Thomas Jefferson and the Revolution of 1800

In 1801, after an election punctuated by bitter partisan disputes, accusations of treason and sedition, and the imprisonment of political dissidents, Thomas Jefferson became the nation’s third President. Twenty years later, reflecting on the bitter presidential race that elevated him into office, he called the election “the revolution of 1800… as real a revolution in the principles of our government as that of 76.” The historian Gordon Wood described the unfinished state of the new capitol, writing that the city that Jefferson arrived in to deliver his Inaugural Address was “surrounded by woods, its streets were muddy and filled with tree stumps, its landscape was swampy and mosquito infested, and its unfinished buildings stood like Roman ruins in a deserted ancient city.” The White House itself was similarly unfinished: “its grounds resembled a construction site with workmen’s shacks, privies and old brick-kilns scattered about… visitors to the President’s House were always in danger of falling into a pit or stumbling into a heap of rubbish.” The Capitol building, where Jefferson was the first President to take the oath of office, “stood in unfinished isolation, joined by only a covered boardwalk. Inside the Capitol, the design and workmanship were so poor that columns split, roofs leaked, and portions of the ceilings collapsed.”¹

Washington, D.C.’s incomplete and bedraggled condition was an apt metaphor for the condition of the country that Jefferson had been elected to lead. The political project which he had played such a critical role in architecting was incomplete, fractured, and undergoing stresses which seemed as likely as not to break the new Republic’s back. The election itself had uncovered a glaring weakness in the Constitution. The Constitutionally mandated procedure for electing the President, once stressed by the election of 1800, proved itself to be indecisive and unsteady. Under the specified process each state would determine, by any means it cared to, a slate of electors; that body would then convene to determine who the President should be. The number of electors were equal in number to the state’s Congressional delegation. Each slate of electors voted for two candidates for President. The overall winner would be President, and the runner-up the Vice-President. Besides the problems inherent in placing two men with different political philosophies and goals in office, especially in light of the fact that the explicit duties and powers of both the President and Vice President were undefined, was the flaw in the method of election itself, which became the pivot around which the nation turned for months after the voting ended. In late 1800, after the Electoral College met and cast their final ballot, both Jefferson, and his fellow Republican Aaron Burr, received the same number of votes. With no single victor, the Constitution dictated that the decision be submitted to Congress which would make the final determination. However, here too the Constitution’s provisions failed to produce the kind of decisive result that the fractured and ambiguous situation called out for. The country’s political future was left to dangle.

While the Constitution specified that Congress would take up the decision if the Electoral College could not, their method of voting was different than that of the College. Each state was apportioned representatives to the Electoral College according to the same formula that was used to make up their Congressional representation. Each state’s representation was roughly proportional to the size of their population (save the glaring fact that slaves were counted as three-fifths of a citizen for the purposes of determining representation.) Yet the process that Congress would follow after the Electoral College’s failure to produce a single victor, would not be proportionally weighted to their states population. Instead, each state delegation would vote amongst themselves, then their collective voice would allow that state to register a single vote in the final tally. To make matters even more complicated, the members of Congress who participated would not be the one that the voters had just elected. Those delegates would not be seated in Congress until after the choice of President was completed. Therefore, the body that would make the decision was dominated by the Federalist party, which had just lost the election decisively, not the new Jeffersonian Republican party (called at the time the “Republican” party but now sometimes referred to as the Democratic-Republicans to disambiguate it from our modern party of the same name) which was surging into office as a result of broad dissatisfaction with the Federalists. This represented yet another blow to how the Framers’ thought the government should, and would work. Washington, in his Farewell Address, had famously reiterated his colleagues long-held fears, warning of the divisive role that parties would play if allowed to intrude into the political system. Yet just four years after Washington left office, party politics were a key determinant in the election of 1800, and would set the standard for American politics through to our day. Due to the emergence of a particularly brutal partisan politics, and even though the outgoing Federalists determined early in this convoluted process that they lacked the votes to re-elect Adams to the Presidency, the out-going Federalists waged a long campaign to block either Jefferson or Burr from winning the race. Eventually, after a long, drawn out political battle, Jefferson prevailed and was elected President, and Burr was appointed Vice-President.

The exposure of this Constitutional problem was not the only imperfection in the new country’s politics that would be exposed at the turn of the eighteenth century. The construction of the American Republic occurred unevenly and episodically over many years, with many significant issues still at play today. While we often think of the Constitution as a monolithically conceived system, in fact it was the product of years of debate and disagreement. These disputes were either resolved, or papered over, or delayed amidst arcane political maneuvers and machinations. Many issues were ultimately decided by slim majorities that came together in improbable circumstances, and for political reasons far removed from the particular issue at hand. Moreover, important decisions that would have long-term consequences were undertaken within political contexts that were not only specific to their time and place, but were also reflective of the social biases and concerns of a small slice of the overall society. The nature of the Constitution meant that they were made with little or no input from a vast number of people excluded from the process, but who would nevertheless be subjected to their effects.

