A Magnificent Catastrophe

by Edward J. Larson

  Adams never joined in denouncing Jefferson’s religion and thought that the tactic backfired badly. Indeed, according to Fisher Ames, the President privately expressed “indignation at the charge of irreligion [brought against Jefferson], asking what has that to do with the public and adding that he is a good patriot, citizen, and father.” Nevertheless, Adams publicly did nothing to protect Jefferson or to reign in the Federalist press, not even the proadministration Gazette of the United States.

  By his response, Adams left himself open to charges of complacency in promoting a state religion, which played into the hands of the Republicans. Having won their independence from a tyrannical monarchy, Americans cherished their political, economic, and religious freedom. In the American mind, every king had fawning nobles, a standing army, and corrupt priests lording themselves over oppressed subjects burdened with heavy taxes to pay for a regime they did not support and churches they did not attend. During the campaign of 1800, Republicans saw themselves as defenders of national independence and individual liberty, which Adams and the Federalists had betrayed by Jay’s Treaty, a standing army, and the Sedition Act. Casting the Federalists also as proponents of an established church and a religious test for public office fit neatly into the larger Republican assault against them as crypto-monarchists and British lackeys.

  By their deft handling of religious issues during the campaign, Republicans not only defended Jefferson. They also put their opponents on the defensive by linking Adams’s public support of civil religion to popular concerns over the authoritarian tendencies of Federalists generally. Late in the campaign, Adams complained privately that, by its overzealous attacks, which often invoked religion, the Federalist press had “done more to shuffle the cards into the hands of the Jacobin leaders than all the acts of the administration and all the policy of [the] opposition.” In later years, Adams came to see his party’s visible association with members of politically active church groups—particularly Presbyterians, who lobbied for national days of prayer and fasting—as an undeserved blackball against him in 1800. “The secret whisper ran through all the sects, ‘Let us have Jefferson, Madison, Burr, anybody, whether they be philosophers, Deists, or even atheists, rather than a Presbyterian President,’” he wrote, referring to a denomination he never joined but that had many Federalist members.

  Just as Federalists used selected excerpts from Notes on the State of Virginia to paint Jefferson as a Deist, Republicans drew on earlier political writings by Adams to tag him as a monarchist. The charge was old, but Republicans prosecuted it with renewed vigor as negative attacks intensified during the summer and fall. It was central to their campaign against Adams.

  “The foundation of a monarchy is already laid,” Republican orator Abraham Bishop proclaimed in a late-summer speech that quickly appeared as a popular pamphlet. He blamed Federalist policies. Exaggerated threats of danger from France justified a costly military buildup and repressive domestic policies; funding the state and national debt raised a class of indolent government creditors; high taxes burdened working Americans; a privileged class benefited from government programs; and a compliant church “pronounces a hardy amen,” Bishop declared. “All of these aristocracies and measures which I have noticed correspond exactly with the systems of monarchical government,” he observed.

  “Do you ask me for proofs that [Adams] is a monarchist?” a Rhode Island pamphleteer asked. “Read his Defense of the American Constitution and his commentary on the Discourses of Davila. In both of these, he speaks with rapture, almost with rhapsody, of the hereditary senate and executive.” Neither book actually called for an American monarch, but Hamilton had long favored life tenure for presidents and senators, and some High Federalists agreed with him.

  A Republican pamphlet published in October under the pseudonym Marcus Brutus tied various Federalist initiatives together into a dark conspiracy. It claimed that Hamilton’s funding system begot debt, which begot taxes, which begot corruption and intriguing officeholders, which begot a standing army, which would beget monarchy “and an enslaved and impoverished people.”

  Republican newspapers echoed these themes. The Aurora called “Federalism a mask for monarchy.” The Hartford Mercury composed a satirical creed for High Federalists that played on their support for an established church. “I believe in Alexander Hamilton, the Creole, mighty and puissant general of the standing army,” it affirmed. “And in Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, his friend and faithful follower, who…was sent from heaven to save this hapless country from the calamities of a republican government, and to confer upon it the beauty, the splendor, and the glory of monarchy.” Completing the High Federalist trinity, the creed concluded, “I believe in the virtuous efforts of Timothy Pickering to prevent a peace with France and to unite us again with the English nation.” This creed neatly encapsulated many of the popular arguments against continued Federalist rule.

  As these various pamphlets and publications suggested, while Federalists focused their fury on Jefferson, Republicans had difficulty deciding whether to attack Adams, Pinckney, or Hamilton. The people perceived Adams as the Federalist candidate for President and were generally unfamiliar with Pinckney. If Hamilton and the High Federalists had their way, however, Pinckney would run ahead of Adams in the electoral vote and win the presidency. Responding to this threat, Republican pamphleteers and printers turned some of their fire on Pinckney, whom they typically portrayed as little more than Hamilton’s pro-British puppet. “Mr. Adams, it is said, though he writes and speaks and acts in favor of a British government, is far behind the real state of political activity,” one Republican newspaper noted. “Mr. Charles Cotesworth Pinckney will answer the purposes of British design much better. The party has discovered he is less timid and that his policies are much higher toned than those of Mr. Adams.”

