In 1796, still in his first term as a U.S. senator, Burr had tried again for the vice presidency. The Federalists had quickly settled on South Carolina’s Thomas Pinckney as their candidate for Vice President, without ever formally meeting to discuss the matter. Republicans not only considered a wider field but employed a novel process for doing so. Their congressional members met together in secret to discuss their options—the first time that a party’s representatives and senators had ever caucused to discuss candidates.
Although a necessary evil to establish and maintain party unity in an age before primary elections and nominating conventions, closed caucuses carried an odor of conspiratorial factionalism from the Revolutionary Era, when both patriots and loyalists met in private to plot the other’s destruction. Factional scheming would give way to open political discourse in the sunshine of American democracy, the patriotic vision proclaimed. Caucusing was reviving with the rise of partisan politics, but it remained unpopular with the public.
In their 1796 secret caucus, Republican lawmakers discussed at least four candidates for the vice presidency: Burr, Senator Pierce Butler of South Carolina, Senator John Langdon of New Hampshire, and Chancellor Robert Livingston of New York. Although members attending the caucus apparently never voted on these individuals and did not, as a group, endorse any one of them, Burr seems to have been the favorite, enjoying particularly strong support in the middle states, especially Pennsylvania, where partisan leader John Beckley affirmed that “the whole body of Republicans are decidedly in favor of Burr.” Republicans, however, made little attempt actually to coordinate their voting for Vice President.
In the ensuing Electoral College balloting, Burr had proved most popular with Republican electors in the middle and western states. In Jefferson’s strongholds in the South, however, most Republican electors had cast their second votes for more senior and reliable Anti-Federalists, particularly Clinton and Samuel Adams of Massachusetts—two popular, older leaders who had initially opposed ratification of the Constitution and apparently were overlooked at the congressional party caucus.
The vote totals in 1796, with Adams and Jefferson coming in first and second while their parties’ other candidates trailed far behind, demonstrated that disciplined party voting did not yet dominate the Electoral College. Many electors still voted their consciences or sectional loyalties. Finishing a poor fourth behind Adams, Jefferson, and Pinckney, Burr professed to feel betrayed by Southern Republicans—particularly Jefferson’s Virginia electors, who gave fifteen votes to Samuel Adams, three to Clinton, and only one to Burr.
Following his Herculean efforts on Jefferson’s behalf in the 1800 New York City election, in the 1800 presidential election Burr demanded more loyalty from Republican electors than he had received in the past. Party discipline, not ideological purity or sectional loyalties, should prevail in the casting of electoral votes, he argued.
Hitching himself to Jefferson and the rise of partisan voting, Burr set his sights on being chosen as the sole Republican vice presidential candidate this time. As in 1796, Republican members of the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate again planned to caucus secretly to make their vice presidential nomination. The brilliant Swiss émigré Albert Gallatin served as the Republican leader in Congress. On May 11, at the boardinghouse in Philadelphia where many Republican lawmakers lodged during congressional sessions, he convened the caucus. Its timing would enable Burr to capitalize on his recent efforts for the Republican ticket in New York if he struck fast. Matthew Davis had already laid the groundwork for Burr to do so, undoubtedly with his mentor’s full knowledge and encouragement.
During the campaign in New York, Davis had sent Gallatin regular reports highlighting Burr’s efforts on behalf of the party. The colonel “has effected all” and “principally” caused the victory, the letters gushed in words that as likely came from Burr as from his adoring protégé. After the party ticket prevailed in New York City, Davis sent a final letter to Gallatin expressly raising the issue that had been the topic of open speculation in the city throughout the campaign. “It is generally expected that the vice president will be selected from the state of New York,” Davis wrote on May 5. “Three characters only can be contemplated, viz., George Clinton, Chancellor Livingston, and Colonel Burr.” Dismissing the first as too old and the second as too timid, Davis concluded, “Colonel Burr is therefore the most eligible character, and on him the eyes of our friends in this state are fixed as if by sympathy for that office.”