The Constitution and the laws that define the boundaries of our governance are better understood as an ongoing process than the reflection of a finished, complete Constitution. While the written Constitution is a seldom changed legal document, it is only one piece in a clockwork of laws, procedures, customs, interpretations, formal and informal institutions, which together represent the form of our political system. Jefferson’s election and the rise of Republicanism was the result of a highly contingent series of events, not a foregone conclusion. Aaron Burr or even John Adams could conceivably have won the race had circumstances been only slightly different. Jefferson’s Republicanism is something that is often surfaced in the political discourse and controversies of the day. As one political faction or another creates its narrative and marshals its rhetorical forces, Jefferson and the Founding Fathers are quoted and summarized (the bumper-sticker version should be: WWTFFD — “What Would The Founding Fathers Do?”) This reflects an understandable attempt to identify and claim a fundamentally American creed; authentically American, universal (timeless and unchanging), to settle our contemporary political controversies. It is clear when reading Jefferson’s Inaugural Speech that he clearly articulated ideas recognizable and relevant in our generation. Among the more recognizable are the retention of sovereign powers in the states (State’s Rights) and the goal of a small federal government with attendant low rates of taxation. However, when these are referenced as fundamentally Jeffersonian, if not American, other more anachronistic components of Jefferson’s political philosophy are elided. Among these conveniently shunted aside are the belief that democracy could only flourish if the economy remained focused on agriculture, that America, isolated from Europe by the Atlantic Ocean could mostly avoid interacting with the international community, and that the national defense is best insured by a strong militia and the absence of a large standing army. All of Jefferson’s ideas were part of his political philosophy, but only some have survived in a rapidly changing world.

While Adams’ election four years before Jefferson’s had been the first to mark an orderly transition of power from one President to another, in 1800 the election was the first to mark the transfer of power from one party to another. Jefferson’s Inaugural Address was notably more poetic than the prosaic addresses of his two predecessor’s. Besides stylistic differences, it was also notable in that Jefferson specifically outlined policies that he would pursue and the political direction he would take the country in. Unlike either Washington or Adams, neither of whom touched on actual policy issues in their first speeches, Jefferson explicitly referred to the immediate political situation facing the country; for these reasons his speech deserves attention. Both Washington and Adams and their colleagues had worried over and warned against the divisive and potentially anti-democratic role that political parties might play in the country’s politics. Yet despite these alarms, the rise of a clearly identifiable two-party system during the 1800 race signaled an unalterable turn away from the Founder’s original hopes for a unifying nationalism spirit devoid of factionalized power-politics.

During his Presidency, faced with an array of immediate problems whose solutions would set patterns for subsequent generations, George Washington had more or less aligned himself with what would become the Federalist party. While he avoided labels, and at times would criticize Federalist policies and politics, during his presidency he agreed with many of the policies that Alexander Hamilton, the architect of the Federalist approach, sought to enact. In 1788 the Constitution’s signers were all nominally Federalists, if for no other reason than they allied themselves against their opponents, the anti-Federalists. The anti-Federalists were not a formal party in any modern sense of the word, but a movement of Federal and State legislators who were suspicious of granting power to a centralized government. They worried that the road being traveled would lead to monarchy, despotism or both, and opposed the ratification of the Constitution. As a political tendency, their movement quickly faded. This was in part due to their political marginalization, theirs was a minority position, and partly due the fact that they were unable to define a clear alternative to the ratification of the Constitution. However, Jefferson’s Republican party did not spring from this early dissent, anti-Federalist dissent. The anti-Federalists have faded into obscurity. Rather a fierce opposition to Federalism sprang from within the ranks of the Federalists themselves.

Jefferson’s Republicans opposed what they saw as a dangerous tendency whereby John Adams, Alexander Hamilton and others, sought to accrue power and create a large, centralized government that they worried would be the source of an internally wrought tyranny. The partisan political struggles of 1800 quickly became an existential battle between the Federalists and the new Republican party. Adding to its volatility was each side’s accusations that their opponents were working in the interests of and even under the direction of foreign governments. The Republicans characterized the Federalists as monarchists, overly influenced by the British. In turn the Federalists accused the Republicans as irresponsible and dangerous Jacobins, attempting to import the excesses of the French Revolution to American shores. The way that politics were conducted in America underwent massive changes between the election of Washington and that of Jefferson twelve years later. The men who conceived of the new republic had imagined a world of politics dominated by unity of purpose, virtuous behavior and conducted within the strict confines of an elite code of behavior — a true gentleman’s club where customs checked what were considered an unseemly grasping for power. Washington, Madison and others raised significant questions about the extent to which the country could rely on higher ideals to appeal to the more mundane and immediate needs of the majority of the country’s citizens. From the earliest days of the new nation, the Founders worried that the kind of self-sacrifice and unity of purpose that fueled the Revolution was in short supply. Looking back at those years from the 1800s, Adams wrote “jumble and chaos as this nation appears at this moment, I never knew it better united — it is always so, the history of this world is nothing else but a narration of such divisions.”²