  Republicans found their best material for attacking Pinckney in a 1792 letter from Adams to Tench Coxe, a former Hamilton aide. Coxe had turned Republican and given the letter to Adams’s opponents. Commenting in it on the appointment of Thomas Pinckney to a diplomatic post in London, Adams criticized the British ties of “the two Mr. Pinckneys” and cautioned, “Were I in any executive department, I should take the liberty to keep a vigilant eye upon them.” After alluding to its contents for months, the Aurora published the entire letter in August 1800, and reprinted it weekly until the election. Other Republican newspapers published the letter as well. It cast both Federalist candidates in bad light. Adams disputed the authenticity of the letter, while Thomas Pinckney issued a public statement in September asserting that, if genuine, then it “must have been founded on misapprehension of persons.” Surely Adams meant to slur his Republican cousin, South Carolina Senator Charles Pinckney, Thomas Pinckney suggested. Reviewing the entire exchange in October, one Republican newspaper described it as “proof, strong proof, of Messrs. Adams, Pinckney, and Hamilton’s attachment to royalism.”

  Monarchism may have been too strong a term for it, but Federalists did share a common vision of society and politics that many Republicans regarded as too hierarchical and authoritarian for America. Despite their intraparty differences, Federalists agreed that family values, cultural traditions, and private property provided the best foundation for a stable society and vibrant economy. They believed in deference to elite leaders. Guided by their common vision, Federalists had provided able, conservative leadership for the United States since the government’s founding in 1789. “Our country is prosperous beyond all example,” a midsummer essay in Baltimore’s Federal Gazette claimed. “Why then should we wish a change?” Federalists stood on their record, which to them looked pretty good. “This is the 12th year of our government,” a Delaware Federalist wrote in 1800, “and is it not as free and republican as it was the first year? If the Jeffersonians wish more republicanism, what must it result in? Not in the freedom of equal laws, which is true republicanism, but in the licentiousness of anarchy.”

  As adept as their opponents in exa
ggerating the negative traits associated with the other side, Federalists portrayed Republicans as violent levelers devoid of any principles except those that served their immediate self-interest. “They are composed of French intriguers, English fugitives from justice, and many of the worst sorts of Americans,” one typical campaign address said of Republicans. The Gazette of the United States depicted Republican leaders as “chimney-sweeper politicians and scavenger statesmen” and characterized their followers as “the very refuse and filth of society.”

  A learned Virginia gentleman, Jefferson obviously did not fit these characterizations. Federalists instead portrayed him as a dreamy idealist corrupted by French philosophy and utterly incapable of providing practical political leadership. Whatever his personal and intellectual virtues, should Jefferson gain office, Federalists feared that he could never control the Republican rabble that would take power with him. “The lower class of democrats and Jacobins would endeavor to render the new administration violent and convulsive,” Wolcott warned in August. “The People are his Gods,” the High Federalist Philadelphia Gazette jeered about Jefferson. “May he not be driven to measures which his own judgment would reject?” a prominent High Federalist asked Hamilton in August.

  Intellectual elitists themselves, Federalists appealed to antiintellectualism in smearing Jefferson. His pursuit of natural science and interest in philosophy all but disqualified him for high office, they claimed. “Science and government are different paths. He that walks in one becomes, at every step, less qualified to walk with steadfastness or vigor in the other,” a Federalist pamphleteer charged against Jefferson. “O that his friends were aware that to him the honorable station is a private one, that mankind would suffer his talents and energies to be harmlessly exhausted in adjusting the bones of a nondescript animal, or tracing the pedigree of savage tribes, who no longer exist.” Jefferson had published research along these lines in Notes on the State of Virginia, which had earned him an international reputation in science.

  Jefferson had also studied philosophy, which Federalists portrayed as even more problematic than his work in natural science. “He is so true a philosopher as to be above matters of fact,” the New England Palladium reported. “Philosophers admire no governments that are practicable…. They trust no theory but such as are untried.” Even the highest of the High Federalists—elitists to the core—worried about too much philosophy in government. “Mr. Jefferson’s conduct would be frequently whimsical and undignified,” Wolcott wrote in August. “He would affect the character of a philosopher [and] countenance quacks.” The aristocratic Charles Carroll of Carrollton, who lived like a feudal lord on his Maryland manor, suggested that Jefferson should try his experiments in government on the Lilliputian European republic of San Marino rather than the United States. “His fantastic tricks would dissolve this Union,” Carroll warned. “Against the dangerous principle of Mr. Jefferson’s philosophy,” a North Carolina pamphleteer added in July, “I have only to direct your view to that ill fated country France and bring to your recollection the history of the horrid government of their philosophers, who professed similar principles.”

  Republicans defended Jefferson by praising his practical ability and political experience. “The philosopher is nothing more than a being…whose opinions are drawn from the convictions of truth and reason,” a Kentucky essayist explained. Rather than inspire mad speculations and fanatical reforms, as some Federalists charged, this writer claimed that Jefferson’s scientific reflections had “given to his mind a degree of philosophical tranquility infinitely superior to most of his contemporaries.” During the campaign, no Republicans ever questioned Jefferson’s ability to lead or challenged the direction in which he would take the country. They stood as united as their opponents were divided. With Adams rallying the middle and all Federalists conjoined at least in their scorn for Jefferson, Republicans knew that they must stand together or fail.

