presidential double balloting in the adoption of the Twelfth Amendment to the Constitution, victory delivered both the presidency and the vice presidency to the same party. The general prosperity in Jefferson’s first term and national pride in the Louisiana Purchase assured the Virginian’s landslide reelection, carrying Clinton with him. Jefferson obviously had needed no help from the aging New Yorker, and over the next four years he treated his vice president accordingly.

  The stand-alone election of the vice president, rather than the presidential runner-up being awarded the office, was a significant development. While it in no way increased the influence of the office unless the president so decided, it did set up the vice presidential nomination as a vehicle for barter by the presidential nominees in quest of electoral college support from certain states and regions of the country.

  Clinton’s succeeding of Burr in the second office had its ironies. In 1800, Burr, as a leading political operative in the Empire State, had persuaded Clinton to join other state party luminaries to run as presidential electors. Their listing was widely credited with swinging New York and the election and had earned Burr his place on the winning ticket. Four years later, with Burr discredited, Jefferson was well pleased to have Clinton as vice president. Not only was he a fellow critic of the Federalist philosophy and someone on whom Jefferson had relied for political counsel on politics in the Empire State; at the age of sixty-five and overtly looking to retire from public life, Clinton also seemed unlikely to seek the presidency in 1808, when Jefferson hoped his friend and fellow Virginian James Madison would succeed him as president.

  Like all three previous vice presidents—Adams, Jefferson, and Burr—Clinton soon learned that he would not make or influence policy in the administration in which he served. Despite his more than two decades of executive leadership in New York, during which he was accustomed to making high-level decisions, he was unfamiliar with the legislative branch in which he now would function, as well as with the city of Washington itself. Though he looked the part of a senator—silver-haired and distinguished—he had neither the legislative skills of his predecessor Burr nor Burr’s youthful enthusiasm.

  John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts, son of the former president, offered a harsh judgment of the man: “Mr. Clinton is totally ignorant of all the most common forms of proceeding in the Senate, and yet by the rules he is to decide every question or order without debate and without appeal. His judgment is neither quick nor strong: so there is no more dependence upon the correctness of his determinations from his understanding than from his experience. As the only duty of a Vice-President, under our Constitution, is to preside in Senate, it ought be considered what his qualifications for the office are at his election. In this respect a worse choice an Mr. Clinton could scarcely have been made.”1

  The seven-term governor of New York and three-time loser of the presidency or vice presidency before replacing Burr on the Republican ticket in 1804, George Clinton was no aristocrat. A farmer-lawyer from rural Ulster County, in the Hudson River valley, he shared Jefferson’s commitment to agrarian interests and his wariness of federal encroachment on states’ rights and individual liberties. But he, too, was a Revolutionary War hero, rising under Washington to the rank of brigadier general after an early political career in the colonial assembly and later as a member of the Second Continental Congress. First elected governor of New York in 1777, he succeeded wealthy Philip Schuyler, later the son-in-law of Hamilton and eventually a bitter political foe. At eighteen Clinton served on a privateer ship in the Caribbean in the French and Indian War, and after studying law in New York he returned to Ulster as county surrogate. He was elected to the Second Continental Congress in 1775, where he met Washington. After a few months in Philadelphia, Clinton returned to New York as the commander of the four county militias responsible for defense of the Hudson River highlands. Under his direction two forts were built, and he eventually recruited enlistments for the Continental army under Washington’s command. “The forts,” he reported, “are in so respectable a state of defense, as to promise us security against any attack on that quarter.”2

  In April 1777, a New York convention drafted and adopted the state’s first constitution, and Clinton was among four men put forward for governor. A flurry of votes in secret ballot from members of the military under his command and farmers surprisingly elected him over the aristocratic Federalist Schuyler. Clinton’s election ushered in a new era of the “yeoman” influence of small farmers in the state’s politics.3

  Clinton notified Washington that “with a Degree of Pain” he was requesting to leave his military post when “the Designs of the Enemy are not fully known.” He added, “I will most cheerfully return to the army until the Fate of the present campaign is determined” if the obligations of his new position should permit it. Hamilton, as a lieutenant-general and Washington’s chief aide, wrote to Major General Israel Putnam, Clinton’s superior officer: “It is regretted that so useful an officer is obliged to leave the posts under his superintendency at a time like this,” a sentiment in which Washington joined while extending good wishes to Clinton as governor.4

  Clinton’s early optimism about the security of the Hudson Highlands was soon dashed. In September, after the British occupied Philadelphia, a large flotilla of ships laden with British and Hessian troops sailed up the Hudson, causing Washington to order his generals to call out the militias in Connecticut and New York. He urgently requested that Clinton take personal direction of Forts Clinton and Montgomery in guarding the New York Highlands against the assaults of the British general John Burgoyne. In a fight between more than four thousand invaders and six hundred American militiamen, many unarmed, the defenders inflicted heavy casualties but eventually surrendered the forts. Clinton barely evaded capture and resumed direction of the resistance, which ultimately prevented the British forces in northern New York from joining up and relieving Burgoyne’s beleaguered forces, which eventually surrendered.