The fissures and cracks of political division would begin to emerge during Washington’s presidency and would become even more pronounced during Adams’. Under both men’s tenure in office the government grew rapidly. Partly, it was inevitable, since the new government had started out in such an anemic condition. Partly, it was indeed due to a belief, most notably expressed by Hamilton, that for the United States to be successful and secure it needed to have a strong Federal government. The entire rationale for scrapping the Articles of Confederation and adopting the Constitution was to create a government that could protect the country internally and externally, manage the debt accrued during the Revolutionary War, regulate trade, conduct diplomacy and levy the taxes necessary to build a bureaucracy that could do so. In this sense, there was broad agreement that the idea of loosely federated states and a coordinating, but weak central government, was not adequate to ensure the nation’s future. Yet over time, Jefferson, James Madison, and others began to worry about the scope and extent of the enlargements proposed by their more expansion minded colleagues. One of the early notable disagreements was over centralization of debt and the issuance of currency. These changes, architected by Alexander Hamilton, who successfully convinced Washington and others that they were essential for the success of the new government, were uneasily accepted by those sharing Jefferson’s as yet fully articulated, Republican sentiments. While the Constitution had delegated the job of executing policy and spending money to the Presidency, it had not specified the mechanisms necessary to accomplish these ends. One of what would become a cornerstone of the Executive branch, the Cabinet and their attendant bureaucracies, was not defined in the text of the Constitution. Hamilton stepped into this void by designing what quickly became the cabinet system we are familiar with now. However, at the time, like the Federal government’s entrance into monetary policy and fiscal management, these moves were controversial. In Washington’s first year as President he established the offices of Secretary of State, Treasury, War and that of the Attorney General. Adams would appoint the Secretary of the Navy in 1798. Yet with Jefferson’s assumption of office, and his skepticism about the growing size of government, the next appointment, that of Postmaster General, would be delayed for over thirty years and not occur until 1829.

Jefferson’s election after Adams’ single term presidency was in large part due to the rise of political parties simultaneous to the increasingly bitter and fractious disagreements over the role of the Federal government. However, beyond technical disagreements about the size and nature of the government, tensions also grew along class, social and sectional (geographic) lines. To many citizens, the Federalists looked like a new Aristocracy. While neither Adams nor Hamilton were wealthy, both having demonstrated significant self-sacrifice to serve in government, their experience and backgrounds as seemingly self-made men were not representative of their peers. In fact the Founders were often wealthy and landed men who set themselves socially apart from the much larger, less cultured, less well educated and much poorer citizens who had followed them to war and then elected them to run the government. The Founders were mostly men who came from the country’s small, but ensconced elite, men like Adams and Hamilton were more exceptions that proved a rule, rather than representatives of a levelled, equal society. The historian Kenneth A. Lockridge observed that at the turn of the century, as the Republican Party emerged with a democratic rhetoric of anti-elitism, that notable parts of the country “were being transformed to look more and more an old world society: old world in the sense of the size of farms, old world in the sense of an increasingly wide and articulated social hierarchy, old world in that ‘the poor’ were ever present and in increasing numbers.”3 North Eastern traders, bankers and burgeoning industrialists were drawn to the Federalists, their promotion of infrastructure development, free-trade, and economic management directly benefited the expanding business class. Increases in the birth rate as well as a steady stream of immigrants were also creating social pressures and social differences which would grow into political divisions expressed through party alignments and divergent political ideologies. Jeffersonian Republicans made overtures to the country’s new men; they criticized the elite (although they were more often than not firmly entrenched in that elite) and appealed to large segments of the population who believed they were held back by men who had appointed themselves to be their superiors.

At the same time that domestic divisions were widening, the country’s diplomatic situation was becoming more complex. In the early days after the Revolutionary war, the Republic had largely benefited from relative calm on the international front. The centuries old rivalry between France and Britain were more or less quiescent in the years leading up to the French Revolution. Spain was preoccupied with the ongoing breakup of her Central and South American Empire and, although American and Spanish territory abutted one another, the expanse of the South Western deserts kept the future American empire and the waning Spanish one at arm’s length. However, soon after Washington took office the French Revolution erupted, and as a result America’s foreign relations would become more complicated through the beginning of the nineteenth century.

The English had decided to end the Revolutionary War more due to political and economic fatigue than military defeat. While thirteen colonies had exited the British Empire, the colonies that revolted were not particularly economically successful (in contrast to the Caribbean where the English maintained a vast slave empire producing valuable commodities for sale in Europe). During the war, Washington’s Army fought a superior British force mostly by avoiding battle, stretching the enemy’s supply lines, and carefully choosing the time and location of major battles. The British quit their enterprise not in the face of military defeat, but due to the war’s expense and the political costs of pursuing it. After winning the Revolutionary war, it would take decades for the new United States to find a secure place for itself in a re-arranged international order. The idea of a new state emerging as a republican democracy was an historical anomaly. The closest points of reference were distant indeed: the Republics in Northern Italy that formed during the Middle Ages and which blossomed during the Renaissance, and the even more ancient models of the early Roman Republic and the cradle of democracy, Athens. While these earlier republican governments sated an idealistic and intellectual thirst after the nature and form of democracy, the American experiment had no contemporary basis upon which to make its case for sovereignty. It was considered as a new, unstable and insubstantial volunteer in a constellation of great European Empires. The new nation had no salient references upon which to base its claims for sovereignty.

