When Congress recessed in May, Jefferson offered to make a campaign stop in Richmond, Virginia, on his return trip to Monticello—but Governor Monroe waved him off. Any direct campaigning by Jefferson might lead the new Secretary of State from Virginia, John Marshall, to respond in kind on behalf of Adams, Monroe warned, “whereby you would be involved in a kind of competition.” Better to leave well enough alone, the governor reasoned. Jefferson’s formidable communication skills lay in writing, not public speaking, and he never again proposed making a campaign appearance. He remained at Monticello for the summer, writing and receiving letters. “Rally round the Constitution,” he urged in an August letter to a Connecticut Republican, “rescue it from the destruction with which it has been threatened.”
While Jefferson therefore returned to Monticello to campaign quietly during the summer of 1800, Burr was as hyperactive as usual. He “is intriguing with all his might in New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Vermont,” Hamilton warned in August, “and there is a possibility of some success to his intrigues.”
Burr made a late summer trip through New England to meet with potential electors and urge them to vote Republican. It was a futile effort, but he nevertheless sounded optimistic about the prospects for Jefferson in the region. “He will have all the votes of Rhode Island,” Burr assured Madison about the only New England state that would choose its electors in a direct popular election. “Nothing can be pronounced of [New] Jersey, but everything may be hoped,” he added about a state that had not yet elected the legislators who would choose its electors. Burr had already written to Jefferson promising him votes from Connecticut, where the legislature was also still to be elected. Burr hinted that these Northeast electors might vote for Jefferson in place of Pinckney rather than vote a strict Federalist Party ticket. This, he suggested, would give the Virginian a comfortable margin of victory over all three national candidates in the final tally. It was all fancy, but perhaps not folly.
Critics later charged Burr with deliberately misleading Southern Republicans about the situation in the Northeast. He did so, they claimed, so that Republican electors in the South would feel free to vote unanimously for him and Jefferson, not dropping any votes, without fearing a tie between the two Republican candidates. Although no hard evidence supports this charge, Burr’s leading biographer concluded that “the logic of it is hard to ignore.”
Burr was not the only one drumming up votes for Republicans. During the summer, Virginia became a hotbed of Republican Party activity. In 1796, one Virginia electoral district had chosen a Federalist elector, who duly voted for Adams and Thomas Pinckney. This time, the state’s Republican Party leaders were determined to shore up all of the state’s electoral votes for Jefferson and Burr.
They had already successfully replaced district voting with a general ticket as Virginia’s method of choosing electors. Under the new rules, candidates for elector ran statewide, and the top twenty-one finishers served as electors. With the general population of the state heavily Republican, this system strongly favored a Republican sweep, though it did not guarantee it. Virginia Federalists countered by challenging the equity of the election-law change. Fairness demanded that each party receive electoral votes roughly proportional to its strength in the state, Federalists claimed, which was more likely to happen under the old rules of district elections than under the new general-ticket law. With the Republicans firmly in control of the state legislature, Federalists could not hope for a change in the law. Nevertheless, their pleas for equity might peel off enough votes for at least some of their candidates to finish among the top twenty-one. Presumably to bolster the chances of this outcome, Federalists in the state ran on the “American Republican Ticket,” as opposed to Jefferson’s regular “Republican Ticket.” Adding to the confusion, Federalists also nominated one candidate with the same first and last name as that of an opponent, forcing Republican voters to identify their candidate’s middle initial when voting.
To enhance their prospect of winning all of Virginia’s electoral votes, Republicans nominated stellar candidates known throughout the state. Revered Revolutionary Era leaders George Wythe and Edmund Pendleton—both in their midseventies—topped the ticket, which also included Madison, over a half-dozen former or future governors or members of Congress, three state militia generals, and representatives from several of the first families of Virginia. This ticket, which probably constituted the most illustrious slate of electors ever offered in any state, demonstrated the commitment of Virginia’s political elite to the Republican cause. An official Federalist circular, issued in late May, resorted to the bizarre charge that Republicans sought to influence voters by nominating candidates with “great and imposing names.” The circular described Federalist candidates as “common” men “like yourselves”—an ironic boast for an elitist party. A midsummer Republican circular responded in defense of its candidates, “There is indeed an influence in their names: an influence which we dare to avow: an influence in which we glory.” A party leader wrote to Jefferson, “I cannot but augur well of a cause which calls out from their retirement such venerable patriots as Wythe and Pendleton.”
Watching the aristocracy of Washington’s home state fall in line behind Jefferson stunned High Federalists. Calling them “fools in earnest as to democracy,” Fisher Ames denounced the “extreme sensibility of the good men of Virginia to silly principles and silly people.” Jefferson, he noted, “wrote some such stuff about the will of majorities” that would cause a New Englander to “lose his rank among men of sense.” In a similar vein, Hamilton observed early in the campaign, “The spirit of faction…is more violent than ever” in Virginia. However much they hated and feared Virginia’s aristocratic Republicans, however, these and other prominent High Federalists recognized them as able political adversaries. Without them, Republicanism would be leaderless; with them, it represented a formidable foe to Federalism.
