The recess did not resolve the impasse. “All stand firm,” Federalist Representative William Cooper (the father of writer James Fenimore Cooper) reported following the vote on Friday. “Had Burr done any thing for himself, he would long ere have been President.” Again the House recessed, this time until noon on Saturday. By then, Governor Monroe had become so alarmed by the situation and frustrated at the lack of news that he directed Virginia militia riders to organize a relay to carry confidential reports between the Republicans in Washington and Richmond. “We request information of the actual state and probable results, as on your answer we shall decide whether it will be proper to convene the [state] assembly,” he wrote to Virginia’s two U.S. senators. “We trust that none of the Republican states will give ground.” After voting four times on Saturday, the House broke for the Christian Sabbath. Four days and thirty-three ballots had not altered a single state’s vote. On Sunday, in a letter to his daughter Maria, Jefferson complained of the “cabal, intrigue, and hatred” of Washington. “The scene passing here makes me pant to be away from it,” he wrote. “I feel no impulse from personal ambition to the office now proposed to me, but on account of yourself and your sister, and those dear to you. I feel a sincere wish indeed to see our government brought back to its republican principles…[so] that when I retire, it may be under full security that we are to continue free and happy.”
The continuing stalemate convinced Bayard that Burr could not win. From the outset, the Delaware congressman had resolved to cast his state’s vote for Jefferson rather than let the election fail and risk disunion. “Representing the smallest state,” he explained to Adams on February 19, “I was compelled by the obligation of a sacred duty, so to act, and not to hazard the Constitution upon which the political existence of the state depends.” Representatives Baer and Craik of Maryland and Morris of Vermont agreed to follow Bayard’s lead. They would give House Federalists ample time to rally support for Burr—indeed, by some accounts, Bayard even tried to solicit Republican votes for Burr—but if that failed, they would swing the contest to Jefferson. Burr probably knew better than to promote his own candidacy. He needed at least three Republican votes to win, and any deals that he made for them surely would become public, with dire consequences for all those involved. The party and the people wanted Jefferson.
Exactly what followed Bayard’s decision to abandon Burr became the subject of impassioned arguments (and even lawsuits) as long as any of the participants lived and remains obscured by their conflicting accounts. “In determining to recede from the opposition to Mr. Jefferson, it occurred to us that probably instead of being obligated to surrender at discretion, we might obtain terms of capitulation,” Bayard later testified. He added that Baer, Craik, and Morris “authorized me to declare their concurrence with me upon the best terms that could be procured.”
According to Jefferson, during the impasse in Congress, various Federalists offered him the presidency in return for his promise to honor government debts, maintain the Navy, and retain current non-policymaking officials. When approached by the Federalists, Jefferson assured Monroe at the time, “I have declared to them unequivocally that I would not receive the government on capitulation.” Bayard instead raised those same issues through a Republican intermediary, Congressman Samuel Smith, and specifically named two port collectors whom he wanted retained. Although Jefferson vehemently denied making any deals for the presidency, Smith later admitted raising the issues obliquely with him and reporting Jefferson’s favorable response to Bayard. “I have taken good care of you,” Bayard soon wrote to one of the named officers. “You are safe.” Both officials kept their jobs for as long as they wanted them.
At a closed party caucus during the weekend recess, Bayard told House Federalists that he intended to abandon Burr. “The clamor was prodigious. The reproaches vehement,” he wrote to a cousin. “We broke up in confusion.” According to some accounts, party leaders asked for added time to see if Burr would offer concessions that could gain him votes. They expected letters from him soon. Accordingly, Bayard voted the party line once more on Monday, and the tally remained constant. Although Burr’s letters are lost, apparently they arrived that day. In them, Burr “explicitly resigns his pretensions” to the presidency, House Speaker Sedgwick reported sourly, which may have simply meant that Burr refused to offer any concessions. “The gig is therefore up,” the Speaker concluded. “Burr has acted a miserable paltry part. The election was in his power,” Bayard informed Delaware’s governor on Monday. As for House Federalists, he added, “We meet again tonight merely to agree upon the mode of surrendering.” The thirty-fifth and final ballot for President would occur at noon on Tuesday, February 17.