It was in this context of a complex and threatening international environment, where a weak America was forced to balance its interests in a world populated with powerful rivals ready to challenge her borders and trade rights, that domestic politics intermixed with international intrigue. Washington’s concerns about the effects of “permanent alliances,” diplomatic intercourse with European countries would fade as the fate of the new nation became firmly linked to the pressures of international politics. Washington and his contemporaries were adamant in their determination to keep America separated from the centuries of intrigue and bloodshed that had plagued Europe throughout its post-Medieval incarnation. American diplomacy throughout this period would broadly follow the precepts established in 1776 when John Adams had drafted his Model Treaty as a guide for future diplomacy. After the United States had declared itself free of Great Britain, it would have to manage its foreign relations on its own. Adams proposed a diplomatic strategy to bolster the development of trade, but which would avoid the dangers of military alliances. Jefferson wrote in his Inaugural Address that America should avoid intercourse that could draw her into European quagmires. In his Inaugural Speech he referred to European politics as the “exterminating havoc of one quarter of the globe.” Yet even with a broad consensus between the Federalists and Republicans regarding America’s diplomatic strategy, foreign affairs became a volatile battleground for the partisan politics of 1800. First Washington, and then Adams, found themselves increasingly on the political defensive, as their domestic opponents criticized their foreign policy initiatives. The criticisms were sharp and often personal; at times devolving into almost paranoid fears that their decisions were being influenced by the English and were geared towards ultimately establishing a monarchy in America.⁴

After the Revolution the English quit the colonies and abandoned the Eastern seaboard, but remained thoroughly ensconced in the Ohio Valley, in the northern reaches of the continent, and to the south maintained their lucrative slave empire in the Caribbean. Most of Europe assumed that democracy in the New World would be short-lived. The English, and soon the French, would show little deference to American sovereignty. American diplomats, regardless of any desire to stay removed from Europe, found their trade regularly bullied and territory threatened. Washington’s Administration addressed its precarious international situation by entering into a treaty with England along the lines that Adams’ established in his Model Treaty. Washington dispatched John Jay, a co-author of the Federalist Papers and later the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Courts, to negotiate a treaty with Great Britain that would normalize relations and avoid war. The resultant agreement accomplished its goal of buying the new nation time to breathe. However, it came at the cost of significant concessions to Great Britain; it promised peace but failed to clearly define the boundaries of American sovereignty. The treaty was widely criticized by those who saw it as a step towards closer relations with Great Britain, while simultaneously damaging relations with France, they complained that it drew America into European relationships and intrigues that would threaten the country’s security. Washington’s conclusion of the Jay treaty would have significant repercussions, both domestically and internationally, during Adams’ Presidency.

Foreign affairs would be directly reflected in domestic politics. The twists and turns of international diplomacy would both influence, and be influenced by, domestic politics and provide a source of heightened tensions in the duel being played out with the emergence of parties and partisan politics. France had been an important ally of the colonies during the Revolutionary War. Thomas Jefferson was like many Americans who loved France for the important role she had played, and who had developed strong personal relationships with French citizens, diplomats and soldiers. These francophile sentiments reinforced parallel concerns that America’s true international challenge came from England. Jay’s treaty came under scrutiny by those who felt that the Federalists had engineered a weak agreement with British at the expense of better relations with the French. On their part, the French were angered by the American treaty. Their endless struggle with the British was heating up again as France underwent its own Revolution in the same year that Washington took office. War between the two European behemoths broke out in 1793. Despite American diplomatic doctrine that called for the U.S. to remain neutral in European wars, the Europeans had different ideas. France was determined to limit Great Britain’s trade and considered Jay’s treaty with its enemy to be almost a casus belli. As the war between England and France heated up, France would begin aggressively interdicting U.S. shipping, claiming its right to limit any trade with Great Britain during wartime. The resultant hostilities, called the “Quasi-War,” marked the end of the earlier quiet period of U.S. international relations, and with it ended the dream that America could remain at arms length from European politics and war.

During this period the domestic political divisions between the Federalists and Jeffersonian Republicans were amplified within American society as each party aligned itself with their favored great European power. These split alliances were reflected in clothing worn on the street. This garb of the old colonial elite, English hair styles, britches and buckled shoes, were counterpoised by the new Republicans who attached French influenced tricolor cockades to their hats (with the Federalists responding by wearing a black cockade), and adopting the sans-culotte and hairstyles of the French Revolution. As the historian Gordon Wood explained of this spilling over of politics into the social sphere, “all aspects of American culture — parades, songs, art, theater, even language — became engines of one party or another promoting France or Britain.” A new expression of party politics emerged where Republican clubs formed, the precursors to the local party operations of our modern system. Some of these clubs were quite radical and even received financial support from French foreign agents. The French used their influence to foment fiery political rhetoric and were even implicated in a series of riots and civil disturbances meant to coerce members of Congress to push the U.S. to join more fully in France’s war against Great Britain. This behavior was denounced as dangerous, and eventually seditious, by the Federalists. In addition to attempting to influence America’s domestic politics, France became more emboldened by its military successes in Europe. Its emissaries in the United States organized privateers, legally sanctioned pirates, who attacked English shipping. French agents purchased ships, outfitted them with cannon, recruited sailors, and sent them out to harass English shipping from the safety of American ports.⁵

