A Magnificent Catastrophe

by Edward J. Larson

  Adams’s supporters rallied to his defense in pamphlets and published letters. Federalist lexicographer Noah Webster took the lead in a widely reprinted open letter to Hamilton. “Admitting all your charges against Mr. Adams, they amount to too small a sum to balance the immense hazard of the game you are playing,” Webster wrote of Hamilton’s scheme to elect Pinckney. “It avails little that you accuse the President of vanity for as to this…were it an issue between Mr. Adams and yourself, which has the most, you could not rely on an unanimous verdict in your favor,” he charged. “That the President is unmanageable is, in a degree true: that is, you and your supporters can not manage him; but this will not pass in this country as a crime. That he is unstable is alleged—pray sir…did he waver during the Revolutionary War?”

  Occasional ill humor and hasty declarations do not equal lunacy, Webster argued. Adams was neither mad nor mentally unfit for office. Webster admonished Hamilton that, by asserting otherwise about the party’s candidate for President on the eve of a critical election, “Your conduct on this occasion will be deemed little short of insanity.” Given the risk that the letter would either divide the Federalist Party or destroy it, Webster asked, “Will not Federal men, as well as anti-Federal, believe that your ambition, pride, and overbearing temper have destined you to be the evil genius of this country?”

  Although High Federalists tended to believe and agree with the substance of Hamilton’s letter, many of them objected to its style and timing. “I am bound to tell you that you are accused by respectable men of egoism and some very worthy and sensible men say you have exhibited the same vanity in your [letter] which you charge as a dangerous quality and great weakness in Mr. Adams,” George Cabot admonished Hamilton. Supreme Court Justice Bushrod Washington, the first President’s nephew, wrote from South Carolina, “We are all thunderstruck here by General Hamilton’s pamphlet.” He warned of a backlash against Pinckney by pro-Adams electors. “This letter,” Hamilton’s longtime friend and ally Robert Troup observed from New York in December, “continues to be disapproved of here. I have not yet met with a dissenting voice.” A few High Federalists privately commended Hamilton for speaking the truth about Adams, but even their letters to Hamilton contained reports of criticisms by other party members. Hamilton never regained standing within the party. Moderates now resented him for betraying Adams on the eve of the election, while High Federalists questioned his discretion. Still, by articulating the conservative case against Adams, the letter stoked the opposition of High Federalists to the President.

  Writing to the American ambassador in London about Hamilton’s letter, Troup added, “Our enemies are universally in triumph.” After months of growing uncertainty, Republicans again felt optimistic about the outcome of the election. Madison’s cousin, the president of William and Mary College, wrote excitedly to Jefferson on November 1, “Hamilton’s attack upon Mr. Adams is perfect confirmation of all that that arch and clever fellow Duane has been so long hinting at or rather affirming [in the Aurora]. It will be a thunderbolt to both.” The Republican Centinel of Freedom wryly noted that the severity of Hamilton’s attack on the President “would have subjected a [Republican] to federal prosecution, condemnation, fine, and imprisonment” under the Sedition Act. Word of the letter reached Monroe before a copy of it, but he promptly wrote to Madison, “From what I have heard of the work, it will do their whole party more harm than good. I am told that it unmasks the views of that party too much not to injure it.”

  Despite its concluding call for electors to vote for Adams and Pinckney, virtually everyone assumed that the real purpose of Hamilton’s letter was to boost Pinckney at Adams’s expense in the forthcoming Electoral College balloting. Of course, Federalist electors need not vote for both Adams and Pinckney: They could vote for either, neither, or both. As was now widely recognized, Hamilton hoped that enough of them would vote for Pinckney and someone on neither ticket so that Pinckney would finish first overall.

  Many people further assumed that Hamilton favored the relatively obscure Pinckney for President because he could control him and that he was willing to manipulate the Electoral College system to put his puppet on the throne. Although some High Federalists preferred Pinckney to Adams for President, most Federalist electors undoubtedly intended for Adams to remain President and Pinckney to become Vice President. This placed Pinckney in an awkward position if he appeared to endorse Hamilton’s scheme. Federalist electors favoring Adams for President could retaliate by withholding votes from Pinckney, as they had done to Thomas Pinckney in 1796.

