Where the Buck Stops

by Harry Truman

  He was also against slavery, you’ll recall, even though he inherited a lot of slaves along with his plantation when his father died, and he tried to get an antislavery clause into the Constitution. But he didn’t succeed and made it his business to free all the slaves on his plantation when he died himself. He also tried to launch a program to end the slave trade in America, but didn’t succeed in that effort, either. Which is a shame indeed. In my opinion, as I’ve said before, if Jefferson had succeeded in getting that clause into the Constitution, and had succeeded in ending the slave trade in 1809, then slavery would have been eliminated gradually, and I don’t think it would have been necessary for the War Between the States to take place.

  All in all, he was probably the most versatile, and one of the most intelligent, men ever to occupy the White House. Some of his opponents called him a dangerous man, but they said the same thing about Andrew Jackson and Franklin Roosevelt and every other great leader. I suppose the people today who use the word “egghead” as a pejorative term, the way “Jacobin” was used in Jefferson’s time, would call him one; but if he was an egghead, he was a practical egghead. He knew how to make things work on the ground as well as to read and talk about them. His particular talent was understanding free government and how it can be made to work, and I think that was the most outstanding contribution that Jefferson made to the history of the United States. He was responsible for the development of a government in the hands of the people, which the Constitution says is where the power of government should reside, and he succeeded in many ways in carrying out that principle in the Constitution. Sometimes presidents were both politicians and thinkers, and Jefferson was one of our greatest thinkers and also a great politician. If you want to call a man an egghead who has a knowledge of all sorts of things, who’s well versed in history and everything else, and who’s also a practical politician and can make good government work, then he certainly was an egghead.

  The great and important thing that was accomplished by that major disagreement between Jefferson and Hamilton was that it created political parties in the United States. This is the way it happened, and this is why it’s such a good thing for our country:

  In the beginning, there was just a single political party, the Federalists. The name derived, simply enough, from the fact that it consisted of the people who had put together the concept of a centrally governed United States and therefore believed in strong control by the federal government over the thirteen former colonies. There were people around, of course, who believed in less control by the federal government and more autonomy for the states, their idea being that the United States should essentially be a loose league of the former colonies working together and helping each other when possible, and not a lot more than that. But they weren’t organized in any formal way and didn’t have a real party name; they were just called anti-Federalists.

  But then those differences developed and kept growing between Hamilton and his followers and Jefferson and his followers, and it began to seem that they disagreed on everything. The basic difference was the disagreements between federal control and states’ rights, but there were all those others. Hamilton believed that federal law should dominate at all times, and with the collaboration of James Madison and John Jay, he was the author of The Federalist Papers, a brilliant political work that started as eighty-five long newspaper articles and was then published as a book, and that did more than anything else to get the original Constitution accepted.

  Jefferson believed that the states should have the right to overturn federal law when it was unfair, and when the government came out with the Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798, which gave the federal government the right to deport foreigners who talked against the United States and jail newspaper editors who published articles that attacked the government, the president, or the Senate or House of Representatives, Jefferson, also in collaboration with James Madison, wrote documents called the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions in bitter opposition to these acts. (Jefferson’s contention that states should be allowed to kill federal laws was never accepted, but his statements against the Alien and Sedition Acts made their unfairness very clear, and the four items comprising the Acts were all dead by 1802.) Hamilton and John Adams and other Federalists hated the French Revolution and called it mobocracy; Jefferson hated the violence and bloodshed, but felt the revolution was necessary to get the French royal family out of power. Adams agreed with Hamilton that the upper classes were smarter and should govern; he wanted senators to be elected for life as a balance to agreeing that members of the House of Representatives should go on being elected by the masses. Jefferson felt that the people should elect all public officials.

  And so, by the time Washington finished up his two terms, there were two formal political parties, the Federalists and Jefferson’s party, now given an official name, the Democratic-Republicans. As I’ve noted before, it’s amusing to realize, in these days when Republicans say that Democrats are dumb and Democrats say that Republicans are dumber, that one of our original political parties combined both names, but there it was. And though Washington was elected without opposition for his two terms as president, and John Adams ran similarly unopposed for those two terms as his vice president, the race for the presidency to follow Washington’s was as bitter as any presidential contest today. The candidates were Adams and Jefferson for president, and Thomas Pinckney of South Carolina as the Federalist candidate for vice president and Aaron Burr, born in Newark, New Jersey, but now a resident of New York, as the Democratic-Republican candidate. And supporters of the two presidential candidates had plenty to say about the fellow who opposed the man of their choice.

  Adams was called a royalist and a monarchist, and it was pointed out that, when he was Washington’s vice president, he’d proposed that the president be called His Highness, and that the members of the Congress should stand in formal reverence when the president addressed them, the way that subjects of the king of England stood when the king talked to them. He was also, because he was fat, referred to as His Rotundity and His Superfluous Excellency. Jefferson’s alleged atheism was stressed in that campaign and the one that followed four years later, and the Federalists’ rallying cry was in the form of asking people which they wanted, “God and a religious president or Jefferson and no God.” Adams, the Federalists went on to say, would teach decency and clean living; Jefferson would bring about “murder, robbery, rape, adultery, and incest.” Jefferson later commented in a letter to his friend James Monroe, “It has been so impossible to contradict all their lies that I have determined to contradict none, for while I would be engaged with one they would publish twenty new ones.” It’s a wonder that no Federalist remembered Jefferson’s interest in art and accused him of loading up the country with graven images.

