Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815

by Gordon S. Wood

  By 1796, with the admission to statehood of Vermont, Kentucky, and Tennessee, the electors totaled 138. The states could select their electors in any way they chose, and the electors were free to vote for any two people they wished, as long as one of them was from outside the state. The man who received the highest majority of votes was president; the second highest, vice-president. If no one received a majority of electoral votes, then the House of Representatives voting by state congressional delegations with each delegation having but a single vote was to select the president from those candidates with the five highest numbers of electoral votes.

  After Washington, this elaborate two-stage procedure was probably how most Framers expected the electoral process would normally work. Because they assumed that worthy presidential candidates might not be known outside of their state or region, they thought that the Electoral College, which favored the large states, would act as a nominating body. The electoral votes would be scattered, and no one, it was assumed, would receive a majority of them; thus from the five men with the highest number of electoral votes, the House would make the final selection of the president. The unanticipated development of parties undermined these expectations.

  But not at once. Parties in 1796 were still distasteful, and most people were reluctant to put party loyalties ahead of regional, state, or personal loyalties. Hence the leading contenders for the presidency—John Adams and Thomas Jefferson—had to appear as if they were indifferent to the office. In 1796 they did not openly campaign but instead remained secluded on their farms, making no statements and offering no hints of their intentions. Although Adams saw himself as the “heir apparent” and believed his “succession” was likely, he knew as well as Jefferson that the ideal character for the presidency had to be called to the office.2

  It was thus left to friends and allies to promote a man’s candidacy. Most Federalists thought that Adams deserved the presidency, but, of course, they wanted a Federalist sympathizer for vice-president as well. Thomas Pinckney of South Carolina, the negotiator of the treaty with Spain, was most talked about, but not everyone knew who he was. Pinckney himself was in the middle of the Atlantic on his way home from Europe and knew nothing of the promotion of his candidacy for high office. Hamilton actually thought that Pinckney was more suitable for the presidency than Adams (he had “a temper far more discreet and conciliatory”). But whether Adams or Pinckney, Hamilton was at least clear about one thing: “all personal and partial considerations must be discarded, and every thing must give way to the great object of excluding Jefferson.”3

  Other Federalists were equally appalled at the prospect of Jefferson’s becoming president or even vice-president. Jefferson as president, said Oliver Wolcott Jr., the Connecticut Federalist who had replaced Hamilton as secretary of the treasury in 1795, would “innovate upon and fritter away the Constitution.” But, continued Wolcott, Jefferson as vice-president might even be worse than if he were president: “he would become the rallying point of faction and French influence” and “without any responsibility, he would . . . divide, and undermine, and finally subvert the rival administration.”4 Better to support Pinckney as president, some Federalists declared, than to see Jefferson in any office, even if it cost Adams the presidency.

  Adams picked up some of this Federalist gossip and was furious. The idea of Pinckney’s becoming president ahead of him violated the natural hierarchy of society and the very meaning of the Revolution. “To see such . . . an unknown being as Pinckney, brought over my head, and trampling on the bellies of hundreds of other men infinitely his superiors in talents, services, and reputation, filled me with apprehensions for the safety of us all.”5

  For the Republicans, Jefferson was the most obvious person to be president. But they were even more confused and divided than the Federalists over the choice of vice-president. Some wanted Pierce Butler of South Carolina. Others mentioned John Langdon of New Hampshire. And still others suggested Robert R. Livingston or Aaron Burr of New York. Burr, who was especially charming and well connected, actually had his eyes on the presidency and was willing to cultivate Federalist votes to get it. Burr’s personal maneuvering made many believe that he was “unsettled in his politics” and thus likely to “go over to the other side.”6

  In the end personal ambitions, local interests, sectional ties, and personal friendships tended to override national party loyalties, making the final election a confused and chaotic affair. Thus the rudimentary efforts of party caucuses to designate a suitable pair of candidates had less effect than many wanted. With the electors in each state chosen in a variety of ways and free to vote for whomever they wished, the electoral system inhibited the capacity of the parties to organize presidential and vice-presidential tickets.

  The Constitution provided for the electors to select any two candidates that suited them, even if they were from opposing parties. So in Pennsylvania one elector voted for both Jefferson and Pinckney. In Maryland an elector voted for Adams and Jefferson. And all the electors of South Carolina voted for both Jefferson and Pinckney. Despite these examples of crossing party lines, however, eight of sixteen states did vote a straight Adams-Pinckney or Jefferson-Burr ticket. Yet, as the vote of the South Carolina electors suggests, the election in fact reflected more of a sectional than a party split.

  In the end Adams received seventy-one electoral votes, mostly from New England and New York and New Jersey. Jefferson was next with sixty-eight, all from Pennsylvania and the states in the South. Pinckney received fifty-nine votes and Burr thirty. The remaining forty-eight votes were scattered among nine men, including Samuel Adams, who received fifteen electoral votes from Virginia as an expression of that state’s mistrust of Burr—something Burr never forgave.