  Fear that the letter could cost him votes from pro-Adams electors led Pinckney to reaffirm his commitment to run with Adams as a team. On various occasions, he effectively promised not to seek support from electors independently. It became for him a public pledge and Pinckney was, above all, a man of honor. Even if he wanted to win the presidency over Adams, Pinckney now could not show it or he would likely lose; yet, to win, Pinckney needed independent votes, especially from South Carolina. Hamilton’s letter effectively restricted his ability to solicit them. In this sense, the letter backfired badly on Hamilton.

  By dividing the party, Hamilton’s letter also complicated Federalist efforts in the five states where voters directly chose presidential electors: Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky, Maryland, and Rhode Island. Voters in these states were preparing to cast their ballots just as news broke of Hamilton’s letter.

  “An eventful period is approaching,” one newspaper warned voters on the eve of the November elections. “All the evil spirits which distract and mislead a people have long been and now are actively and indefatigably employed in the United States. It behooves you, therefore, as you value your country’s happiness and continued prosperity, to inquire with earnestness into the probable effect of measures recommended.” This newspaper supported Adams and Pinckney, but a similar note of urgency also sounded in the Republican press. In the minds of many, the people remained a wild card in presidential politics: That was why lawmakers in most states did not authorize them to vote for electors.

  The voting began on the first Monday of November with both a statewide election in Virginia and district elections in North Carolina. This was Jefferson country. Any chance for the Federalists to win electoral votes in Virginia had ended in January, when Governor Monroe and Republicans in the legislature changed the method of choosing electors to a single, statewide general election in which all the candidates ran. Even though Federalist candidates did well in some pockets of Virginia, the overall state vote went heavily Republican. “The elections have exceeded our hopes,” Madison wrote from his central Virginia home on November 10. “In this county, out of more than 350 votes, seven only were in the wrong ticket.” Republican elector candidates triumphed by a three-to-one margin statewide, giving “the Jefferson ticket” (as Madison called it) all of Virginia’s twenty-one electoral votes—the biggest prize in the nation.

  In North Carolina, which Charles Pinckney and others had hoped to secure for Jefferson by a switch to a statewide general-ticket method of choosing electors, Federalists actually increased their number of electors from the single one elected in 1796. The state retained its electoral-district method of picking electors, and Federalists prevailed in four out of the state’s twelve electoral districts. Some of these elections were extremely close, but the total did not greatly exceed expectations. These were Federalist districts in a Republican state: The party’s congressional candidates won in them, too. Perhaps helping the Federalists, news of Hamilton’s attack on Adams did not reach North Carolina until after the vote.

  Elections in Kentucky and Maryland followed a week later. Both states chose electors in district elections. The method did not matter in Kentucky because the state was uniformly Republican. One of two new states carved out of the trans-Appalachian West during the 1790s, in 1798, its Republican-dominated legislature passed resolutions, anonymously drafted by Jefferson, denouncing the Alien and Sedition Acts as unconstitution
al and declaring them void in Kentucky. A frontier people, Kentuckians had little affection for the elite Easterners who dominated the Federalist Party and were certain to cast their four electoral votes for Jefferson regardless of how they selected them. Parties did not formally nominate candidates for elector in Kentucky; individuals simply offered themselves for the post. In some Kentucky districts, both elector candidates pledged themselves to vote Republican, giving voters no real choice.

  Whereas political parties took little part in the campaigns for electors from Kentucky, the November district elections in Maryland played out virtually as a continuation of the overtly partisan October elections for the state’s legislature. With its rigid political hierarchy dating from its founding as a proprietary colony owned by one of Britain’s richest feudal lords, Maryland once appeared to offer the brightest prospect for Federalists in the South. Seven of its ten electors had voted for Adams in 1796, and six of those had cast their other votes for Thomas Pinckney. In 1800, Federalists had expected to do at least as well in Maryland as before, and hoped to do even better if they changed the rules for selecting electors. Those expectations changed, however, when the Federalists’ eleventh-hour proposal to have the legislature choose the state’s electors backfired and Republicans captured the state’s House of Representatives in the October elections.

