In the year 1800, Thomas Jefferson became the third president of the United States of America after defeating John Adams, Aaron Burr, and Charles Pinckney in the constitutional crisis known as the Election of 1800. This election was heavily contested and was effectively the first time political parties ran smear campaigns against each other. The Democratic-Republicans and the Federalists clashed heavily.
In 1796, John Adams was elected president of the United States of America. He was the first president elected after the incumbency of George Washington. Adams’s federalist ideas on nationalized banking and a strong central government proved unpopular. The Adams administration faces several severe tests. It was a mixed administration. The vice-president, Thomas Jefferson, was a Democratic-Republican while Adams himself was a Federalist. The Federalist Party itself was also divided. There were conservatives like Alexander Hamilton and moderates such as Adams himself. Hamilton actually opposed Adams as the Federalist candidate despite them being in the same party. This helped create the circumstances by which Jefferson slipped past the Federalist candidate, Thomas Pinckney, to become vice-president. Hamilton was extremely influential to many Federalists even though he resigned from the cabinet in 1795, before Adams even became president. Many Federalists continued to seek and follow his advice, even those on Adams’s cabinet (www.ushistory.org/us/19d.asp).
Beyond these considerable problems in his own party, Adams also faced a major international crisis. The French believed that there was an Anglo-American alliance in Jay’s treaty, and they were outraged. France suspended diplomatic relations with the United States at the end of 1796 and seized more than 300 American ships over the next two years. John Adams responded by sending a diplomatic mission to France. When it arrived in Paris, three of the French foreign minister’s agents explained that in order for negotiations to even begin, America would have to loan the French government money and pay a bribe to the agents themselves. People in the United States began to refer to this as the “XYZ Affair.” The French rebuff was seen as a blow to American honor and became a major rallying issue for Federalists, who were generally anti-French (www.ushistory.org/us/19d.asp).
The strong steps that Adams took in response to the French foreign threat also included a severe repression of domestic protest. In 1798, John Adams signed the Alien and Sedition Acts. These acts restricted speech against the Federalist government. It also made attainting citizenship difficult and acted as measures to prevent disruptive factions. New powers were put into place to deport foreigners and made it harder for new immigrants to vote. Before these laws, a new immigrant would have to have lived in the United States for only five years in order to be eligible to vote, but a new law raised this to fourteen years. The Sedition Act prohibited public opposition to the government. Fines and imprisonment were used against those that who “write, print, utter, or publish… any false, scandalous and malicious writing” against the government.
Under the terms of this law over 20 Republican newspaper editors were arrested and some were imprisoned. The most dramatic victim of the law was Representative Matthew Lyon of Vermont. His letter that criticized President Adams' "unbounded thirst for ridiculous pomp, foolish adulation, and self avarice" caused him to be imprisoned. While Federalists sent Lyon to prison for his opinions, his constituents reelected him to Congress even from his jail cell (www.ushistory.org/us/19e.asp).
The Sedition Act violated individual protections under the First Amendment of the United States Constitution (www.ushistory.org/us).
Instead of continuing to use the demand of war to build his own popularity and to justify the need for strong federal authority, Adams opened negotiations with France when the opportunity arose toward peace. Reconciling with France during the critical campaign of 1800 enraged many Federalist, including Adams’s own secretary of state who repeatedly refused to send peace commissioners to France. Alexander Hamilton, an extremely intelligent political operator, denounced Adams’s actions for a quasi-war clearly could stimulate patriotic fervor. This could have helped Federalists win the upcoming election. Ultimately, Adams only convinced the Federalists Congress to move toward peace by threatening to resign. This would have allowed Thomas Jefferson to become president immediately. Aspersed and defamed by his political opponents and abandoned by the conservative half of his own political party, Adams became the first and only single-term president in the early national period until 1828, when his son suffered a similar fate (www.ushistory.org/us/19f.asp).
The Election of 1800 was an emotional, hard-fought campaign. Both sides believed that
the victory of the opposite party would result in the demise of the nation. The Federalists attacked Thomas Jefferson for his support of the French Revolution and his atheism. Many Federalists believed that if Jefferson were to become president, the same chaos and bloodshed of the French Revolution would plague America. The Democratic-Republicans, on the other hand, attacked the Federalists for being anti-liberty and monarchist. The strong centralization of federal power under Adams’s presidency was denounced by the Democratic-Republicans. They specifically objected to the expansion of the United States army and navy, the attack on civil liberties in the Alien and Sedition Acts, and new taxes and deficit spending used to support broadened federal action. Basically, the Federalists wanted federal authority to be strong and to restrain the popular majorities’ excesses, while the Democratic-Republicans wanted to reduce national authority in order for the people to be able to rule more directly through state governments.