  Initially, the election of the Federalist John Adams as president and the Republican Thomas Jefferson as vice-president seemed to promise an end to factionalism and a new era of goodwill. Jefferson and Adams had been friends during the Revolution, and the results of the electoral contest, together with Jefferson’s expressed willingness to serve as vice-president under the more senior Adams, suggested to both men the possibility not only of renewing the friendship but also of restoring the Founders’ dream of nonpartisan government. Others had the same hope—that somehow the two men would detach themselves from their respective factions and end what one observer called the “prevailing spirit of jealousy and party.”7

  John Adams came to the presidency much opposed to what he repeatedly called “that fiend, the Spirit of Party.”8 As a good radical Whig, he had always valued independence, not only the independence of America from Great Britain and the independence of one part of the government from another, but also the independence of one man from another; indeed, he always prided himself on his own independence. He defied his father in choosing a career as a lawyer rather than as a clergyman. He defied many of his fellow patriots in 1774 by defending loyalist victims of a mob in the aftermath of the so-called Boston Massacre.9 While in Europe negotiating the peace in the early 1780s, he defied both Congress and his colleagues in doing what he thought was best for the United States and New England. He repeatedly expressed fears of being under obligation to other people, and he seemed to take a stubborn pride in the snubs and sneers that he often received for his cantankerous and outspoken opinions. “Popularity,” he told James Warren in 1787, “was never my Mistress, nor was I ever, or shall I ever be a popular Man.” His classical heroes were Demosthenes and Cicero, whose achievements came in the teeth of their defeats, their unpopularity, and their loneliness. “I must think myself independent, as long as I live,” he said. “The feeling is essential to my existence.”10

  That feeling was expressed in his political and constitutional theories. Adams was always interested in constitutionalism and the proper structuring of government. Indeed, none of the Revolutionaries took the science of politics more seriously. At the moment of Independence and constitution-making in 1776, his pamphlet, Thoughts on Government, became
the most influential work guiding the framers of the new state republics. In 1780 he took the lead in drafting the Massachusetts constitution, widely regarded as the most consequential state constitution of the Revolutionary era. And in 1787–1788 when he was abroad serving as first minister to Great Britain he sought to translate what he had learned into some basic principles of political science applicable to all peoples at all times. The result was his three-volume work Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States, a bulky, disordered conglomeration of political glosses on the single theme of mixed or balanced government.

  By 1787 Adams had lost whatever confidence he had once possessed at the time of Independence in the capacity of the American people to make themselves into a benevolent and virtuous people. Americans, he now concluded, had “never merited the Character of very exalted Virtue,” and it was foolish to have “expected that they should have grown much better.”11 Life everywhere was a struggle for superiority. In this struggle only a few made it to the top, and once there, these aristocratic few, who were rarely the most talented or virtuous, would seek only to stabilize and aggrandize their position by oppressing those below them. Those on the bottom of society, driven by the most ambitious, would in turn seek only to ruin and replace the few aristocratic social leaders they hated and envied.

  Hence arose, said Adams, an inevitable social division between the few and the many, between gentlemen and commoners, between “the rich and the poor, the laborious and the idle, the learned and the ignorant,” between those who had attained superiority and those who aspired to it. Grounded as it was in the irrational passions of people, this division could be neither stable nor secure. This struggle for superiority existed everywhere, even in egalitarian, republican America. Indeed, argued Adams, almost a half century before Tocqueville made the same penetrating observation, Americans were more driven by the passion for distinction, by the desire to set themselves from one another, than other peoples. In a republican society devoted to equality “there can be no subordination.” A man would see his neighbor “whom he holds his equal” with a better coat, house, or horse. “He cannot bear it; he must and will be on a level with him.” America, Adams concluded, had thus become “more Avaricious than any other Nation.”12

  Adams’s political solution to this ceaseless scramble for place and prestige was a mixed or balanced government. Education, religion, superstition, oaths—none of these devices could control human appetites and passions. “Nothing,” he told Jefferson in 1787, “but Force, and Power and Strength can restrain them.” Nothing “but three different orders of men, bound by their interests to watch over each other, and stand the guardians of the laws” could maintain social peace.13

  Constitution-makers, said Adams, must provide separate chambers in the legislature for those at the top and those on the bottom of the society, for the aristocracy and for the democracy. They must segregate and balance the two warring social elements in a bicameral legislature and erect an independent executive who would share in the law-making and mediate the basic social struggle between the few and the many.

