A Magnificent Catastrophe

by Edward J. Larson

  Religion also played a major role in Pennsylvania’s gubernatorial election, but with the traditional roles reversed. In the 1796 presidential election, Federalists had portrayed Adams as a faithful Christian and Jefferson as an infidel bent on driving religion from the public square. In the 1799 Pennsylvania contest, however, Ross was the Deist and Republicans showed that they could give as good as they got. Their campaign literature portrayed McKean as “a devout Christian” and Ross as a heretic. They frequently repeated the charge that Ross publicly denied the Christian doctrine of original sin, and reminded voters that he once sought to delete a provision from the state constitution requiring that officeholders believe in God. Of course, at the national level, Federalists leveled those precise accusations against Jefferson. If the 1799 gubernatorial campaign served as a fair barometer of the nation’s political climate, then it forecast heavy weather ahead for the election of 1800.

  Federalists despaired when McKean beat Ross by about 5,000 votes out of some 70,000 ballots cast. Not only had the Republicans taken the governorship, they had gained control of the lower house of the legislature, the Assembly, and almost captured the State Senate as well. Nearly 60 percent of Pennsylvania’s eligible voters participated in the election—more than twice the percentage participating in the preceding gubernatorial election. The Republicans won on high turnout, with particular strength among Irish and German immigrants. “The Federal Party are so much alarmed at the idea of McKean being chosen governor that they are apprehensive of success…next year,” the Aurora crowed, referring to the 1800 presidential contest. McKean and his Republicans would still have to battle the Federalists controlling the State Senate over the method of selecting electors, but the contest looked tilted in their favor.

  Demoralized by their drubbing in the polls, Federalists worried openly about its implications for the upcoming presidential election. “Such a fire has been lighted up in Pennsylvania as will consume the Federal Union,” printer John Fenno opined in the Gazette of the United States. Characterizing McKean’s partisan victory as “an event most disgraceful to our national character,” the Federalist Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Thomas Sedgwick, blamed the split between Adams and High Federalists, which he saw as potentially fatal for his fledgling party. “The state of Pennsylvania is a strange medley,” Abigail Adams added. Its “late election has withered all the laurels it ever had.”

  Perhaps the direst predictions came from High Federalist printer William Cobbett, the Anglophile editor of the caustic, opinion-laced Porcupine’s Gazette, who had suffered in libel actions brought in McKean’s court. “The election of my Democratic judge as governor of Pennsylvania, undeniably the most influential state in the union, has, in my opinion, decided the fate of what has been called Federalism,” Cobbett growled. “His success [is] only a sort of onset in the struggle which will terminate in the complete triumph of Democracy.” Cobbett viewed Republican “Democracy” as synonymous with “Jacobin” tyranny. Acting on his fears, Cobbett promptly moved his publishing business from Philadelphia to New York, and then to London. He refused to live under Republican rule.

  Republicans celebrated across Pennsylvania as word of their victory and its surprising extent spread. For them, it was like Independence Day: bonfires, bands, fireworks, ox roasts, and plenty to drink. Toasts to Jefferson, “the faithful guardian of our rights,” inevitably raised the loudest and longest cheers, equaling or exceeding those even for McKean. “May the spirit which dictated the Declaration of Independence preside in the union,” one toast to Jefferson proclaimed. It elicited nine cheers compared with only three for a toast to Washington, “the late commander in chief.” Republicans in Pennsylvania now sang a new song:

  Ye true sons of freedom, ye rude swinish throng,

  Attend for a while, and I’ll give you a song,

  It’s the triumph of freedom, we now celebrate,

  A Republican governor gain’d for the state.

  Friends of Freedom now since we have gained our cause,

  Let’s be firm in supporting our country and laws,

  But not that curst law of Sedition so ill,

  If I do then curse me with an Alien bill.