  Nevertheless, the race was a very close one, and there’s no telling how it may have ended if Washington had remained silent. But much as Washington respected Jefferson, and much as he continued to depend on his help even after Jefferson left his cabinet and returned to being a private citizen in 1793, he felt that Adams was more likely to continue his policies and viewpoints than Jefferson, and he finally came out and endorsed Adams. It was enough to tip the scales - that and the fact that most of the people in government jobs had been put there by Washington and Adams and were more likely to be kept on there if Adams rather than Jefferson became the second president. And in the electoral vote, Adams got seventy-one votes and Jefferson sixty-eight; Adams carried the electors in Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, and Vermont, and Jefferson got the electors in six southern states and one other state, taking Georgia, Kentucky, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, and that one state that wasn’t in the South, Pennsylvania.

  And one other thing happened that seems weird to twentieth-century minds: Jefferson, Adams’ opponent and the leader of the party opposed to Adams, became Adams’ vice president. Keep in mind tha
t, as the Constitution had it originally, the man who got the most votes became president and the man who got the second-largest number of votes became vice president, and remember also that our Founding Fathers weren’t thinking much or at all about opponents and opposing political parties. As they saw it then, the fellow who got the most votes would be the fellow who was most popular and had the most popular viewpoint, and the fellow who got the next largest number of votes would be the fellow who was almost as popular as the first man because he thought along the same lines.

  But the thing that happened here changed that kind of innocent thinking permanently. Alexander Hamilton didn’t care much for either of the two men running for president - he thought Adams was unstable and too unpredictable, and you know the ways in which he differed with Jefferson - so, since he was a Federalist himself, Hamilton set out quietly to see if he could get both presidential candidates defeated and the Federalist running for vice president, Thomas Pinckney, in as president. Since Pinckney was a southerner, Hamilton began to campaign for Pinckney among southern electors, hoping that enough of them might move away from Jefferson to give Pinckney the largest number of votes. But instead it caused confusion and dissension among the electors, Pinckney came in third, and Thomas Jefferson was the new vice president.

  Jefferson was a bit bored as vice president because he often felt he just didn’t have enough to do, and I’m in sympathy with that feeling because I felt that way myself once or twice when I had the job, even though there was a lot more responsibility given to the office by the time I got it. Jefferson had so much free time that he sat down and wrote that book, A Manual of Parliamentary Practice, which is still being used today, but he also did whatever chores came his way and did them well and effectively, and he was an even stronger candidate when he ran for president against Adams again in 1800.

  Burr was again the Democratic-Republican candidate for vice president, and this time the Federalist choice for the office was another Pinckney from South Carolina, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney. (Charles Cotesworth Pinckney was Thomas’ brother, Thomas having decided not to run again. Both men were officers in the Continental Army. And to confuse you further, there was another Charles Pinckney around at the time. He had no middle name and was Charles Cotesworth’s and Thomas’ cousin. He was governor of South Carolina from 1789 to 1792, and again from 1796 to 1798, and again from 1806 to 1808. He also served in the Revolutionary War. All three men were captured during the war, and I imagine the British had a hell of a time telling them apart.)

  The results of the election were even more confusing. Adams and Pinckney took the majority of the electoral votes in seven states, Connecticut, Delaware, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Vermont, and Jefferson and Burr got the majority of the electoral votes in eight states, Georgia, Kentucky, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia. Maryland’s electors gave half their votes to Adams and Pinckney and the other half to Jefferson and Burr. However, when the individual votes were added up, Adams was third with a total of sixty-five votes, thereby becoming the first, but far from the last, president to be defeated for a second term, but Jefferson and Burr ended up with an identical seventy-three votes apiece. It should have been simple at that point; Jefferson, after all, was the presidential candidate and Burr the vice-presidential candidate, so Jefferson should have become president and Burr vice president. But Burr wasn’t a sensible man, and he refused to go along with this obvious solution. This put the matter into the hands of the House of Representatives, and they voted no less than thirty-six times in the days between February 11 and February 17, 1801, before a decision was reached. Hamilton had a lot to do with the decision; he felt that his unpredictable colleague Adams was a pillar of wisdom and sanity compared to Burr, and since it was now strictly a choice between the two Democratic-Republicans, he went around urging electors, and politicians who had influence with electors, to support Jefferson. This time his efforts succeeded, and Jefferson took Georgia, Kentucky, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Tennessee, Vermont, and Virginia, a total often states, and Burr took four, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island. Delaware and South Carolina were so undecided that they abstained completely from voting. Jefferson, therefore, was now president and Burr vice president.