Ultimately, no Federalists switched sides to vote for Jefferson. In an apparent display of party solidarity and continued opposition to Jefferson, Federalist congressmen from Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island stuck with Burr; the rest simply abstained. This gave the votes of Maryland and Vermont to Jefferson. He carried the election by a margin of ten votes to four, with Delaware and South Carolina not voting.
Participants viewed the House election through partisan lenses that polarized their sight. “Thus has ended the most wicked and absurd attempt ever tried by the Federalists,” Gallatin wrote after the final vote. “They had but one proper mode to pursue, and that was for the whole party to come over; instead of which they contrived merely to suffer Mr. Jefferson to be chosen without a single man of theirs voting for him.”
Federalists saw it differently. Congressman John Cotton Smith, an outspoken Christian and a future Connecticut governor, closed his account of the House battle by observing, “Thus ended the electoral drama, with a catastrophe sufficiently bitter in its effects on the vital interests of the country…[to have] fully justified the vote we gave.” Following the final ballot, the detached New York Federalist, Gouverneur Morris, cautioned a senior Republican official, “This farce of life contains nothing which should put us out of humor.” Few took Morris’s worldly advice. Preparing to leave Congress at the session’s end, one the staunchest holdouts for Burr, Harrison Gray Otis, wrote to his wife, “Yes my beloved angel, with you, I shall retire from this scene of anxiety…and remain a silent spectator of the follies and confusion, of the strife and licentiousness incident to all popular government, and to ours in the most eminent degree.” In the next session, a Republican would represent his Boston congressional district in the heart of Federalist New England.
Sixteen months after Pennsylvania voters cast the first ballots in the contest and only two weeks before the scheduled presidential inauguration, the election of 1800 finally ended. Abigail Adams learned the final outcome as she passed through Philadelphia on her way home to Massachusetts. “I have heard some of the Democratic rejoicing such as ringing bells and firing cannon,” she wrote to her husband. “What an inconsistency, said a lady to me today, the bells of Christ Church ringing peals of rejoicing for an infidel president!”
As the news reached them, Republicans across the nation celebrated with parades, banquets, bonfires, and making loud noises. “The question which has so long held the Union in doubtful suspense was yesterday decided by the election of the honorable Thomas Jefferson as President,” a Baltimore newspaper reported on February 18. “The news was immediately announced to the city by a discharge of 16 cannon from the Observatory.”
From start to finish, conflicting hopes for liberty and fears of disorder spurred Americans to an unprecedented level of partisan activity. “I was willing to take Burr,” Bayard wrote on the eve of Jefferson’s inauguration, “but I was enabled soon to discover that he was determined not to shackle himself with Federal[ist] principles.” Forced to take a Republican, Bayard accepted the Virginian, but he still did not vote for him. The manner by which Federalists conceded the election by not voting outraged Jefferson. “We consider this therefore as a declaration of war on the part of this band,” he wrote to Madison after the final Hous
e ballot.
Partisanship prevailed to the bitter end and showed no signs of abating. Over the campaign’s extended course, George Washington’s vision of elite, consensus leadership had died, and a popular, two-party republic, conceived in the crucible of the Adams presidency, was born.
