TWENTY-EIGHT
There is a debt of service due from every man to his country, proportioned to the bounties which nature and fortune have measured to him.
—THOMAS JEFFERSON
You and I have formerly seen warm debates and high political passions. But gentlemen of different politics would then speak to each other.… It is not so now. Men who have been intimate all their lives cross the streets to avoid meeting, and turn their heads another way, lest they should be obliged to touch their hat.
—THOMAS JEFFERSON to Edward Rutledge
THE PUBLICATION OF WASHINGTON’S farewell address on Monday, September 19, 1796, set off America’s first contested presidential election. The Washington announcement was, Massachusetts congressman Fisher Ames said, “a signal, like dropping a hat, for the party racers to start.”
Presidential elections in the first decades of the republic were odd affairs. Candidates did not campaign. They allowed, obliquely or through friends and allies, that they were available to be elected. Networks of the like-minded put together a ticket for president and vice president. In most states individual electors let it be known that a vote for them would be a vote for their favorites for both offices. Until the ratification of the Twelfth Amendment in 1804 there was no distinction between the two offices in the electoral college. The second place finisher became vice president.
However different in form presidential contests were, one feature has been constant from the beginning: They have been rife with attacks and counterattacks.
It took just ten days from the publication of Washington’s farewell for Jefferson’s enemies to strike against him, and strike hard. On Thursday, September 29, 1796, The Columbian Mirror and Alexandria Gazette published a statement from Charles Simms, a Federalist lawyer close to President Washington. Simms was campaigning to become a presidential elector for John Adams from Prince William, Stafford, and Fairfax counties in Virginia. He took Jefferson on directly in his late September broadside. Jefferson, Simms charged, was not fit for high office, for he had fled the wartime governorship “at the moment of an invasion of the enemy, by which great confusion, loss, and distress accrued to the State in the destruction of public records.” Such a man was too weak to be president, Simms said, “for no one can know how soon or from whence a storm may come.” Jefferson was, in other words, a coward driven by vanity. Adams, on the other hand, was a statesman who could be counted on to stay the course set by George Washington.
The Jeffersonians reacted with force. John Taylor of Caroline, a pro-Jefferson Virginian, drafted a reply for publication. It made the case that Governor Jefferson had not failed in his duty, telling again the story of the invasion of 1781. Most important, in what was to become a perennially useful political theme, the Republicans argued that the contest of the hour was about the present, not the past. It was, they said, about the conflict between republican and monarchical visions of American government.
Taylor illustrated his point by describing a 1794 conversation with Vice President Adams and New Hampshire senator John Langdon in which Adams allegedly said that “no government could long exist, or that no people could be happy, without an hereditary first magistrate, and an hereditary senate, or a senate for life.” Campaign literature read: “Thomas Jefferson is a firm REPUBLICAN—John Adams is an avowed MONARCHIST.”
After the Jay Treaty, the next president faced the rising prospect of war with France—a possibility that imbued the election with an even greater sense of urgency that it already had.
Enduring a late-autumn cold spell at Monticello—the temperature had dropped to 12 degrees, freezing the ink in its well on his desk—Jefferson awaited news of the 1796 election results. Given the tasks facing the next president, he said the vice presidency might be preferable to winning the presidency itself. “Few will believe the true dispositions of my mind on that subject,” Jefferson wrote. “It is not the less true however that I do sincerely wish to be the second on that vote rather than the first.”
Hamilton, who opposed both Adams and Jefferson, was a complicating factor. He devised a fascinating strategy to deny his two rivals the presidency by urging Federalist electors in South Carolina to cast ballots for Adams’s choice for vice president, native son Thomas Pinckney, for president rather than vice president. Hamilton’s motive? Madison wrote to Jefferson that Hamilton believed Adams “too headstrong to be a fit puppet for the intriguers behind the screen.”
One sign that Jefferson was more invested in a personal victory than his formulaic protestations to the contrary lies in a note Madison wrote him on Saturday, December 10, 1796. “You must reconcile yourself to the secondary as well as the primary station, if that should be your lot,” Madison told Jefferson. The emphasis on “must” is Madison’s—suggesting that Jefferson’s closest political friend and counselor knew the presidential candidate to be anxious for the top post. Madison was also preparing his friend for the possibility that the Hamiltonian maneuvering could throw the election into the House of Representatives if Adams and Jefferson ended up in a tie in the vote.
Jefferson knew that a subsequent numerical deadlock in the House was also possible—“a difficulty from which the constitution has provided no issue,” he wrote Madison. Should he and Adams find themselves in such a situation, Jefferson authorized Madison to “fully to solicit on my behalf that Mr. Adams may be preferred. He has always been my senior from the commencement of our public life, and the expression of the public will being equal, this circumstance ought to give him the preference.”
As the returns reached Philadelphia, Pinckney faded to third, and Madison’s worries reverted to the fear that Jefferson had been so set on becoming president that he might refuse the second spot. Appealing first to Jefferson’s concern for reputation, Madison wrote that “it is expected that as you had made up your mind to obey the call of your country, you will let it decide on the particular place where your services are to be rendered.” Moreover, having a Republican influence in close proximity to the president could be important, even critical. “There is reason to believe also that your neighborhood to Adams may have a valuable effect on his councils particularly in relation to our external system,” Madison wrote.