In his mind, Gallatin had already narrowed the choice to two of these three New Yorkers. On May 6, even before receiving Davis’s final letter, Gallatin wrote from Philadelphia to his wife, then visiting her family in New York City. “Who is to be our vice president, Clinton or Burr?” he asked. “This is a serious question which I am delegated to make, and to which I must have an answer by Friday next.” That was the appointed day for the secret Republican caucus.
To discover which person New York Republicans favored as Vice President, Gallatin asked his wife’s illustrious father, retired Navy captain James Nicholson, to survey local sentiment. Nicholson instead went straight to Clinton and Burr. Here the record becomes fuzzy. Nicholson and Clinton later wrote that, in line with conventional practice, Clinton played the reluctant candidate, much as he had when Burr asked him to stand for the State Assembly two months earlier.
Nicholson pressed him about the vice presidency, Clinton wrote in an 1803 letter. “After much conversation on this subject, I finally agreed that in answering Mr. Gallatin’s letter he might mention that I was adverse to engage in public life, yet rather than that any danger should occur in the election of president…I would so far consent as that my name might be used without any contradiction on my part,” he recalled. Burr also initially expressed his willingness to stand as Jefferson’s running mate, Clinton and Nicholson reported, but then became enraged when Nicholson told him that Clinton’s name would also go forward to Philadelphia. “He would have nothing more to do with the business,” Burr reportedly told Nicholson, and would instead run for governor. To placate Burr, Nicholson (with Clinton’s consent) altered his response to Gallatin.
Nicholson’s letter to Gallatin did not mention any of the alleged behind-the-scenes posturing by Clinton and Burr. It simply endorsed Burr as the choice “of all the Republicans in this quarter that I have conversed with.” According to the letter, Clinton “declined” to run due to “his age…and attachment to retired life” and endorsed Burr as “the most suitable person” for the vice presidency. The wily Burr then played the reluctant candidate whose conditional no actually meant yes. “He seemed to think that no arrangement could be made which would be observed to the southward,” Nicholson wrote of Burr’s reluctance, “alluding, as I understand, to the last election, in which he was certainly ill used by Virginia and North Carolina. I believe he may be induced to stand if assurances can be given that the Southern States will act fairly.” Without a solemn pledge of solid support by Republican electors in all states, Burr was well aware that he could gain the caucus nomination and still come in third or fourth in an election that Jefferson won. “Burr says he has no confidence in the Virginians,” Gallatin’s wife added in a separate letter. “They once deceived him, and they are not to be trusted.”
By encouraging party-line voting by electors pledged to partisan unity, Burr’s expressed goal was to garner one vote from every Republican elector, which could result in his getting as many votes as Jefferson. Indeed, any astute politician could readily recognize that completely straight party-line voting would lead to a tie vote between the party’s two candidates. Such an outcome could be catastrophic. The Constitution stipulated that in the event of a tie between two candidates, each with votes from a majority of the electors, the House of Representatives would pick between them by majority vote. In the House balloting, each state would have one vote. At the time, due to an even partisan split in some state congressional delegations, neither party controlled
a majority of them. The Federalists could thus use their power in Congress to block Jefferson’s election.
During the campaign, Republican leaders never seemed to doubt that some Republican electors would, in the end, drop their votes for Burr, either on their own initiative or at the direction of a party leader. After all, it was clear that no Republican elector actually favored Burr over Jefferson for President, but the Constitution prohibited them from officially designating one vote for President and another vote for Vice President. Eliminating one or more votes for Burr was the only way Jefferson could win the election without a troublesome House vote.
Forty-three Republican members of Congress reportedly attended the secret caucus, which formally tapped Jefferson as the party’s nominee for President and Burr as its choice for Vice President. At the time, presumably to maintain the appearance of an open party, participants did not publicly acknowledge that the meeting had occurred.
Ironically, after Federalists held a closed, but not secret, caucus to choose their candidates for national office within days of the secret Republican one, the Republican Aurora gleefully condemned it as a “fractious meeting…unknown to the constitution or law.” Other Republican newspapers also questioned the authority of a “self-appointed” caucus to “dictate” nominations without ever suggesting that Republican lawmakers held a similar gathering. Indeed, in an autobiographical writing published four decades later and after a stellar career of public service that transcended partisanship, Gallatin still defensively maintained that Republican caucuses were infrequent, informal, and nonbinding during his tenure in Congress.