  Four years earlier, a swing of only two electoral votes from Adams to Jefferson would have switched the outcome. If the 1800 election proved equally close, then any state could decide the whole. By summer’s end, however, most close observers expected the outcome to turn on the results from Maryland, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina—the three remaining states that could plausibly give all their electoral votes to candidates from either party or split them among the contenders.

  Without mass communication, people relied on private letters and local newspapers for word on political developments elsewhere. They pumped out-of-state visitors for news and endlessly rehashed available information. From his seat at Monticello, during the summer Jefferson sent and received a steady stream of letters speculating about the probable outcome in various states. In his letters, he typically projected falling just short, as if to goad his correspondents to greater effort. Hamilton conducted a similar correspondence within the nationwide network of High Federalists, always plugging for Pinckney. Adams also closely monitored election trends from his farm in Massachusetts. The Pinckneys of South Carolina, both Federalist and Republican, were convinced that the election would come down to their state’s eight votes. Politicking in New York and the Northeast, Burr worried openly about the electoral count, remembering how Southern Republican electors had deserted him in 1796.

  Having neither opinion polls nor any nonpartisan sources of political information to guide them, the pundits and participants made their best guesses about how each state would vote. By September, they had reached strikingly similar conclusions. Virtually everyone agreed that the Republicans would sweep New York, Virginia, Georgia, and the western states of Kentucky and Tennessee. The Federalists would carry Delaware and all of New England, with the possible exception of one or two electoral votes in Rhode Island, which conducted a statewide vote for electors. The New Jersey legislature would surely choose Federalist electors for its state unless Republicans managed to wrest control of the State House in the October legislative elections, which appeared unlikely.

  Counting only these twelve seemingly certain states, Federalists held a slight edge in electoral votes, 48 to 44, with 70 needed to win outright. The apparent advantage for the Republicans lay in the other four states: Pennsylvania, Maryland, and the Carolinas. These states held 45 electoral votes, with Republicans expected to pick up most of them.

  Of course, only Jefferson could count on securing votes from all his party’s electors. Just as Burr worried about losing Republican electoral votes in the South, and even as Hamilton actively campaigned for Federalist electors to abandon Adams, Pinckney feared that some pro-Adams electors would drop him from their ballots, as they had done to his brother in 1796. Some contemporary accounts had Burr actively trying to garner potentially wayward Pinckney second votes from Federalist electors to pad his own total. Burr “is intriguing with all his might in New Jersey, Rhode Island and Vermont,” Hamilton wrote in early August about his old rival. “He counts positively on the universal support of the [Republicans] and that by some adventitious aid from other quarters; he will overtop his friend Jefferson. Admitting the first point, the conclusion may be realized. And if it is, Burr will certainly attempt to reform the government à la Bonaparte. He is as unprincipled and dangerous a man as any country can boast.”

  Of the four states generally viewed as still hotly contested, during the late summer of 1800, national attention focused mostly on Maryland. North Carolina voters would choose their electors in district elections during the autumn. Most observers expected Republicans to win easily in most districts, but the exact number that would go Republican, and how many Federalists might take, was disputed. Some estimates suggested that Federalists might carry as many as four or five of the state’s twelve electoral districts. In Pennsylvania, the deadlock persisted between the Republican governor and Federalist senate pending the outcome of state legislative elections in October. Given the small number of the state’s senate seats at stake in 1800—only one-quarter of the total—almost all of which they held already, Rep
ublicans faced an uphill fight to win outright control of the legislature. Nevertheless, they hoped that a strong popular vote for their candidates might persuade senators to cooperate with assemblymen and the governor in choosing Republican electors. Sectional politics and family ties would figure into the choice of electors by the South Carolina legislature—with neither factor favoring Adams. In 1796, legislators had picked electors who crossed party lines to vote for the two Southern candidates—Jefferson and Thomas Pinckney—and they might do so again in 1800 with another Pinckney on the Federalist ticket. Certainly the Pinckney family wielded enormous influence in the state.

  In Maryland, however, the contest for presidential electors was wide open. The state traditionally chose its electors in district elections, scheduled this year for November. Each party expected to win some of them. If Federalists retained control of the state legislature in the October state elections, as most observers anticipated, they promised to change the election laws so as to empower legislators to appoint Maryland’s ten electors. Of course, they would pick Federalists. This gave Maryland voters two potential opportunities to weigh in on the presidential contest—first in the October legislative elections and, if Federalists failed to retain complete control of the State House, then in November district elections. Presidential politics consumed the state from midsummer through the autumn elections. Only five months earlier, New Yorkers thought that their state elections would decide the presidential contest. Now Marylanders claimed that distinction. “It is admitted,” one Federalist candidate for elector noted in September, “that in all probability the election of president will depend on Maryland.”