On Wednesday, February 8, 1797, the votes were tallied. Adams won, barely, by a margin of 71 to Jefferson’s 68. Pinckney carried 59. The Federalists fretted about Jefferson’s winning the vice presidency. One anti-Jeffersonian clergyman was reported to have prayed: “O Lord! Wilt Thou bestow upon the Vice President a double portion of Thy grace, for Thou knowest he needs it.”
Adams was thrilled to become president. As he had written Abigail, he believed deeply in “the sense, spirit, and resources of this country, which few other men in the world know so well [or] have so long tried and found solid.” Despite the second-place finish, Jefferson found the results flattering. “I value the late vote highly,” he said, “but it is only as the index of the place I hold in the esteem of my fellow-citizens.”
Jefferson spent the cold weeks after the election ruminating on politics. “I knew it was impossible Mr. Adams should lose a vote North of the Delaware, and that the free and moral agency of the South would furnish him an abundant supplement,” he wrote. “On principles of public respect I should not have refused [the presidency]: but I protest before my God that I shall, from the bottom of my heart, rejoice at escaping.”
He took a wry, knowing tone: “The honeymoon would be as short in that case as in any other, and its moments of ecstasy would be ransomed by years of torment and hatred.” The vice presidency was the better place at this hour. “This is certainly not a moment to covet the helm,” Jefferson said.
Whispers of possible secession to form a confederacy of northern states appeared in The Connecticut Courant in November and December 1796—whispers that hinted at a larger source of tension. At issue was the advantage Jefferson and his fellow Southerners had in national elections because of the three-fifths clause, the constitutional provision that counted a slave as three-fifths of a person to establish the number of congressmen and presidential electors allocated to each state. When Jefferson went on to win the presidency four years later, his Federalist critics would disparage him as the “Negro President” because of his dependence on the three-fifths clause. The battles over slavery were thus rooted not only in the debate over the morality of abolition but in the practical political reality that every additional slave state (ironically and tragically) increased the power of white office seekers from those states.
Jefferson found it preferable—and more comfortable—to strike grand notes on secession rather than engage his adversaries on the stark realities of the mathematics of power. “We shall never give up our union, the last anchor of our hope, and that alone which is to prevent this heavenly country from becoming an arena of gladiators,” he told Elbridge Gerry.
In the last days of the 1796 election, Jefferson had drafted a kind letter to Adams. After the usual disclaimers (“I have no ambition to govern men”), Jefferson wrote that the presidency was “a painful and thankless office.” Should Adams be able to “shun for us this war by which our agriculture, commerce and credit will be destroyed,” then “the glory will be all your own; and that your administration may be filled with glory and happiness to yourself and advantage to us is the sincere wish of one who though, in the course of our voyage through life, various little incidents have happened or been contrived to separate us, retains still for you the solid esteem of the moments when we were working for our independence.”
On New Year’s Day 1797, Jefferson sent Madison a draft of the letter to Adams. “I can particularly have no feelings which would revolt at a secondary position to Mr. Adams,” Jefferson wrote. “I am his junior in life, was his junior in Congress, his junior in the diplomatic line, his junior lately in our civil government.” Nevertheless, he asked Madison whether he should send Adams the letter.
Madison replied with a six-point case against it. The key ones: Since things were currently cordial between the two men, “it deserves to be considered whether the idea of bettering it is not outweighed by the possibility of changing it for the worse.” Another: “May not what is said of ‘the sublime delights of riding the storm etc.’ be misconstrued into a reflection on those who have no distaste to the helm at the present crisis? You know the temper of Mr. A. better than I do: but I have always conceived it to be a rather ticklish one.” Another: “The tenderness due to the zealous and active promoters of your election, makes it doubtful whether their anxieties and exertions ought to be depreciated by any thing implying the unreasonableness of them. I know that some individuals who have deeply committed themselves, and probably incurred the political enmity at least of the P. elect, are already sore on this head.” And finally: “Considering the probability that Mr. A.’s course of administration may force an opposition to it from the Republican quarter … there may be real embarrassments from giving written possession to him of the degree of compliment and confidence which your personal delicacy and friendship have suggested.”
Jefferson was grateful for the counsel. He would not mail the letter.
Jefferson reached Philadelphia on Thursday, March 2, 1797. Without delay he called on the president-elect. Adams, who lodged at Francis’s on Fourth Street, repaid the courtesy the next morning, visiting Jefferson in his temporary quarters. Closing the door behind him, the president-elect said he was glad Jefferson was alone. The two had much to talk about.
Adams spoke of France, telling Jefferson that he had considered asking the new vice president to undertake a mission to Paris, “but that he supposed it was out of the question, as it did not seem justifiable for him to send away the person destined to take his place in case of accident to himself, nor decent to remove from competition one who was a rival in the public favor.” What did Jefferson think of dispatching Madison to join a diplomatic mission in Paris?