  After the war, Clinton resumed his full-time responsibilities as the governor of New York, by this time sufficiently entrenched to repel easily another challenge from the aristocratic Schuyler. During the war, with much of the southern part of New York State under British occupation, Cl
inton had been a strong advocate for increasing the power of Congress to prosecute the war and achieve a greater sense of nationhood at home. Afterward, as governor he became more concerned about the rights and liberties of his state and of fellow New Yorkers within the developing and expanding federal government and about the state’s heavy financial burden to it. His earlier flirtations with national office, including brief Anti-Federalist campaigns in New York and Virginia to elect him president or vice president in 1789 and vice president in 1792, did not divert him from his prime allegiance and defense of the interests of his home state.

  But in early 1804, with Burr summarily dismissed for a second vice presidential term and Clinton fixed on retiring from the New York governorship, his selection to be Jefferson’s reelection running mate became obvious. With his long service in Albany, his war experience, and his solid Anti-Federalist credentials, Clinton at sixty-five was just right as one who would not pose a serious challenge to the younger Madison for the presidency in 1808.

  Jefferson accordingly paid little attention to Clinton, disregarding him on patronage matters in New York and turning a deaf ear to his urgings for more protection of American shipping, critical to the port of New York, amid turmoil in Europe. Clinton deplored as inadequate the ultimate appropriation of one million dollars to defend the entire east coast, about which he was not consulted.

  As John Quincy Adams so uncharitably observed after Clinton took the chair as presiding officer of the Senate, he was a fish out of water after so many years of swimming in familiar political waters in Albany. He returned often to his home in Poughkeepsie and, unlike Burr, usually absented himself from the Washington social circuit, seldom entertaining colleagues and living mostly in boardinghouses, his wife, Cornelia, having died in 1800.

  After so many years in power in New York and with an abundance of free time as the vice president, Clinton tried to keep his hand in his state’s politics. In 1807, in desperation to reestablish Republican control in New York, some of the vice president’s loyalists called on him to return and seek yet another gubernatorial nomination. Irritated, he asked his friends not to force him to make an “absolute refusal” of any such nomination.

  Meanwhile, as the so-called Burr Conspiracy in the West spread, Clinton applauded Jefferson’s disavowal of any administration involvement and warned his nephew DeWitt Clinton to steer clear of it. He expressed strong doubts that Burr’s activities reflected only interest in land speculation.

  At the same time, the national party that Jefferson had constructed was suffering divisions over his successor in 1808. Publicly he remained silent while clearly preferring Madison. But because Clinton, increasingly out of the loop of the Jefferson inner circle, had reservations about the administration’s foreign policies, his name again began to surface for the next presidential nomination, although he now was in his late sixties. His New York base could appeal to many voters, especially elsewhere in the North, who felt that sixteen years of the last twenty of a Virginian in the presidency was enough. Also being injected into the speculation was another Virginian, James Monroe, who along with William Pinckney had negotiated the treaty with Great Britain in 1806, which Jefferson found so unsatisfactory.

  The Republican congressional caucuses that had emerged in 1800 and were continued in 1804 were essentially to select the vice presidential nominees, since in both years Jefferson was the agreed presidential choice. In 1808, for the first time the party presidential nomination involved real competition. Madison’s strong support in Congress made the caucus his favored device, whereas Monroe’s and Clinton’s chances seemed better in a process of broader representation. Both hoped that at the least the caucus would be delayed, preventing an early Madison nomination. But it was called for in January, long before adjournment, because a movement for Monroe was growing in the Virginia legislature and the Madison backers hoped to undercut it.

  On January 23, 1808, Senator Stephen Bradley of Vermont as the previous Republican caucus chairman, summoned party members of Congress to the Senate chamber to nominate the Republican ticket. His right to call the caucus was challenged by a New York Republican, but eighty-nine members showed up, of whom eighty-three voted to nominate Secretary of State Madison for the presidency. The caucus then voted on the vice presidential nomination, and seventy-nine went for Clinton for a second term.