No record exists of what transpired within the Republican caucus on May 11—only Gallatin’s private report of the results. “We had last night a very large meeting of Republicans in which it was unanimously agreed to support Burr for Vice President,” he wrote privately to his wife in New York on May 12. Jefferson denied playing any direct role in the choice. “It is our mutual duty to leave those arrangements to others and to acquiesce in their assignment,” Jefferson wrote to a Southern supporter about himself and Burr. “He has certainly greatly merited [the support] of his country, and the Republicans in particular, to whose efforts his have given a chance of success.”
Perhaps because of their secret nature, caucuses could not in themselves enforce party discipline. Burr wanted more than a mere expression of support: Only pledges of personal honor would bind participants to their caucus commitments. He sought them following the caucus. Republicans soon spoke openly of their mutual commitment to vote equally for Jefferson and Burr. When rumors spread that, to prevent a tie, some Southern electors would not vote for Burr so that Jefferson would be certain to prevail over Burr in the final tally, Burrite David Gelston wrote accusingly to Madison on Burr’s behalf, “Can we, may we, rely on the integrity of the southern states?” Madison responded by openly urging Governor Monroe to make sure that all Virginia’s electors duly voted for Jefferson and Burr. “It would be superfluous to suggest to you the mischief resulting from the least grounds of reproach, and particularly to Virginia, on this head,” he wrote to the governor. Madison, Monroe, and Jefferson each assumed that others would, nonetheless, make sure that at least one Republican elector in some state would not vote for Burr. None of them wanted to be personally responsible for the breach of trust, however.
Burr now had the nomination and a pledge of support covering all Republican electors. He responded by campaigning conscientiously for the party ticket and never, as far as the record shows, overtly breaking his implicit commitment to support Jefferson. If he did watch out for himself along the way, it was nothing more than he expected from others.
The Federalist caucus, though on its surface less contentious, involved more convoluted subcurrents than the Republican one. For Jefferson’s running mate, Republicans had chosen someone already known for his independent ambition and lack of long-term party loyalty yet able to deliver key electoral votes. Jefferson would later call Burr a “crooked gun or other perverted machine whose aim or stroke you could never be sure of,” while Monroe and other leading Republicans had long viewed him as unreliable. Some observers predicted that Republicans would soon regret choosing Burr. In contrast, for their second candidate, Federalists tapped a reliable subordinate and party loyalist, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, the elder brother of their 1796 vice presidential candidate, Thomas Pinckney.
Although seemingly obvious on its face to the public, the choice of Pinckney for the national ticket, in fact, threatened to split Federalists along a critical fault line. Party insiders knew that Pinckney’s loyalties ran toward Hamilton rather than Adams, and that Hamilton had backed Pinckney’s brother over Adams in 1796. Indeed, after the caucus in 1800, senior Federalist leader Fisher Ames privately commented on the “singular and mysterious” state of his party’s politics: “The plot for an old Spanish play is not more complicated with underplot.” The choice may have been perverse in some respects, but there was good strategy behind it, especially for High Federalists.
Like the Republicans, the Federalists caucused in the wake of the New York City election, which cast a pall over their gathering. To retain the presidency without New York’s electoral votes, Federalists needed to peel some votes away from Jefferson in the South. With its established aristocracy, the Pinckney family’s power base, and its relative independence from national partisan politics, South Carolina offered the best prospects for them. This is why they turned once again to one of the wealthy and influential Pinckney brothers—who were South Carolina’s leading Federalists—to run with Adams. Born into power and privilege in Charleston, both brothers studied law in England, received military training in France, and inherited vast low-country plantations with hundreds of slaves. In the afterglow of negotiating a popular 1795 treaty with Spain that peacefully resolved the nation’s southwestern border with Louisiana and opened New Orleans to American commercial traffic, Thomas Pinckney had been the Federalists’ logical choice in 1796 for trying to break the Republicans’ grip on the South. Every South Carolina elector voted for him and Jefferson; none voted for Adams.