Adding fuel to America’s domestic political fires were a new class of partisan newspapers. As the century came to its close, newspapers proliferated in the United States. Wood noted that after the Revolutionary war, “Americans were rapidly becoming the largest newspaper reading public in the world.” The expansion of the newspaper industry and the reading public occurred in conjunction with the rise of Party politics. The newspapers, traditionally popular for their reliable crop and trade information, became more infused with political content. Their fiery partisan editors routinely engaged in political rhetoric and took an active part in the political process. The majority of the newer, more politically oriented journals supported the Republicans. Wood notes they played a large role in the shaping of public opinion in this period, writing that

in the generation following the Revolution, over three hundred thousand British and Irish immigrants entered the United States. Many were political or religious refugees, radical exiles driven from Britain and Ireland because of their dissenting beliefs…. Since many of these radical exiles were writers, printers, and editors, they inevitably ended up in America creating or running newspapers. Indeed, they contributed in disproportionate numbers to the rapid growth of the American press. In the several decades following the end of the Revolutionary War, twenty-three English, Scottish, and Irish radicals edited and produced no fewer than fifty-seven American newspapers and magazines, most of which supported the Republican cause in the politically sensitive Middle States.

The mixing of domestic politics with foreign policy, the external pressures placed on the United States as the new European wars heated up, the increase of threats, rumors, and paranoia in daily political discourse all collided with the revelations of the XYZ Affair. The impact of this diplomatic crisis would mark a sharp change of public opinion in favor of the Federalists. Then, in another sudden and sharp reversal, triggered by Adams’ overreaction in passing the Alien and Sedition Acts and his jailing of critics, the Republicans benefited from a political wind that would reverse public sentiment and carry Jefferson into the White House in 1801.⁶

X, Y, and Z were pseudonyms used to disguise the identities of participants in a French scheme to extort money and concessions from the U.S. in exchange for peace in the undeclared Proxy War that had erupted between the two countries. The French, angered by John Jay’s 1794 trade treaty with Great Britain, and emboldened by their own, more recent, military successes in Europe, increased their harassment of American shipping which often carried goods to and from England. With the two countries on the brink of war, Adams, as Washington had earlier with the English, sought a diplomatic solution with France. Adams sent a delegation to France. However, they were blocked from even meeting with Talleyrand, the French Minister for Foreign Affairs, until they agreed to pay a personal bribe. After a long series of unsuccessful attempts to pursue a peace treaty, the American delegation gave up and returned home.

When the delegation returned to the United States, and it was revealed that the efforts had failed, Adams came under withering criticism. Republicans accused him of engineering the failure as a Federalist scheme to throw America’s support behind England in her war with France. These critiques found significant traction in the midst of the moment’s partisan politics. Adams correctly felt that the real reasons, Talleyrand’s corruption and the insincerity of the French to enter into real negotiations, were too politically volatile to reveal. He was trapped, however, as pressure continued to mount Adams ultimately relented and released a series of documents that revealed the real reason that the negotiations had failed. The prime evidence was a letter that dramatically hid the names of three French functionaries behind the pseudonyms, X, Y, and Z, and revealed the French corruption and simultaneously threw increasingly vitriolic domestic politics into a new phase of chaos. Public opinion shifted dramatically. Criticism of Adams and the Federalists and concerns about close relations with England were replaced by anger at the French, their local agents, and their political supporters, many, if not all, who were Republicans.

Adams immediately capitalized on the shift in sentiment. With international tensions heightening, Adams successfully lobbied Congress to create a new cabinet position, the Secretary of the Navy, and provide funding for a naval force adequate to defend U.S. shipping from French attacks. This was a blow to the Republicans who not only wanted to keep the government as small as possible, but also were fearful of large standing militaries, which they saw as easily converted to the ends of whatever political faction was in power. Adams acted domestically as well, spurred by the angry rhetoric in the street and the revelation of plots and intrigue that had long been the fodder for wild conspiracy theories. He struck back not only against French subversion and trouble-making, but also against vocal critics of his government. The administration quickly passed two new laws: the Alien Act and the Sedition Act. The Alien Act was designed to allow the government to easily expel foreign nationals whom they suspected of violating U.S. law and sovereignty. While no one was prosecuted under its statutes, it had a chilling effect and many French nationals left the U.S. in anticipation of its enactment. The Sedition Act was less benign; it was aimed directly at domestic political dissent. Over two dozen individuals, mainly U.S. citizens, including prominent newspaper publishers and a U.S. Congressional representative were indicted. Ten of those brought up on charges were convicted and suffered fines and in a few cases, imprisonment. In his pursuit of these imagined seditionists, Adams’ triggered another dramatic swing in public opinion. Where the XYZ Affair had radically altered the political narrative in the Federalists favor, the Alien and Sedition Acts reversed public opinion against what were widely understood as draconian measures to stifle free speech. The Alien and Sedition Acts became powerful campaign issues that Jefferson and his Republicans capitalized on; substantially contributing to Adams’ electoral defeat in 1800.