  The rules did not change: Maryland voters would still choose their state’s electors in district elections on November 10. Suddenly, however, Republicans began talking about their candidates winning in most of Maryland’s electoral districts. The Federalist proposal to have legislators appoint electors had refocused the legislative races on presidential politics and, when the proposal failed, the underlying debate continued through the November elections. As during the legislative campaigns, the contests for electors pitted Federalists, who typically hailed Adams’s steady patriotism and denounced Jefferson’s alleged atheism, against Republicans, who contrasted Jefferson’s love of liberty with Adams’s monarchical predilections and policies.

  Then something new intervened that might have improved Adams’s prospects. On November 7, three days before the scheduled vote in Maryland, word reached Baltimore that Adams’s bold gamble for peace had succeeded. The first accounts came from month-old European newspapers carried to the United States aboard the ship America. They contained few specifics. The text of the actual agreement, known as the Convention of 1800 or Treaty of Mortefontaine, did not arrive until December. After months of pessimistic reports predicting the imminent suspension of peace talks, the unexpected good news spread rapidly. Under the agreement, naval hostilities between the two countries would cease. The path to peace had opened when American negotiators dropped their demands for indemnities from France for losses to American shipping and the formal termination of the old Franco-American Alliance. Ever since revolutionaries had removed the King from the helm of the French government, Federalists had wanted out of America’s supposedly perpetual alliance with France. The parties agreed to reserve these emotional issues for future discussion.

  The peace treaty surprised and delighted Adams. Fearing that the negotiation would fail, he had considered asking Congress, when it reconvened in mid-November, for a general declaration of war against France to supplement the limited authorization of naval engagements approved in 1798. “If war in any degree is to be continued, it is a serious question whether it will not be better to take off all the restrictions and limitations,” Adams wrote to Secretary of State John Marshall in September. “We shall be tortured with a perpetual conflict of parties…until we have either peace or war.”

  Apparently fearing that Adams might call for war in his opening address to Congress, Jefferson had already decided to delay his arrival in Washington until after the President’s speech. As Vice President, he should have presided over the address, but Jefferson did not want to confront Adams publicly on policy matters—particularly the issue of war or peace—until the election was over. Writing from Washington in late November, Abigail Adams joked about the situation in the context of Jefferson’s noted taste for luxuries. “’Tis said [Thomas Jefferson] is on his way, but travels with so many delicacies in his rear that he cannot get on fast lest some of them should suffer,” she wrote to her daughter, Nabby.

  With informal word of a peace agreement but without the actual text of it, Adams could not fully capitalize on having achieved an honorable peace. He passed over the issue quickly in his address to Congress on November 22 by stating simply that Napoleon had received the American negotiators “with the respect due their character.” Restoring American neutrality and trading rights at a time of continuing war in Europe stood as the crowning achievement of Adams’s presidency, but it came too late to affect the election significantly. Most states had already chosen either their electors or the legislators who would pick them.

  Maryland, however, had still to vote. Even there, though, the news made little difference. The deposed war minister, James McHenry of Baltimore, who had supplied Hamilton with confidential information about Adams for his damning letter, now nursed a private grudge against the President. That he and his High Federalist faction controlled the party machinery in Maryland did not bode well for Adams, and news of the tentative peace agreement only fed the animosity. Like McHenry, many of Maryland’s leading Federalists would sooner fight France than negotiate with its hated leaders. Further, even if the style and timing of Hamilton’s letter offended Federalists generally, many High Federalists found its arguments against Adams compelling. After thanking Hamilton for exposing the President’s “unfitness” for office, for example, Charles Carroll of Carrollton, Maryland’s oldest surviving signer of the Declaration of Independence, sat out the election. “I fear our Constitution would be more injured by [Adams’s] unruly passions, antipathies, and jealousy than by the whimsies of Jefferson,” Carroll concluded.