Indeed, Virginia’s Republican leaders took a decisive step during the campaign toward the formal institutionalization of their party. For the first time by members of any state party, Republicans in Virginia named a general committee and county committees. This structure, which was in place by the summer, enabled state Republicans to disseminate information and organize voters. According to the official record, these county committees were directed “to receive all communication from the general committee, and to send to [it] such information as they shall deem necessary to promote the Republican ticket.”
The general committee’s chairman soon wrote to Jefferson, “We have begun our correspondence with the [county] committees, and mean to keep up a regular intercourse upon the subjects which may seem to require it.” This included distributing a midsummer circular designed to counter Federalists’ appeals to Virginians’ loyalty to George Washington and his party. “Let the contest be considered as it really is, between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams,” the circular asserted. “Consummate your reverence for the memory of Washington, not by employing it as an engine of election, but by declaring that even his name shall not prevent the free use of your own understandings. As a friend to liberty, we believe Jefferson second to no man, and the experience of no man has afforded better lessons for its preservation.” Most critically, the general committee worked through the county committees to distribute handwritten cards listing the entire slate of Republican candidates that voters could sign and deposit in the ballot box on Election Day. Voting was done by signed ballots in Virginia, but voters needed to supply their candidates’ names.
Even as Republican leaders in Virginia tried to stir up voting for their party’s ticket, they tried to damp down partisan protests. Indeed, they worried that violence would erupt as tensions rose during the run-up to the election. In particular, Madison and Monroe feared that the administration might seek to incite violent protests by enforcing the hated Sedition Act in Virginia, and thereby make the Virginia Republicans look like French Jacobins. They interpreted the May 1800 prosecution of Republic
an scandalmonger James Callender in Richmond—the only such trial ever held in Virginia—in this light and sought to reduce the public outrage against it. By this time, they saw every act in a partisan context, even a criminal prosecution.
As the trial approached, Monroe sent out word to Richmond-area Republican leaders to keep their partisans calm. If the Federalists expected to incite a violent Republican reaction to the prosecution, Monroe wrote to Madison at the time, “they are deceived as…an attempt to excite a hot water insurrection will fail.” In his reply, Madison expressed his approval of this course of action, noting that it seemed especially wise at a time when the Federalist Party, by its extreme actions in enforcing the Sedition Act, seemed “so industriously co-operating in its own destruction.” Virginians would submit to the law, Monroe assured Jefferson on the eve of Callender’s trial, “and give no pretext for comment to their discredit.”
More than ever, Virginia Republicans did not want to act like French Jacobins or give any justification for the Federalists’ domestic-security measures. With the collective fears inspired by the XYZ Affair and Fries’s Rebellion finally easing—due in part to Adams’s handling of them—any new threat of disorder would play into Federalists’ hands. In 1799, Jefferson had expressed concern that, by their repressive acts, the administration might attempt to “force a resistance which with the aid of an army may end in monarchy.” As the election approached, Republican leaders called for peace in Virginia and used the new party structure to foster it. The trial, which passed without incident, became a testament to Federalist oppression rather than Republican reaction.
By midsummer, Americans were watching a new form of campaign for the presidency. Adams had traveled through the middle states, appealing directly to potential voters. With this trip, and a series of policy adjustments, he had rallied his supporters, fended off the High Federalists’ effort to oust him from the ticket, and secured his position as the party’s principal nominee. Meanwhile, perhaps inspired by Burr’s success in building a political machine in New York, Virginia Republicans organized themselves to deliver votes for their party’s candidates. In some other states holding elections in the fall, such as Maryland and New Jersey, similar party organizations soon appeared. For the first time, the outlines of a modern presidential campaign took shape in various places across the country focused on a series of state elections in Rhode Island, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas—some for legislators, others for electors—scheduled for the fall. Everyone now knew that these elections would decide the presidency.
CHAPTER SEVEN
FOR GOD AND PARTY
SUMMER was a quiet season in the American political calendar during the early national period. Legislatures traditionally convened in the winter and spring, drawing public attention to political matters. Adding to the interest, some places held town meetings or local and state elections in the late winter or early spring. Politicians used this time to plot and posture with an eye toward the fall, when most elections occurred. When summer came, legislators went home, and other concerns took precedence over politics. Farmers would tend to their fields and flocks, the rich might move to their summer homes, and everyone would complain about the heat. Epidemic diseases, particularly cholera and malaria, became a threat in some urban areas. Life slowed, and only extreme partisans showed much concern about politics. Campaigns stalled and candidates struggled to get attention or simply took a break themselves.
Despite the heightened level of partisanship that marked the year, political issues lost traction during the summer of 1800 as well. Even Adams and Jefferson settled into something akin to their customary summer routines at home. With no critical elections scheduled for the summer, observers and participants had time to assess the state of play, which was so much in flux.