In 1801, after surmounting the obstacles that a confused process and concerted political opposition placed in his path, Jefferson measured the political task in front of him and delivered an Inaugural Address seeking to put partisanship aside and call for unity. The eloquence of his Inaugural Address was in contrast to those of his two predecessors. Washington and Adams each delivered short speeches that extolled the nation’s institutions and people yet omitted any specificity regarding the policies they would pursue. In addition to its stylistically superiority, Jefferson’s speech was much more explicit than those of his predecessors in setting forth his policy agenda. Jefferson’s opening declaration signaled a desire to reduce tension and bring together the parties, and the nation, that had so conspicuously divided itself over economic, sectional, political and social issues. In one notable section of the speech, Jefferson confidently proclaimed that “we are all Republicans, we are all Federalists.” He acknowledged the sharpness of the political debates that had fueled partisan division — and batted them away. He posited that anyone still upset at the tone and tenor of the discourses of the election were “strangers, unused to think freely and to speak and to write what they think.” He assured his audience that democracy and the “will of the majority” had prevailed in the election and that partisan disputes had been decided by the majority. He promised the losing Federalists that the election’s victors would “be reasonable” and assured them “that the minority [still] possess their equal rights”; he enjoined his audience to “unite with one heart and one mind.” Jefferson’s calls for unity were responsive to the needs of the moment. His calls for political unity are remembered because they remain thematically resonant within the universal experience of political discord. Yet while the speech’s poetry and universal message resonate with our modern ear, its themes recognizable and its cadence pleasing, Jefferson’s speech also engaged with his contemporaries around issues that were unique to their contingent circumstances.⁷

The ideas expressed in Jefferson’s Inaugural Speech were the product of a long process of thinking and reaction to specific events that he went through in the two decades after he wrote the Declaration of Independence. They were simultaneously an expression of the Republican Party’s ideology, as well as that of, what he believed, was a unifying, consensual politics shared by all Americans. A year before the election Jefferson wrote out “a profession of my political faith.” He claimed that his politics were not partisan, but were an expression of “sincere zeal” to “wish an inviolable preservation of our present federal constitution, according to the true sense in which it was adopted.” Jefferson believed that his Republicanism was essentially and authentically American. He thought that the Federalists had strayed into something that was anti-democratic and monarchically influenced. Adams’ jailing of political dissidents under the strictures of the quickly passed Sedition Act, solidified his views and those of the growing Republican party. When he called for unity, proclaiming that “we are all Republicans, we are all Federalists,” Jefferson made a distinction between types of Federalists. On the one hand there were authentic Federalists, within this group he would place Adams, whom he would admonish for having incorrect views regarding the size of government etc., but whom he felt still fell within a boundary of an orthodox, American, small “r” republicanism (in spite of Adams’ anti-democratic stifling of speech). Jefferson explained that he took Adams and his brand of Federalists “to my bosom as brothers, I view them as honest men, friends to the present constitution. Our difference has been about measures only, which now having past away, should no longer divide us.” However, he also believed that there was another type hiding behind the label of Federalism; these were both inauthentic and potentially dangerous. He described these false-Federalists as people who would “lurk” behind men like Adams, but were in fact a “heretical sect of monarchists; afraid to wear their own name.” For Jefferson the “real” Federalists were “sheep” who permitted “the fox to take shelter among them.”⁸

Jefferson’s speech provided a concise outline of the policies that the Republicans would pursue in office, these were: liberty at home (he would free the men imprisoned under the Sedition Act and return their fines shortly after taking office); a foreign policy that would allow for increased commerce but avoid “entangling alliances”; states rights in contradiction to a relatively weak federal government; a national defense strategy that would rely on state militias to repel attacks on U.S. soil or to buy time while a regular army could be raised to deal with more serious incursions; low taxes; a commitment to pay the countries debts; and economic support for agriculture and “commerce as its handmaid.” In his listing, much more specific than anything his two predecessors engaged in, Jefferson not only outlined a clear political direction that his party would take, but one that he felt was less an expression of a partisan, separate politics, but a unified American one. Jefferson’s enunciation of what his party’s Republicanism stood for was an attempt to move away from the partisanship that had split the country by defining the boundaries of a new, consensual political creed. Jefferson didn’t rely on simple platitudes in support of a hazy unity; he asserted a specific political program that he believed was not reflective of both his Republican philosophy and also was the articulation of an authentic, universal, American creed. While that may not have been true then, aspects of his ideology are clearly reflected in our own moment’s politics, even if they yet define a particular ideology and not one shared by both parties.⁹

In office both Washington and Adams benefited from what can be understood as a broad political consensus, there was little ideological jockeying during their respective elections. More or less, the two Presidents preceding Jefferson governed within the context of a single dominant political milieu. This is not to say that there were no political differences, but there wasn’t a cohered opposing narrative challenging the dominant one. They pursued a more-or-less shared national project and a broadly embraced matrix of social norms, values, and Enlightenment world-view, their political differences appeared within the boundaries of a single political movement. That changed during the election of 1800 and any consensus, or illusion of consensus, was fractured under the pressure built up over decades. The assumption that their approach and thinking represented universal truths turned out to be unfirm ground upon which to assemble their creation. The country they architected, like Washington, D.C. at the turn of the century, would be left to future generations to complete.