  It would have been bad news for the country if Burr had become our third president; there’s no telling what might have happened to us. It’s a big enough blot on our history that he was our vice president, and it’s fortunate for that reason that vice presidents didn’t have all that much power and all that much to do then, because he was really quite a terrible man.

  It wasn’t that Burr, who was born in 1756, was stupid, because he was certainly clever enough; the problem with him was that he was a driven man, so ambitious and so ruthless that he’d do anything to get what he wanted at the time he wanted it. He was a graduate of the College of New Jersey, which later became Princeton University, at the age of sixteen, then a brilliant law student until he left law school to become an equally brilliant soldier in the Continental Army, and after that a lawyer in New York who moved rapidly up the political ladder. In quick order, he was an assemblyman, New York State attorney general, and a United States senator. He also helped develop a patriotic club called the Tammany Society into a political organization that had a lot to do with creating the Democratic-Republican Party, and for a while, also did some good fighting unfair practices like the imprisonment of people for debt and assisting immigrants in getting jobs. The organization also helped get some good men elected, including Andrew Jackson. (This was, of course, long before it degenerated into Tammany Hall, which was controlled by Boss Tweed and his cronies.)

  All this made Burr an increasingly powerful national figure and got him on the ticket with Jefferson in 1800, but you’ve already seen how he behaved when he refused, at first, to concede to Jefferson even though he knew that everybody was really voting for Jefferson for president and for him for vice president. But the really terrible thing occurred in 1804, as most people will remember from their history studies, when Burr, who hadn’t gotten along at all well with Jefferson during their four years together, was replaced by another New York lawyer, George Clinton, as Jefferson’s running mate in Jefferson’s campaign for a second term. Burr returned in fury to New York and ran for governor of his state, but Alexander Hamilton continued to fear Burr as a dangerous man and continued to talk out against him. Burr was defeated, and more frustrated and filled with hatred than ever, he challenged Hamilton to a duel.

  Hamilton, unfortunately, accepted, because the stupid general attitude in those days was that a man was branded a coward if he didn’t accept. The duel took place in a deserted area in Weehawken Heights, New Jersey, on July 11, 1804, and Hamilton was killed. He was only forty-nine years old, and it was an awful waste because he’d done many good things for the country, and I’m sure he would have done many more if he’d lived. He was a very important man of his period, and Burr had a chance to be, too, but he had those tremendous and terrible ambitions. I don’t know what he would have done if he’d been chosen as president instead of Jefferson when there was that tie vote, but I have an idea that he would have done everything he possibly could to make the president an absolute monarch. That’s what I’ve always thought in studying the events of that period, anyway, so maybe it’s just as well that he was so clearly the kind of man he was and that this eventually brought him down completely.

  The duel was the end of Burr’s usefulness as a public man in the United States, but he had one more bad move to make. He organized a group of sixty well-armed men and headed into the South and the Southwest; it’s never been exactly clear what he intended to do with such a tiny army, but the popular theory is that he intended to instigate some kind of war between Spain and the United States and while they were at each other’s throats, grab some piece of land, either in the Louisiana Territory or perhaps down in Mexico, and set it
up as an independent nation with himself as its president. (Or maybe even its king. I don’t know what was going on in that strange man’s mind.)

  But Burr made the mistake of trying to enlist the help of a man named James Wilkinson, a sort of disreputable fellow who had been a brigadier general in the Revolutionary War and had the responsible job of being “clothier general” in charge of the Army’s supplies, but resigned after he was accused of having irregularities in his accounts. The thing that Burr didn’t know was that Wilkinson was a friend of the Spaniards, and, in fact, it later came out that he was working for Spain and had even sworn an oath of allegiance to Spain and was drawing a pension of $2,000 a year from them, which was later raised to $4,000. Wilkinson went immediately to Jefferson and told him what was happening, and Burr was arrested for treason and tried in Richmond, Virginia, with John Marshall, who was then Chief Justice, presiding.

  Marshall decided not to make any more of the matter than was absolutely necessary and acquitted Burr, saying he hadn’t actually committed “an overt act of treason.” Burr moved to Europe for a while, then returned to New York and practiced law again, but never reentered politics. He died at the age of eighty in 1836. Wilkinson, the chief witness against him at his trial, reentered the American army and served in the War of 1812, but was such a bum officer that he was relieved of his command, and he retired and moved down to Mexico and died there in 1825.

  JEFFERSON, MEANWHILE, HAD no trouble at all in being reelected for a second term. This time Charles Cotesworth Pinckney tried for the presidency rather than the vice presidency on the Federalist ticket, but he was easily defeated, drawing only 14 electoral votes to Jefferson’s 162. Jefferson got the electoral votes of fifteen states, and Pinckney only the votes of Connecticut and Delaware. (Despite this, incidentally, Pinckney ran again as a Federalist in 1808 against James Madison and this time got 47 votes to Madison’s 122. Pinckney then decided that politics wasn’t for him and took a job as the first president of the Charleston, South Carolina, Bible Society.)