The spring elections in New York were touted as decisive before they occurred, and they might have been if Federalists had won them. For Jefferson to prevail in the final count, however, Republicans still needed at least a half-dozen more electoral votes from northern or middle states than New York’s twelve to supplement those expected to come their way from southern and western states, and even more to offset any votes for Adams or Pinckney from the Carolinas. Pennsylvania with its fifteen electoral votes could supply them all if Federalists in the State Senate either gave in to the will of the governor and the State Assembly or lost their slim majority after the October elections. Alternatively, if Federalists could keep Pennsylvania from voting or split the vote there, then a Federalist sweep in Maryland could supply the margin of victory for Adams or Pinckney. If these two contested middle states broke about evenly, New Jersey stayed in the Federalist column, as was expected, and North Carolina voters chose at least some Federalist electors in their district elections, as even many Republicans conceded, then South Carolina legislators would decide the presidency with the selection of their eight electors. No one could know what they would do until they did it.
As the overall debate quieted considerably with legislators and the candidates headed home for the summer, in its place issues of extraordinary concern to select groups of voters rose to the fore. One issue that gained particular attention was the supposed scandal regarding Jefferson’s religion.
Federalists hoped that concerns about Jefferson’s views on religion and its relationship to government would rally Christians to their side. In 1800, the United States remained a fundamentally Christian nation even as the nature of its religious establishment was evolving. Before the Revolution, colonies typically provided government support for one favored denomination—usually the Church of England or, in New England, the Congregational Church—and required officeholders to profess their faith in Jesus Christ as God and savior. During the Revolution, the Church of England in America renounced the English King’s leadership and became the Episcopal Church, but still it lost its established status in most states. Dissenting sects—particularly the Baptists and the Methodists—flourished among the people as revivalism spread.
Many Revolutionary Era leaders gravitated toward various forms of Deism or Unitarianism that acknowledged God as the Creator of nature and nature’s laws but denied that God intervened in natural processes through miracles and viewed Jesus as simply a great moral teacher. Among statesmen, Franklin, Jefferson, and Thomas Paine publicly supported this movement, but Washington, Adams, and even Hamilton privately drifted in the same direction even as they endorsed public displays of conventional religiosity. As political conservatives, Federalists tended to value religion, tradition, and family authority as means of fostering social, economic, and political order. In contrast, Jefferson and many Republicans saw religion as a personal matter and denounced established churches as fetters on freedom.
Pushed by an unlikely coalition of dissenting Christians and principled secularists, many states shifted from establishing only one denomination to authorizing government support for all churches—though in practice those funds either dried up or continued flowing along traditional channels. Presbyterians in particular vied with Episcopalians and Congregationalists for cultural authority in many places. Members of these mainstream denominations felt that their traditional religious beliefs and practices were under siege from the forces of Enlightenment secularism on the one side and evangelical revivalism on the other. There were Deists and secularists in the uppermost echelons of both parties, but the issue of religion had become increasingly partisan in the wake of the French Revolution, in which the Jacobins had moved so abruptly and violently to break the back of church authority. Republican support for the revolution in France was portrayed by many Federalists as opposition to Christianity. They pointed to what Jefferson had done in Virginia and drew extravagant parallels between it and recent developments in France.
In 1786, Virginia had leapfrogged other states by enacting Jefferson’s Statute of Religious Freedom. By law, the state had established the Episcopal Church since colonial days, but in one jump, this landmark legis
lation repealed that law and provided instead that “no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever.” Further, it abolished a religious test for public office by adding “that our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinion any more than our opinions in physics or geometry.”
For Jefferson and Madison, who led the fight for the law’s enactment, those two principles—no state support for religion and no religious test for civil rights—constituted fundamental freedoms endowed by the Creator. “Whereas, Almighty God hath created the mind free,” the statute declared in a ringing affirmation that has echoed through the centuries, “all attempts to influence it by temporal punishments and burthens, or by civil incapacitations, tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness, and are a departure from the plan of the Holy author of our religion.” As Jefferson saw it, state churches in Europe, stereotypically with bloated, corrupt hierarchies, invoked irrational superstitions to oppress people and support despots. Through his Statute of Religious Freedom and similar laws, he hoped for the freedom from religion as much as the freedom of religion.
At the national level, the Constitution soon followed Virginia in precluding a religious test for public office and, with the ratification of the First Amendment in 1791, barring a national establishment of religion. Some states continued to provide public funds for churches into the 1800s, however, and to require that government officials profess faith in Christ or, more generally, in God. Many Americans believed that, in order to act right, people needed the precepts of religion backed by the promise of Heaven and the threat of Hell. They viewed Jefferson’s support for the separation of church and state as reckless. For some, the Virginian’s apparent rejection of core Christian doctrines simply made matters worse. A leader should rely on God, Christ, and the Bible, they believed. In 1800, Federalists could point to the terrors of Jacobin France as the logical consequence of trying to rule without religion.
A Magnificent Catastrophe Page 19