Jefferson’s first speech as President dealt directly with the policy and political issues he felt were critical to address at the time. He articulated a political program that he thought had universal appeal, and he offered a hand of friendship and reassurance to his defeated rivals. As Jefferson came to office he sought to mollify those on both sides of the country’s political divide whose rhetoric and actions threatened the republic and to quell the fires ignited by partisan competition. respond to, and down the mounting pressures developing from contentious and unresolved structural flaws. However, reading his Inaugural Address as a comprehensive plan for reclamation and repair elides the stark divisions that Jefferson, however eloquently, papered over. Jefferson was well known not only for his erudition, eloquence, and charm, but also for his aversion to conflict. This predilection, on its surface a bid to heal, lacked the substance to address the deep flaws and contradictions that had been solidified within the country’s institutions in the formative period after the Revolution.

The Jeffersonian Republicans are often portrayed in the hagiographic, heroic narratives popular today, as proponents of a modern, levelled, accessible, authentically American, democratic process. In this narrative the Federalists are cast as the Republican’s compliment: representatives of an elitist clique that was more European than American, more autocratic than democratic. However, this juxtaposition describes these people and their time anachronistically in the fundamentally different language and context of our own time; it is less than an accurate translation. As noted, the historian Gordon Wood observed that there were significant contradictions between the seemingly levelling and democratizing politics of the Republican party and trends that were shaping the society into an increasingly hierarchical, unequal form. Among the most notable were the growing social and class differences between the common, new men that the Republican’s claimed as their constituency and the men who led their movement. Aaron Burr, who could easily have been president, was a product of the stratified heights of American aristocracy. By all accounts Burr was more interested in the accrual and use of power for his own purposes, than reforming the government in the wake of Federalist excesses. For his part, Jefferson was a wealthy slave-holder whose intellectualism and philosophizing led him to express odd and impractical political ideas. At one point he pontificated that all laws, and the entire Constitution, should be invalidated and re-drawn every few decades because otherwise young men would have no stake in the system they were coming of age in. Jefferson was also an enthusiastic supporter of France. He was happy for Revolution and especially the troubles it caused the entrenched European aristocracy which Jefferson held in contempt. Yet despite his general revolutionary spirit he was critical of the Haitian Revolution and the victory of its Black freedmen and former-slaves over the French. Jefferson, like many of his fellow slave-holding and wealthy peers, was terrified by the specter it created of a similar slave revolt in the United States.

The circumstances, mechanisms and processes that placed Jefferson in the White House became less and less democratic as their wheels turned. Jefferson was the first winner of the Presidency who owed his election to the racially divisive three-fifths doctrine and the imbalances of the electoral college. Jefferson, who was the standard bearer of a more open democracy, won office in a process where the voice of the public went virtually unheard and was more notable for the gamesmanship of a new class of political operatives than for any increase of democratic process. One of the innovations that accompanied the rise of party politics, was the attention given to manipulating the levers of the complex process — the rules and procedures by which elections were held.

Aaron Burr’s power, popularity and position in the Republican party was largely due to his ability to deliver New York’s electoral votes to the Republicans. Jefferson, Burr and others carefully calculated and sought advantage in the political process. They displayed all the zeal and cunning we experience with our present day political operatives, lobbyists, tricksters and consultants. New York’s large bounty of electoral votes were apportioned by the State’s Assembly, not by popular vote. Burr played the busy shepherd of New York’s process and took elaborate steps to ensure that the Assembly was controlled by the Republicans; he prepared

a roster of all voters in the city and had party workers visit every known Democratic-Republican to round up support and contributions. His house was crowded with messengers and committeemen and poll watchers who ate while they mapped strategy and napped on the floors rather than go home to sleep. Burr also introduced “fagot voting” into the party’s political repertoire during this campaign, enfranchising scores of working people who failed to meet the property requirement for voters by making them joint owners of a single piece of property.

As a feted “master of the electioneering arts,” one of his awed Federalist opponents asked Burr how he had engineered the victory. Burr responded: “we have beat you by superior management.”¹⁰

While the Republican victory may have been a victory for the day’s “forgotten man,” enfranchised, “common,” white men, it was a disaster for the people at the other end of the social spectrum, Blacks and Native Peoples. The imperative to expand Westward had been a central component of the European colonial experience since contact. A significant irritant in the Colonial relationship with Great Britain had been the latter’s diplomatic agreements with the Native American polities west of the East Coast’s mountain ranges and throughout the Ohio Valley. The British checked the Colonist’s desired Westward expansion to the frustration of the white population. While the white settlers were anxious for cheap Western lands, British diplomacy required good relations with the Indigenous Nations who controlled the Western reaches of the continent. After the Revolutionary War, one of the most successful policy achievements of the new American government under the Articles of Confederation was the “opening” of the Ohio valley and the subsequent quick, often violent, evacuation of its native inhabitants. In the new century, Jefferson oversaw an enormous expansion Westward with the 1803 purchase of France’s vast holdings that stretched beyond the Mississippi River. The constant Westward migration pushed native people from their land to provide tracts of land to white settlers. Jefferson famously called these new men “Yeoman Farmers.” They were the small landholders who Jefferson argued would be the bedrock of democracy. They worked their own land, which invested them in the Republic, and made them economically free. Jefferson ascribed, as many of his age did, to a classical belief argued by Aristotle, that this attachment to the land was a fundamental requisite for political freedom and enfranchisement. Jefferson imagined his Yeomen Farmers to be the basis upon which an authentic and firm American nation would be built.