Thomas Jefferson had been troubled by what had occurred during the incumbent’s
presidency, and he was convinced that the radicals within the Federalist Party were waging war against what he called the “spirit of 1776” or goals the American people had hoped to attain through the American Revolution. Jefferson believed that the election was going to be crucial to the fate of our nation.
The “revolution…of 1776,” Jefferson would later say, had determined the “form” of America’s government; he believed the election of 1800 would decide its “principles.” “I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of Man,” he wrote (www.smithsonianmag.com/history/thomas-jefferson-aaron-burr-and-the-election-of-1800-131082359/).
Jefferson was not the only person who believed that the election of 1800 was critical. Alexander Hamilton, who had been George Washington’s secretary of the treasury, believed that it was a contest to save the new nation from “the fangs of Jefferson.” Hamilton agreed with a Federalist newspaper essay that argued that defeat meant “happiness, constitution and laws [faced] endless and irretrievable ruin.” It seemed as though the Federalists and Democratic-Republicans could only agree on one thing: that the victor in 1800 would set America’s course for generations to come, perhaps forever (https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/thomas-jefferson-aaron-burr-and-the-election-of-1800-131082359/).
A few weeks before John Adams’s inauguration in 1796, France, engaged in an all out
war with England for world domination, proclaimed that it would allow America to trade with Great Britain. The French Navy then began to take over American ships at sea which idled port-city workers and plunging the economy toward a depression. Paris rejected Adams’s envoys after he tried to negotiate a settlement. Adams’s had actually hoped to avoid war, but he found himself caught is quite the storm. Ultra Federalists, or extremists, capitalized on the passions unleashed in this crisis and scored great victories in the off-year elections of 1798, taking charge of both the party and Congress. A provisional army was created and Adams was pressured to put Hamilton in charge. The Ultras passed heavy taxes to pay for the army and, with Federalist sympathizers in the press braying, “traitors must be silent,” enacted the Alien and Sedition Acts. The Federalists defended the Sedition Act as a necessity in the middle of a grave national crisis; meanwhile Jefferson and his followers saw it as an intention of silencing Republicans and as a violation of the Bill of Rights. Jefferson asserted that the Sedition Act proved that there was no step, “however atrocious,” the Ultras would not take. Not only did Jefferson feel as if Federalist Extremists could possibly overreach, but John Adams also believed this. He, just as Jefferson, came to suspect that the Ultras, led by Hamilton, wanted to provoke a crisis with France.
Their motivation perhaps had been to get Adams to secure an alliance with Great Britain and accept the Ultras’ program in Congress. But avowing that there “is no more prospect of seeing a French Army here, than there is in Heaven,” Adams refused to go along with the scheme and sent peace envoys to Paris. (Indeed, a treaty would be signed at the end of September 1800) (https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/thomas-jefferson-aaron-burr-and-the-election-of-1800-131082359/).
It was in the bitterly partisan atmosphere that the Election of 1800 was conducted (https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/thomas-jefferson-aaron-burr-and-the-election-of-1800-131082359).
During this time, the Constitution specified that each of the 138 members of the
Electoral College cast two votes for president. The Constitution also stipulated that if the candidates tied, or none received a majority of electoral votes, the House of Representatives “shall [choose] by Ballot one of them for President.” Dissimilar from today, each party nominated two candidates for the presidency. The Federalists, without indicating a preference for a front-runner, elected John Adams, who was hoping for a reelection, and Charles Pinckney of South Carolina. Pinckney was born into Southern aristocracy and raised in England, and he had the last of the four nominees to come around in favor of American independence. The Democratic-Republicans did choose a front-runner: Thomas Jefferson.
Jefferson had held public office intermittently since 1767, serving Virginia in its legislature and as a wartime governor, sitting in Congress, crossing to Paris in 1784 for a five year stint that including a posting as the American minister to France, and acting as Secretary of State under Washington. His second place finish in the election of 1796 had made him vice president, as was the custom until 1804 (https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/thomas-jefferson-aaron-burr-and-the-election-of-1800-131082359/).
The second choice for the Republicans was Aaron Burr. He was the youngest of the candidates (44 years-old), and he had abandoned his legal studies in 1775 in order to enlist in the Continental Army. He experienced the horrors of America’s failed invasion of Canada and the miseries of Valley Forge. After the war ended, he practiced law with Alexander Hamilton and represented New York in the United States Senate. By 1800, he was serving as a member of the New York legislature (https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/thomas-jefferson-aaron-burr-and-the-election-of-1800-131082359/).