  Commenting on the results from Monticello, Jefferson wrote to South Carolina Senator Charles Pinckney, the younger Republican cousin of Thomas and Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, “The success of McKean’s election is a subject of real congratulation and hope.” Of course, Jefferson had carried Pennsylvania in 1796 and still lost. He would need more electoral votes from northern or middle states and solid support from the South to be sure of victory in 1800. The isolated votes in Virginia and North Carolina that had gone to Adams last time must be secured. No one knew this better than the younger Pinckney.

  Charles Pinckney lived for politics, and he particularly enjoyed besting his Federalist cousins, who had taken to calling him “Blackguard Charlie” for his allegiance to the Republican cause. As prominent members of South Carolina’s inbred aristocracy, the Pinckneys transformed state politics into a family feud. For months, Charles Pinckney had urged Jefferson and Madison to secure the Republican base by pushing Virginia and North Carolina to adopt a statewide method of choosing presidential electors because he was convinced that the majority in both states would be solidly Republican. “The success of the Republican interest depends on this act,” Pinckney wrote in a September 1799 letter to Madison. Under a district method of choosing electors, he explained, pockets of Federalism within those two predominantly Republican states could cost Jefferson the presidency in 1800, just as they had in 1796. Using a statewide general ticket would prevent this result. “A single vote may be of great consequence,” Pinckney stressed. “This is no time for qualms.” The 1798 congressional elections underscored the risk when Federalist candidates won in eight of Virginia’s nineteen congressional districts.

  Viewing district elections as the most democratic method of choosing presidential electors, Jefferson had favored them as a means to make the inherently elitist electoral-college system somewhat more representative. Without effective state media or communications, local voters might know district candidates, whereas they could not know many of those running statewide. To Jefferson, democracy required informed voters. Practical considerations, however, brought him around to Pinckney’s point of view. Any large state using district elections effectively disenfranchised itself in a close presidential contest in which most other states used some form of winner-take-all method of choosing electors—either by a statewide vote or legislative appointment. Splitting a state’s electoral votes between opposing candidates effectively negated them.

  Once Republicans gained firm control of the Virginia government with Monroe’s selection as governor in December 1799, Jefferson endorsed switching to a general ticket for choosing the state’s electors. “All agree that an election by districts would be best if it could be general” throughout the nation, he wrote to Monroe, “but while ten states choose either by their legislatures or by a general ticket, it is folly and worse than folly for the other six not to” use some winner-take-all approach. Madison, then serving in the state legislature, recognized that his party had enough power to push through the change. “The present assembly is rather stronger on the Republican side than the last one,” he wrote to Jefferson on January 12, 1800. “It is proposed to introduce tomorrow a bill for a general ticket in choosing the next electors.” In January, majority Republican lawmakers dutifully enacted Madison’s bill calling for a statewide election for electors, but only after a bitter partisan debate and by an unexpectedly narrow margin. The new election law all but assured that Jefferson would sweep Virginia’s twenty-one electoral votes this time, the most of any state.

  Between Virginia’s general-ticket law and McKean’s triumph in Pennsylvania, the pieces seemed to be falling in place for a Republican victory in 1800. The election remained nearly a year away, however, and essential uncertainty over the outcome remained. Even with all their
electoral votes, Virginia and Pennsylvania could not quite guarantee the margin of victory for Jefferson. He had received virtually all their votes four years earlier and still lost. True, if he carried all their votes this time and every other vote he had won in 1796, he would win by one vote—but he could not necessarily count on doing so well everywhere. Other than Pennsylvania, the middle states—New Jersey, Maryland, and Delaware—remained predominately Federalist. Pockets of Federalism in the Carolinas also threatened to undermine Jefferson’s Southern base and subtract votes from his 1796 total. In addition, in Virginia and Pennsylvania, Federalists immediately began working to salvage some electoral votes.