EPILOGUE
INAUGURATION DAY, MARCH 4, 1801
JOHN ADAMS left the Executive Mansion about three hours before sunrise on Wednesday, March 4, to catch the 4:00 AM public stage for Baltimore on the first leg of his journey back to Massachusetts. His term as President had ended at midnight, and he wasted no time in leaving the cavernous, unfinished mansion, later known as the White House, that had served as his home for scarcely four months. On his first full day in the building, when he still hoped for an extended stay, Adams had prayed, “May none but honest and wise men ever rule under this roof.” Now he left it to his successor beset by grave doubts about the honesty and wisdom of the policies that Republicans would bring with them into power. Other departing Federalists, including former House Speaker Theodore Sedgwick, rode in the same public coach—all choosing to leave town before Jefferson’s inauguration at noon. They traveled by the light of a nearly full moon for two hours before the first streaks of dawn brightened the morning sky. Defeat embittered and embarrassed Adams for years to come.
Thomas Jefferson surely rose before the sun that day too; he always did. He still roomed in a small suite at Conrad and McMunn’s boardinghouse near the Capitol, and would stay there for two more weeks as work progressed on the Executive Mansion. After other boarders got up and dressed, Jefferson ate breakfast with them at the common table and reportedly declined their invitation to sit at its head. Escorted by soldiers of the Virginia militia and flanked by various members of Congress and other dignitaries, Jefferson then walked to the Senate chamber for his inauguration. His predecessors had ridden in a coach with liveried attendants on such occasions. Jefferson wore a plain suit and, unlike Washington and Adams at their inaugurals, he neither powdered his hair nor carried a sword. He wanted to set a democratic tone for his administration, and continued doing so by curtailing official levees, accepting a handshake rather than a bow, and otherwise introducing an informal style to state functions. A better writer than speaker, Jefferson sent his messages to Congress rather than deliver them to assembled lawmakers. Before taking the oath of office, however, in a shy, small voice all but lost in the ornate, crowded Senate chamber, Jefferson gave the greatest speech of his political career. He beautifully crafted it to claim the middle ground after the bitter, divisive campaign. Newspapers carried it to the nation.
“During the contest of opinion through which we have passed, the animation of discussion and of exertions has sometimes worn an aspect which might impose on strangers unused to think freely,” Jefferson began. “But this being now decided by the voice of the people…let us restore to social intercourse that harmony and affection without which liberty, and even life itself, are but dreary things.” Among the causes of these differences, he stressed the divided opinion “as to measures of safety” against the widening European war. “Every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle,” Jefferson cautioned in a statement calculated to reach out to moderates. “We are all Republicans: We are all Federalists. If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union, or to challenge its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free.” He then restated his political principles in centrist terms: neutrality abroad, the freedom of religion and the press at home, full payment of the national debt, and equal justice with impartial juries. No Federalist could have expected more from a Republican; many expected much less from Jefferson. In an apparent answer to those who questioned his belief in God, he closed with prayer: “May that Infinite Power which rules the destinies of the universe lead our councils to what is best, and give them a favorable issue for your peace and prosperity.”
Expanding on his speech in letters to party leaders and senior statesmen, Jefferson expressed a determination to promote republicanism by weaning rank-in-file Federalists from their High Federalist leaders. “I am in hopes my inaugural address will…present the leading objects to be conciliation and adherence to sound principle,” Jefferson wrote to Monroe. “This I know is impracticable with the leaders of the late faction, whom I abandon as incurables…but with the main body of the Federalists, I believe it very practicable.” To his new Attorney General, Levi Lincoln, Jefferson added, “The consolidation of our fellow citizens in general is the great object we ought to keep in view” by reaching out to those whom he called “the federal sect of republicans.” At the same time, he added, “We must strip of all the means of influence the Essex Junto and their associate monocrats in every part of the Union.” Hamilton remained a particular worry. In a conciliatory letter to Washington’s former War Secretary, Henry Knox, Jefferson warned, “I know indeed there are monarchists among us.” To the senior Revolutionary Era leader John Dickinson, Jefferson noted, “I consider the pure Federalist as a republican who would prefer a somewhat stronger executive; and the Republican as one more willing to trust the legislature.” Both, he noted, “should see and fear the monarchist as their common enemy.”