By 1800, Thomas’s older brother, Charles Cotesworth, had emerged as the strongest candidate to run with Adams on the party ticket. One of three commissioners named to negotiate outstanding differences with France in 1797, the older Pinckney famously defended America’s honor by refusing to pay the bribe allegedly sought by French officials in the XYZ Affair. “No, no, not one sixpence,” he purportedly replied, or, “Millions for defense, but not one cent for tribute.” Both versions circulated widely in the United States, and made him a national hero—at least until taxpayers began paying those millions. After the ensuing breakdown of negotiations led to fears of war with France, Pinckney agreed to serve under Washington and Hamilton as commander of Southern forces in the Additional Army even though, as a general during the Revolutionary War, he had outranked Hamilton. With his brother Thomas then serving in the U.S. House of Representatives and his cousin Charles in the U.S. Senate, Charles Cotesworth joined Adams on the party’s agreed upon, though unofficial, national ticket.
In a controversial twist, rather than endorse Adams as President and Pinckney as Vice President, the thirty-or-so Federalist members of Congress attending the caucus agreed simply to endorse both men and urge all Federalist electors to vote for them equally. Presumably party moderates and High Federalists were able to reach consensus at the caucus only on these terms. The agreement left Hamilton free to hope that this time a plot like the one he had hatched in 1796 would succeed and his candidate would outpoll Adams. To work, the effort would require strict party-line voting by Federalist electors in the North while at the same time a repeat of favorite-son balloting by South Carolina’s electors. If all Federalist electors duly voted for both candidates—with no one dropping votes from Pinckney, as some had done with his brother in 1796—and if South Carolina’s electors again voted for a candidate from their state’s most powerful family, then Charles Cot
esworth Pinckney would almost surely win the presidency.
Hamilton had suggested this approach in a May 4 letter to Federalist House Speaker Theodore Sedgwick, a caucus leader. Reminding the Speaker of the 1796 effort to bring Thomas Pinckney in ahead of Adams, Hamilton declared that, following the loss in New York, such an effort was now the party’s best option for retaining the presidency. “To support Adams and Pinckney equally is the only thing that can possibly save us from the fangs of Jefferson,” he wrote.
The scheme might succeed in 1800 where it had failed in 1796, Hamilton reasoned, because Adams had lost so much High Federalist support by then due to the resumption of peace negotiations with France. Although moderates within the party welcomed the peace mission, High Federalists hated it. Enough electors from New England might now knowingly go along with his scheme for it to work, in contrast to those who had scuttled it last time. “It is therefore essential that the Federalists should not separate without coming to a distinct and solemn concert to pursue this course bona fide,” he wrote to Sedgwick.
The strategy behind the caucus agreement was clear to all astute political observers. Jefferson immediately dubbed it a “hocus-pocus maneuver,” presumably referring to the substitution of the popular candidate, Adams, by the High Federalists’ choice, Pinckney. Adams guessed Hamilton’s game as soon as he heard what the caucus had done, and he was livid. Following the caucus, Fisher Ames neatly summed up the political situation when he wrote: “It is understood by most persons that Pinckney’s chance is worse than Jefferson’s and better than Adams’s.”
Sedgwick described the caucus in words that echoed Hamilton’s instructions for it. “We have had a meeting of the whole Federal Party on the subject of the ensuing election and have agreed that we will support, bona fide, Mr. Adams and General Pinckney,” he wrote. “If this agreement be faithfully executed we shall succeed, but otherwise we cannot escape the fangs of Jefferson.” As a leading member of Congress from Massachusetts who had long supported Adams, Sedgwick had felt personally betrayed when the President reopened peace negotiations with France in 1799. “Had the foulest heart and the basest mind in the world been permitted to select the most embarrassing and ruinous measure,” Sedgwick commented at the time, “perhaps it would have been precisely the one which has been adopted.” In his report of the Federalist caucus, Sedgwick pointedly added, “It is true that the late conduct of the President has endeared him to the great body of the Federalists, but it is equally true that it has created an entire separation between him and those whom he theretofore deemed his best friends.” Sedgwick counted himself among the friends estranged by the President’s conduct toward France. He was ready to reciprocate in kind.
A Magnificent Catastrophe Page 14