  In Virginia, Federalists tried to shame Republicans into restoring district elections, and, with legislative elections scheduled for April, well before the balloting for electors in November, they even dreamed of gaining control of the legislature and then restoring district elections themselves. A statewide general ticket will effectively “exclude one third at least of the citizens of Virginia from a vote for the president of United States,” one partisan complained—the one-third in Federalist-leaning districts. A widely reprinted Federalist broadside denounced the general-ticket law as violating “the ancient usages of elections and [voters’] established rights” of choosing from among candidates in local races rather than between party ballots in statewide ones. Underscoring this point, critics of the law noted that Virginia had never conducted a statewide election for any office: Should partisan considerations trump democratic traditions?

  Republicans responded with a pamphlet, A Vindication of the General Ticket Law, which defended the principle of winner-take-all balloting as “best calculated to preserve to every state in the union the full extent of that power which the Constitution intended to confer.” As the most populous state, Virginia should have the most electoral power, the Republicans argued, and only a winner-take-all approach would secure it.

  Of course, the same electoral calculus applied in other states and to both parties. As the contests over voting methods heated up in Pennsylvania and Virginia, partisan lawmakers in other states took heed. Fearing that Republican electors might win in one or two of their state’s electoral districts, Federalists in control of the Massachusetts government soon responded effectively in kind to Virginia Republicans by switching from district elections to legislative appointment for presidential electors. Explaining his desire to “guard against one anti-federal vote from Massachusetts,” a Bay State lawmaker warned that “one vote may turn the election.” Cautious Federalists in neighboring New Hampshire also opted for legislative appointment. Ultimately only three states—Kentucky, Maryland, and North Carolina—stuck with district elections for choosing presidential electors in 1800, four fewer than in 1796. Two others—Rhode Island and Virginia—used a statewide general ticket for electors, which would likely result in one party carrying all the electoral votes because voters would presumably vote along party lines in such a contest. The rest used some form of legislative appointment.

  In Pennsylvania, despite McKean’s victory and their strong showing in legislative races, Republicans could not yet count on sweeping the state’s electoral votes in 1800. They had taken control of the lower house of the state legislature along with the governorship in 1799, but Federalists had clung to power in the upper house. Both houses and the governor would have to agree on the method of choosing electors, and Federalists in the upper house firmly opposed any approach that might favor Jefferson. They would demand either district elections or legislative appointment, which would surely secure some Federalist electors, over the statewide ballot favored by McKean and the Republicans. As long as they controlled the State Senate, even by a narrow margin, they would have the power to hold out for their preference, or force a stalemate. If lawmakers failed to resolve the issue of how the state chose its electors, Pennsylvania might have to abstain altogether from voting in the presidential election.

  Federalists went into the 1800 election never having lost the presidency and firmly in control of both houses of Congress due to their strong showing in the 1798 midterm elections. With their leaders split over Adams’s peace initiative with France and critical state elections going against them in Pennsylvania and Virginia, however, their prospects for 1800 had dimmed even while Washington lived. As the only person whom all Federalists admired, Washington had held the party together and given it meaning. A few years earlier, Jefferson had predicted that the nation’s “republican spirit” would revive once Federalists could no longer rally around Washington. For beleaguered Federalists, their leader’s passing came at a critical time. “The death of the General!” one prominent Federalist had exclaimed late in 1799. “God help us!” His words spoke for an entire party.

  Throughout the 1790s, Republicans were defined largely by their opposition to Hamilton and the High Federalist agenda. People called them “the antis.” With Washington gone and their unity shattered by Adams’s overture to France, Federalists were fast becoming “the antis”—defined mainly by their opposition to Jefferson and the Republican Party. The initiative heading into the 1800 election had passed from the Federalists to the Republicans by the end of January, but the outcome was far from certain and partisanship now reigned supreme.