In the flush of victory, Jefferson depicted the prior administration as a passing aberration in America’s democratic tradition caused by fear and religious obscurantism. “The frenzy…wrought partly by ill conduct in France, partly by artifices practiced on [our citizens], is almost extinct,” he wrote on March 18 to Thomas Paine in Paris—and invited the aging revolutionary to return home. “What an effort…of bigotry in politics and religion have we gone through!” Jefferson added to the noted chemist and liberal theologian Joseph Priestley. “The barbarians really flattered themselves they should be able to bring back the times of Vandalism when ignorance put everything into the hands of power and priestcraft. All advances in science were proscribed as innovations.”
Jefferson saw his victory as a turning point. “We may now say that the U.S. from New York southwardly are as unanimous in the principles of ’76 as they were in ’76,” he reported to Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts. “Your part of the union, tho’ as absolutely republican as ours, had drunk deeper of the delusion and is therefore slower in recovering from it. The aegis of government and the temples of religion and justice have all been prostituted there to toll us back to the times when we burnt witches. But your people will rise again.” Indeed, he assured Samuel Adams on March 29, “The storm is over, and we are in port.” Years later, Jefferson characterized the election of 1800 as “a revolution in the principles of our government.”
Federalism retrenched and, concentrated in the Northeast, its leaders fought on as an opposition force. “Party is an association of honest men for honest purposes and, when the state falls into bad hands, is the only efficient defense; a champion who never flinches, a watchman who never sleeps,” Fisher Ames wrote on March 19. “An active spirit must be roused in every town to check the incessant proselytizing arts of the Jacobins,” he declared on behalf of his partisans. “We must speak in the name and with the voice of the good and the wise, the lovers of liberty and the owners of property.” With his relationship to Republicans strained by the prolonged House election for President and no chance of them nominating him for a second term as Vice President, Burr flirted with joining the Federalists. Hamilton resisted Burr’s efforts to gain party support for an 1804 gubernatorial campaign in New York, which led to a series of escalating exchanges between the two men, culminating on July 11 in the duel that ended Hamilton’s life and Burr’s political career.
Although rivals in Virginia politics, Chief Justice John Marshall represented a type of Federalist that Jefferson did not automatically dismiss as monarchical. He asked him to administer the oath of office, and Marshall agreed. “Today the new political year commences,” the Chief Justice wrote to Charles Cotesworth Pinckney on the morning of M
arch 4. “The [Republicans] are divided into speculative theorists and absolute terrorists: With the latter I am not disposed to class Mr. Jefferson.” Later that day, Marshall added a postscript about Jefferson’s speech. “It is in the general well judged and conciliatory,” he wrote, “in direct terms giving the lie to the violent party declamation which has elected him.” Pinckney, however, was not persuaded—and stood as the Federalist candidate for President against Jefferson in 1804. He carried only two small states, Delaware and Connecticut, and two districts in Maryland. The strategy of winning over the center through moderate policies and republican rhetoric succeeded brilliantly for Jefferson, just as it would for Madison and Monroe: three successive, two-term Presidents from Virginia. By the 1804 election, the Twelfth Amendment would, however, enshrine partisan politics in the U.S. Constitution by requiring electors to vote separately for President and Vice President rather than the two best candidates. For good or ill, the likes of an Adams and a Jefferson would never again serve together in those offices.
It took a few more years before John Adams yielded to the new order. “The Federalists, by their intolerance, have gone far toward justifying, or at least excusing, Jefferson for his; and for the future, it seems to be established as a principle that our government is forever to be not a national but a party government,” Adams wrote in confidence during the heated 1808 presidential campaign, which pitted Madison against Pinckney. “While it lasts all we can hope is that, in the game at leap frog, once in eight or twelve years the party of the OUTS will leap over the head and shoulders of the INS; for, I own to you, I have so little confidence in the wisdom, prudence, or virtue of either party that I should be nearly as willing that one should be absolute and unchecked as the other.”
A Magnificent Catastrophe Page 31