  Most Clinton and Monroe supporters in Congress declined to attend, but Madison still had a majority of the party legislators. In Virginia, backers of Monroe refused to recognize the result of the caucus or of another by the party members in the state legislature that nominated Madison electors. They formed a rival faction that nominated electors pledged to Monroe. Clinton meanwhile, still considering himself a candidate for the presidency, complained that he had not been told of the congressional caucus or its purpose, and he never formally accepted its vice presidential nomination.5

  Clinton told New York senator Samuel Mitchell he thought himself “treated with great disrespect and cruelty” by the caucus goers, apparently to be cavalierly dismissed as a serious presidential prospect.6 Some of the Clintonians complained that Virginia’s pride in the presidencies of Washington and Jefferson had “stimulated the people of that state to believe that Virginia geese are all swans.”7

  Mitchell wrote his wife about Madison’s and Clinton’s prospects: “There does not appear the remotest probability of [Clinton’s] success as President. The former gives dinners and makes generous displays to the members. The latter lives snug at his lodgings, and keeps aloof from such captivating exhibitions. The Secretary of State has a wife to aid his pretensions. The Vice-President has nothing of female succor on his side.”8

  Clinton meanwhile, demonstrating what he now thought of Jefferson’s conduct of foreign policy and how its continuance under Madison would imperil the country, wrote to DeWitt Clinton: “It is in my Opinion impossible that the Cause of Republicanism can exist much longer under the present visionary Feeble and I might add Corrupt Management of our National Affairs. It is calculated to disgust our best Friends and is fast doing so.”9

  John Randolph of Virginia undertook to rally his state’s “Tertium Quids”—a third faction of the Republican Party—to Clinton as a way to detour Madison, but Clinton’s unusual behavior hampered the effort. He continued to ignore and say nothing of the Republican caucus endorsement of him for another term as vice president, generating a belief in some quarters that he had left the party. He denied it and refused to withdraw his presidential candidacy.

  Meanwhile, in August of the election year, some two dozen or so prominent Federalists from seven New England and mid-Atlantic states, plus South Carolina, caucused to consider nominating the party’s ticket. But when some of the New York and Pennsylvania delegates balked at Clinton, the Federalist caucus settled on Pinckney of South Carolina and Rufus King of New York.

  Clinton’s advanced age—he as now sixty-nine and in declining physical condition—also was raised against him as a presidential nominee. But if he was too old, his defenders asked, why had the Republican congressional caucus chosen him to continue as vice president, first in line of succession for the presidency? At the same time, they challenged the legitimacy of the congressional caucus to nominate the Republican ticket, since the Constitution specifically provided for electors to decide the election, taking it out of the hands of Congress.

  Some Pennsylvania Republicans favored Clinton for president and Monroe for vice president but on reflection concluded that Clinton could prevail only in league with Federalists, an unacceptable circumstance. In the end, they gave all their twenty electoral votes to Madison. In Clinton’s own New York, fears of being out in the cold in a Madison administration produced a split in the state’s electoral votes, with thirteen for Madison and six for their former governor.

  In Virginia, bad feelings remained over Clinton’s stubbornness in refusing to say whether he accepted the vice presidential nomination again. Later, Monroe’s supporters, recognizing he
trailed Madison, contrived the notion of running Clinton for president and Monroe for vice president as a means of bringing Monroe decisive support from New York. Unsaid was the prospect that Clinton, if elected president, might not live out his term or seek a second term, leaving Monroe well positioned to ascend to the presidency. Randolph, a veteran Anti-Federalist but a fierce foe of Jefferson in Virginia, endorsed the Clinton-Monroe ticket but now carried little weight in the Old Dominion.

  Once again Clinton was disappointed at the prospect of another four years as vice president. He had had enough of presiding over the Senate and enough of the foreign policy of Jefferson and Madison. But he had no alternative and quietly went along for the ride into the general election, in which the Republican ticket of Madison and Clinton easily prevailed.

  In the new Madison administration, inaugurated on March 4, 1809, Clinton didn’t bother to put in an appearance until weeks later, when the first congressional session began. While there, he was as isolated from power as he had been in the last four years of the Jefferson administration. But by this time Clinton neither had the vigor nor the inclination to take any significant task. Dutifully he continued to preside over the Senate when he was in Washington, but ill health and his desire to be back home in New York diminished that time. Why he agreed to serve another term as vice president under another president with whom he had major differences, in a position he long before had grown tired of, remained a mystery.

  Clinton’s last significant action as vice president came in 1811, three years after election to his second term, when he cast the deciding vote breaking a 17–17 tie in the Senate on rechartering the Bank of the United States, sought by Madison and Gallatin. Clinton, siding with the seventeen old Republicans and against the seven Federalists and ten Republicans for rechartering, killed the bank with only the eleventh vote he cast in his two vice presidential terms.10