Of slavery little was said directly by either political party. However, the silence over the issue, and the aggressive Republican preference for State sovereignty over Federal power and law, meant that the slave holding states were given license to continue the practice indefinitely. Jefferson was referred to as the “N…r President” by some of his detractors. This insult was levied by critics who worried over the power that the country’s slanted electoral system gave to slaveholders. The three-fifths clause of the Constitution, and the additional power that small states got from the equal apportionment of Senate seats, threw the election to Jefferson; the power of this structural imbalance showed itself clearly for the first time. These concerns would appear in subsequent years, expressed by what was known as the “Slave Power” conspiracy. By the middle of the new century many believed that there was a cabal operating from the slave states and exerting anti-democratic, hidden political power. Yet these concerns were less about slavery than the weighted political power wielded by the southern states. Fear about Slave Power was less about the slaves themselves and their lack of freedom, than the economic impact that slave labor exerted to cheapen the value of white labor, driving wages down.

But neither party had a monopoly on the blinders that focused attention on the narrow concerns of the men who controlled the political system. In January 1801, as his presidency came to a close, John Adam’s clearly articulated his thoughts about the politics of slavery in a letter to two abolitionists attempting to enlist his support. After first assuring the correspondents who sent him an abolitionist pamphlet that he was not a slave holder himself, he warned that “the abolition of slavery must be gradual and accomplished with much caution and circumspection.” In terms of his own concerns he wrote that “there are many other evils in our country which are growing, whereas the practice of slavery is fast diminishing.” Adams was more concerned that the

sacred regard to truth in which you and I were educated, and which is certainly taught and enjoined from on high, seems to be vanishing… [There is] a general relaxation of education and government. A general debauchery… These are in my opinion more serious and threatening evils… I might even add that I have been informed that the condition of the common sort of white people in some of the southern states… is more oppressed, degraded and miserable than that of the Negroes.¹¹

The limits of Republican reforms conformed not only to the viewpoint of slaveholders like Jefferson, but broadly within the political thinking and power structures that defined the contours of what was considered possible within a narrowly framed politics. The introduction of parties in American politics reflected and reinforced deepening divisions within the society. While the new structure of politics raised the volume of debate over certain issues, it stifled others. The structure of the Constitution and the emerging contours of political power evident in 1800, are still redolent and unresolved today.

Notes

1. “the revolution of 1800,” “Founders Online: From Thomas Jefferson to Spencer Roane, 6 September 1819.”; “surrounded,” “its ground,” and “stood” Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815, 289–290.

2. “Founders Online: From John Adams to Benjamin Rush, 12 June 1812.”

3. Kenneth Lockridge as quoted in Shalhope, “Toward a Republican Synthesis: The Emergence of an Understanding of Republicanism in American Historiography,” 76.

4. “Permanent alliances,” “George Washington’s Farewell Address.”; “exterminating havoc,” Jefferson, “Inaugural Address.”

5. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815, 255.

6. “Americans were rapidly,” Wood, 251.; “in the generation,” Wood, 252. summarizing Paul Star, The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications (New York, 2004), page 80.

7. Jefferson, “Inaugural Address.”

8. “A profession,” “sincere”, “wish,” “Founders Online: From Thomas Jefferson to Elbridge Gerry, 26 January 1799.”; “we are all,” Jefferson, “Inaugural Address.”; remainder, “Founders Online: ‘Fair Play,’ 1 June 1803.”

9. Jefferson, “Inaugural Address.”

10. Burrows, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898, 328.

11. “Founders Online: From John Adams to George Churchman, 24 January 1801.”

References

Burrows, Edwin G. Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898. Edited by Mike Wallace. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

“Founders Online: ‘Fair Play,’ 1 June 1803.” Accessed January 31, 2021. https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-40-02-0349-0002.

“Founders Online: From John Adams to Benjamin Rush, 12 June 1812.” Accessed January 14, 2021. https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/99-02-02-5807.

“Founders Online: From John Adams to George Churchman, 24 January 1801.” Accessed February 9, 2021. https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/99-02-02-4766.

“Founders Online: From Thomas Jefferson to Elbridge Gerry, 26 January 1799.” Accessed January 31, 2021. https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-30-02-0451.

“Founders Online: From Thomas Jefferson to Spencer Roane, 6 September 1819.” Accessed February 7, 2021. https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/98-01-02-0734.

“George Washington’s Farewell Address.” Presidential Speeches, September 19, 1796. Miller Center. https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/presidential-speeches/september-19-1796-farewell-address.

Jefferson, Thomas. “Inaugural Address.” The American Presidency Project, March 4, 1801. UC Santa Barbara. https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/inaugural-address-19.

Shalhope, Robert E. “Toward a Republican Synthesis: The Emergence of an Understanding of Republicanism in American Historiography.” The William and Mary Quarterly 29, no. 1 (1972): 49–80.

Wood, Gordon S. Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815. Oxford University Press, 2009.