The Constitution left the manner of selecting presidential electors to the states. In eleven
of the sixteen states, state legislatures picked the electors, so the party that controlled the state assembly received all of that state’s electoral votes. As for the other five states, “qualified” voters (white, male tax payers or white, male land owners depending on the state) chose the electors. Some states used a winner-take-all system (voters cast their ballots for the entire slate of either Republican electors or the Federalist slate) while other states would split electors among districts (https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/thomas-jefferson-aaron-burr-and-the-election-of-1800-131082359/).
The election’s outcome brought a dramatic victory for the Democratic-Republicans. They
swept both houses of Congress, including a decisive sixty-five to thirty-nine majority in the House of Representatives. The presidential election, however, was not as apparent. Jefferson and Burr ended up tying, both receiving seventy-three votes. Adams received sixty-five while Pinckney received sixty-four.
Adams thus became the first presidential candidate to fall victim to the notorious clause in the Constitution that counted each slave as three-fifths of one individual in calculating population used to allocate both House seats and electoral votes. Had slaves, who had no vote, not been so counted, Adams would have edged Jefferson by a vote of 63 to 61 (https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/thomas-jefferson-aaron-burr-and-the-election-of-1800-131082359/).
The presidential vote would be sent to the House of Representatives where they would decide between the two Republicans. In the House, each state would cast a single vote. If each of the sixteen states voted—that is, if none abstained—nine states would elect the president. The Democratic-Republicans controlled eight delegations—New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, Kentucky, and Tennessee; meanwhile, the Federalists held six—New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Delaware, and South Carolina. Maryland and Vermont were deadlocked.
Although there was a tie in the Electoral College, public opinion seemed to side with
Jefferson. Not only was he his party’s front-runner, but he had also served longer at a national level than Burr, and in a more exalted capacity. If neither candidate were selected by noon on March 4 (when Adams’s term ended) the country would be without a president until the newly elected Congress convened in December, nine months later. In the interim, the Federalist-dominated Congress would be in control (https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/thomas-jefferson-aaron-burr-and-the-election-of-1800-131082359/).
Wednesday, February 11, 1801, a crippling snowstorm awoke the city of Washington.
This was the day the House was to begin voting. Only one of the 105 House members did not make it in to Congress, and his absence was not going to change his delegation’s tally. Voting began as soon as the House was gaveled into session. When the roll call was finished, Jefferson carried eight states, Burr carried six, and two deadlocked states had cast blank ballots. Jefferson still needed one more vote to carry the majority. A second and third vote was held both with similar outcomes. Finally, at three in the morning, when the tired congressmen decided to call it a day, nineteen role calls had been taken all with the same inconclusive result. By Saturday evening, the House had cast thirty-three ballots. Everyone began to believe that the deadlock was unbreakable. Vote after vote and nothing was changing (https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/thomas-jefferson-aaron-burr-and-the-election-of-1800-131082359/).
The ten-dollar-founding-father, Alexander Hamilton, came in to mix thing up a bit before the thirty-sixth vote was cast. As the House of Representatives prepared to vote, Hamilton used his influence to support Jefferson. He wrote several letters outlining the dangers of a Burr Presidency and urged fellow Federalists to vote for Jefferson.
In a letter to Representative Harrison Gray Otis of Massachusetts, Hamilton wrote:
Burr loves nothing but himself; thinks of nothing but his own aggrandizement, and will be content with nothing, short of permanent power in his own hands. No compact that he should make with any passion in his breast, except ambition, could be relied upon by himself. How then should we be able to rely upon any agreement with him? Jefferson, I suspect, will not dare much. Burr will dare every thing, in the sanguine hope of effecting every thing (Hamilton, Alexander. Received by Rep. Harrison Gray Otis, 23 Dec. 1800.).
After numerous blocked ballots, Hamilton helped to secure the presidency for Jefferson, the man he felt was the lesser of two evils. Ten state delegations voted for Jefferson, four supported Burr, and two made no choice. Hamilton’s actions in this election would eventually lead to his death.
The House of Representatives elected Thomas Jefferson the third president of the United States on February 17, 1801, after casting thirty-six ballots. The Election of 1800 pointed out problems in our Electoral College system. The framers of our Constitution had not anticipated in there being such a tie, nor had they considered the possibility of the election of a president or vice president being from opposite parties. In 1804, the 12th Amendment was ratified. It corrected some of the system’s problems by creating separate Electoral College votes for president and vice president (https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/thomas-jefferson-aaron-burr-and-the-election-of-1800-131082359/).