  CHAPTER THREE

  “ELECTIONEERING HAS ALREADY BEGUN”

  THE NEWS resounded like rolling thunder as it spread across America. “The French Republic is overthrown,” the Federalist Gazette of the United States reported on February 7, 1800. The name Napoleon Bonaparte hung in the air everywhere. The republic’s greatest general had staged a coup and taken effective control of France. Americans sensed that this new earthquake in European politics would shake their country too, but no one yet knew exactly how. Federalists and Republicans alike struggled to retain their balance in the wake of the shocking news.

  If they agreed on nothing else, Federalists and Republicans agreed that events in the Old World still influenced those in the new one. The cataclysmic European conflicts gave energy and meaning to the American partisan disputes. Indeed, they had largely given them birth. Bonaparte’s coup d’état cast all in doubt. Although it occurred in November 1799, word of the event did not begin reaching American ports until January 1800, with complete reports arriving only in February.

  For over a decade, political developments in France had dominated the news in America. “That revolution which has been the admiration, the wonder, and the terror of the civilized world had, from its commencement, been viewed in America with the deepest interest,” observed John Marshall, whose principled stand against negotiating with France during the XYZ Affair effectively launched his legendary career in American public service. Second only to Britain, France had influenced the course of American political, social, and cultural development for two centuries. Always the other world power with designs on eastern North America, France had alternately threatened and enticed Americans since colonial times. After trying to conquer Britain’s New World colonies in the 1760s, France helped them to gain their independence in the 1770s. So many Americans still admired Louis XVI for his role in their struggle for independence that his portrait continued to hang in a position of honor at the U.S. House of Representatives in 1800—more than seven years after his own people had overthrown and beheaded him.

  The fascination of Americans with the French Revolution crossed party lines and stemmed in part from the sense that the American Revolution had played an important role in transporting visions of liberty and democracy onto the world stage. At the dawn of the French Revolution, for example, Washington wrote optimistically to Jefferson in France, “The rights of mankind, the privileges of the people, and the true principles of liberty seem to have been more thoroughly discussed and better understood throughout Europe since the American Revolution.” Jefferson concurred. He wrote back to Washington, “The [French] nation has been awakened by our revolution.” This bond between the two nations had survived into the 1790s despite growing doubts among Hi
gh Federalists. Even when France’s short-lived constitutional monarchy fell to republican rule in 1793, Washington (in words probably written by Jefferson as his Secretary of State) reassured French officials that “the union of principles and pursuits between our two countries [is] a link which binds still closer their interests and affections.” Capturing the spirit of the day, John Marshall wrote, “There seems to be something infectious in the example of a powerful and enlightened nation verging toward democracy.”

  Virtually all Americans had initially welcomed the French Revolution as heralding a new birth of freedom in Europe. The absolute authority of the King in prerevolutionary France and the oppressive power of its nobles and clerics found little support among Americans, who claimed a heritage of representative government, personal liberty, and economic opportunity from their days as British colonists. Their revolution defended and expanded these rights, Americans believed, without directly challenging the established social and religious order. As the French Revolution pushed far beyond its American predecessor, however, in repudiating political, economic, and religious traditions and opening new horizons for radical social change, many Americans, led by the High Federalists, began having second thoughts. Now the French had fallen under military rule, a fate anathema to the basic principles of the United States and the American Revolution.

  Federalists took one lesson from the French experience: Unfettered democracy under the influence of a leveling faction produces anarchy, atheism, and then tyranny. “I much fear that this country is doomed to great convulsions, changes, and calamities,” Maryland Senator Charles Carroll of Carrollton, an extreme High Federalist, wrote to Hamilton in 1800. “The turbulent and disorganizing spirit of Jacobinism, under the worn out disguise of equal liberty, and rights and division of property held out as a lure to the indolent and needy, but not really intended to be executed, will introduce anarchy which will terminate here, as in France, in a military despotism.” In his arch-Federalist newspaper, William Cobbett tried to awaken his readers to the Republican threat at home by raising the guillotine. “The friends of order and humanity [are] dilatory, like the persons of the same description in France,” he warned. “They seemed to be waiting till the sons of equality came to cut their throats.”