  Although Adams’s idea of mixed or balanced government resembled the traditional theory that went back to the ancient Greeks, he gave it a new twist. In 1776 most Americans, like most eighteenth-century English Whigs, had assumed that the basic struggle in English history had always been between the crown and the people, between the king and the House of Commons, between the royal governors and the colonial assemblies. In this perennial conflict the aristocracy sitting in the House of Lords and the various colonial councils had played a mediating or balancing role in the famous mixed English constitution and in each of its miniature colonial counterparts. Now in the 1780s Adams, like some other Americans and especially like the Swiss writer on the English constitution Jean Louis De Lolme, recast the basic struggle and turned it into one between ordinary people and the aristocracy, between commoners and gentry, and between the lower and the upper houses of a bicameral legislature. In this new social conflict the executive, the monarchical element in this mixed constitution, became the balancer or mediator. Adams’s image of the government was a set of two scales held by a third hand, which was the executive.14

  With a veto power over all legislation such as that theoretically held by the British monarch, the executive could throw its weight against the irrational and oppressive measures of either branch of the legislature, especially against the usurpations of the aristocracy segregated in the upper house. “If there is one certain truth to be collected from the history of all ages,” argued Adams in his Defence, it was “that the people’s rights and liberties, and the democratical mixture in a constitution, can never be preserved without a strong executive.”15

  For all his theoretical emphasis on the importance of the executive in government, Adams had never actually served as an executive in any organization. He had never been a governor, or a cabinet officer, or a military commander. Even as vice-president he had not been involved in the discussions and decisions of the Washington administration. Yet now he was the chief executive of the United States, able to put his ideas of a balanced constitution to the test.

  It would not prove easy. Adams had little of Washington’s prestige, and that distinction between him and his illustrious predecessor became the scourge of his life. Every time he heard Washington praised as the savior of the country he squirmed with irritation and envy. Added to his woes was his reputation for favoring monarchism that bred suspicion of his presidency. He had so often praised the English constitution (that “most stupendous fabric of human invention”), and in his writings so often emphasized the “monarchical” element in his balanced constitution, and so often talked of America’s having become a “monarchical republic” because of its single strong president that his commitment to republicanism was always mistrusted. His fellow Americans had good reason to believe that he had absorbed too much English royal thinking during his mission to the Court of St. James’s in the 1780s.

  ADAMS’S SIMPLE-MINDED CONSTITUTIONAL REMEDY of bicameral legislatures may have been disproportionate to the unruly and dynamic social circumstances he described, but he was not wrong in his contention that American society was divided between the few and the many. In fact, that was how many Americans in the 1790s had come to describe their society, as a contest between “democrats” and “aristocrats,” which were the derogatory terms that the two emerging parties of Federalists and Republicans commonly used to label one another.

  Although Jefferson could privately call himself and others like him “natural aristocrats,” most Federalists were not at all happy with being called “aristocrats.” While John Adams in his honest, blunt way was elevating the contest between the few and the many into his elaborate science of politics, most of his fellow Federalists were vainly trying to deny publicly that there was any difference at all between themselves and ordinary folk. The Revolution had turned “aristocrat” into a pejorative term or worse—the enemy of all good republicans and liberal reformers. Thus labeling one’s opponent an aristocrat was good rhetorical strategy, and all the more effective in light of the way in which the French revolutionaries were demonizing their privileged aristocrats as being even beyond the pale of citizenship, something they were underlining in blood.16 If the Federalists were willing to be recognized as distinctive at all, they wanted to be thought of as the rightful rulers of the society, as disinterested leaders beset by hordes of Jacobinical sans-culottes who were out to destroy all harmony and order in the society.

  The Northern Republicans, of course, were only too eager to label the Federalists—all those landed gentlemen, rich merchants, wealthy lawyers, and other well-to-do professionals—as “aristocrats” who “fancy themselves to have a right of preeminence in every thing.”17 In fact, they were merely puffed-up phonies whose claims of disinterested superiority had no basis in reality. Most of those who made up the Northern Republican party may have been middling people, but they thought the Revolutio
n with its republican emphasis on merit as the only criterion of leadership gave them as much right to govern and exert authority as the so-called better sort of Federalists. These ordinary men supported the Republican party and opposed Great Britain not because they had necessarily thought through all the particular issues and policies dividing them from the Federalists, but because they hated what they thought the Federalists and the monarchical spirit of Great Britain had come to stand for. Ultimately, as with all politics, there was a deep emotional basis to the ideological party division.

  The Federalists tried to retaliate by calling their Republican opponents “democrats,” a term that in the past had suggested the licentiousness of the common people, but one that was now acquiring a more positive connotation. Indeed, the Republicans began to wear the hitherto derogatory term of “democrat” as a badge of honor.

  The experience of three middling individuals who became ardent Republicans—William Findley of Pennsylvania, Jedediah Peck of New York, and Matthew Lyon of Vermont—may help illuminate the kinds of social feelings involved in the contest between the Federalists and the Republicans, or at least between the Federalists and Northern Republicans. These three individuals might be considered as stand-ins for tens of thousands of other common folk.

  Although the conflict these individuals had with their Federalist opponents was described by them as “democrats” versus “aristocrats,” it was not quite a “class conflict” as the term is often understood today. To be sure, it was an important social conflict, but not one of an oppressed working class taking on an exploitative bourgeoisie or moneyed men, as some historians have contended.18 Indeed, if either contestant represented the “bourgeoisie,” it was the so-called middling “democrats,” men such as Findley, Peck, and Lyon. Although the contestants in this social struggle knew each other well, often dined with one other, and had a great deal in common, they nevertheless were engaged in a social struggle that revealed much of what America from its earliest days had been about and would continue to be about—the difficulty would-be aristocrats had setting themselves off from those just below them.