  Hamilton’s letter presumably contributed to a general torpor within Federalist ranks in the state. “Tomorrow, the electors of this state are to be chosen by the people,” McHenry wrote to Wolcott from Baltimore on November 9. “Here, we shall make little or no exertion for the Federal[ist] candidate, not from any indifference to the good old cause, but from…an opinion pretty generally imbibed of the utter unfitness of one of the Federal[ist] candidates to fill the office of President.” McHenry then added about Adams, “Whether he is sportful, playful, witty, kind, cold, drunk, sober, angry, easy, stiff, jealous, careless, cautious, confident, close, open, it is almost always in the wrong place or to the wrong persons. For such a chief…who can contend?” Reports of peace with France did not placate McHenry. “What kind of convention have our beleaguered ambassadors made with Bonaparte? And what points have they left undecided?” he asked Wolcott.

  If, as High Federalists seemed to wish, the Maryland elections served as a referendum on Adams’s presidency, then the verdict was mixed. Federalists rebounded from their party’s staggering setback in the October legislative elections, but only to parity with the Republicans. In the November elections, each party won in five of the state’s ten electoral districts. Maryland voters could have all but determined the presidential contest by giving the lion’s share of their electors to one party, but instead the split decision in the elections simply kept the race too close to call.

  With only three undecided states remaining—Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina—any one of the four candidates could still win the presidency outright by gaining sufficient votes from these remaining electors. In a late November letter to his son-in-law, Jefferson projected the electoral-vote tally so far: “Setting aside Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and South Carolina, the Federal scale will have from the other states 53 votes and the Republican 58.” This tally was off by one due to incomplete returns from North Carolina. When the final results reached him from North Carolina, Jefferson revised his running tally to stand at 57 to 54 in favor of the Republicans.

  If every state named all its electors in 1800, then a candidat
e for President needed votes from at least 70 of them to win outright. With each elector casting 2 votes, of course, two candidates could potentially receive 70 or more votes. In that event, the candidate with the highest total would win, or, if two tied at top, then Congress would choose between them. Already confident of getting at least 57 votes when the Electoral College met on December 3, Jefferson knew that votes from Pennsylvania’s 15 electors could put him over the top. If Pennsylvania did not participate, which remained a distinct possibility, then candidates would need votes from only 62 electors for a majority. South Carolina’s 8 electors could supply them for Jefferson. Rhode Island carried less significance at this point because its 4 electors could not tip the contest decisively for any candidate. At most, they could help candidates build their totals.

  Of the three remaining undecided states, Rhode Island acted first. It was scheduled to choose its four electors in a statewide general election on November 19. Adams, as a fellow New Englander, was popular with state voters but Republicans nourished hopes of securing at least some of the state’s electoral votes. A hotbed of anti-federalism in the 1780s and early 1790s, Rhode Island remained hostile territory for High Federalists. The state’s independent-minded governor, Arthur Fenner, promised to split his two votes between Adams and Jefferson if he became an elector. Republicans hoped that other Rhode Island electors might follow his lead.

  Declaring that “the efforts of both parties will be greater than at any election since independence,” one local Republican forecast that Rhode Island’s four electors would give “four [votes] for Jefferson, two for Burr, and two for Adams.” This highly optimistic projection presumed that two electors would vote for the Republican ticket and two would split their votes between Jefferson and Adams. Jefferson never counted on receiving votes from any New England state, but his supporters had high hopes for Rhode Island. Fearing the worst, one local Federalist pleaded with voters, “How disgraceful will it be to the sober, steady, and consistent character of New England if one of her states should totally depart from that character and range herself under the standard of Virginia.…Let us remember that we are not voting for a single representative in the Assembly or in Congress, but that the vote of a single [elector] may now decide who shall administer the executive government of the United States.”