Jefferson agreed that he should not leave the country and thought Madison would refuse such a post. Adams, however, seemed determined. “He said that if Mr. Madison should refuse, he would still appoint him and leave the responsibility on him.”
The ceremonial proceedings in Congress Hall on Saturday, March 4, 1797, were brief but memorable. Congress gathered for a short session; the business was the inauguration of the president and the vice president and the swearing-in of new senators and representatives. The president pro tempore of the Senate, William Bingham of Pennsylvania, administered the oath of office to Jefferson in the second-floor Senate chamber.
The first American secretary of state was now the second vice president of the United States. Jefferson, in turn, swore in the eight new senators and delivered a short speech. He alluded to his broad political convictions and, graciously but unmistakably, to the mortality of the president: “No one more sincerely prays that no accident may call me to the higher and more important functions which the constitution eventually devolves on this office.”
In a sign of the virulence of the time, some Jefferson supporters found his speech too conciliatory. “His first act in the Senate was to make a damned time-serving, trimming speech in which he declared that it was a great pleasure to him to have an opportunity of serving his country under such a tried patriot as John Adams, which was saying to his friends—I am in; kiss my—and go to H-ll,” one New York Republican was said to have remarked.
After Jefferson was done, they reconvened in the House chamber on the ground floor of Congress Hall for the presidential inauguration of John Adams. As Adams recalled it, George Washington seemed cheerful—even relieved: “Methinks I heard him think ‘Ay, I am fairly out and you fairly in! See which of us will be happiest.’ ” Jefferson thought Washington a lucky man. “The President is fortunate to get off just as the bubble is bursting, leaving others to hold the bag,” he wrote Madison. Privately, Jefferson repeated his claims of satisfaction at the results of the election. “The second office of this government is honorable and easy,” Jefferson said. “The first is but a splendid misery.”
Two days after the inauguration, Adams and Jefferson dined with Washington. The new president and vice president left the table together. On the street, Jefferson told Adams that Madison would decline the appointment to France.
It was just as well. The new president had spent time with his cabinet that day and found opposition among the Federalists to his thought of sending Madison. “He immediately said that on consultation some objections to that nomination had been raised which he had not contemplated,” Jefferson recalled, “and was going on with excuses which evidently embarrassed him, when we came to 5th Street where our road separated, his being down Market street, mine off along 5th and we took leave: and he never after that said one word to me on the subject, or ever consulted me as to any measures of the government.”
John Adams governed amid stress and strain. As president he fought to keep the peace, or at least a semblance of it, during what became known as the Quasi-War with France, a sustained series of expensive naval engagements. (Adams referred to it as “the half war with France.”) To see him through his years in office, he retained Washington’s cabinet, including the Federalist secretary of state, Timothy Pickering. This proved problematic, for the cabinet officers tended to see themselves as autonomous, complicating Adams’s administration by undercutting the president. And as vice president, Jefferson spent most of his time presiding over the Senate and tending—quietly—to the construction and nurture of the Republican opposition to Adams’s Federalist government.
Reflecting on the evening conversation with Adams and on the events of Monday, March 6, 1797, Jefferson wrote: “The opinion I formed at the time on this transaction was that Mr. A. in the first moments of the enthusiasm of the occasion (his inauguration) forgot party sentiments, and as he never acted on any system, but was always governed by the feeling of the moment, he thought for a moment to steer impartially between the parties; that Monday the 6th of March being the first time he had met his cabinet, on expressing ideas of this kind he had been at once diverted from them, and returned to his former party views.”
The Adams presidential years were busy personal ones in Jefferson’s domestic sphere. Patsy Randolph had three children between 1796 and 1801. In 1796 the Duc de la Rochefoucauld called at Monticello and found that Patsy’s younger, beautiful sister Polly “constantly resides with her father; but as she is seventeen years old, and is remarkably handsome, she will doubtless soon find that there are duties which it is sweeter to perform than those of a daughter.” The next year Polly married John Wayles Eppes, a cousin. They would have two children. And Jefferson himself arrived at Monticello for a visit on Tuesday, July 11, 1797. Nine months and two weeks later, Sally Hemings gave birth to a son. The baby was named William Beverley, called Beverley.
During the vice presidential years Jefferson became more philosophical about criticism, seeing it as an inevitable feature of political life, something to be endured—like storm or fire—if one wished to prevail in the public arena. “I have been for some time used as the property of the newspapers, a fair mark for every man’s dirt,” he wrote. “Some too have indulged themselves in this exercise who would not have done it, had they known me otherwise than thro’ these impure and injurious channels. It is hard treatment, and for a singular kind of offense, that of having obtained by the labors of a life the indulgent opinions of a part of one’s fellow citizens. However these moral evils must be submitted to, like the physical scourges of tempest, fire etc.” It was a more mature and measured view than he had held even while in France or at the beginning of his term as secretary of state—a sign that Jefferson had the capacity to grow and to learn. He did not have to like it, but he knew he had to put up with it.
He was thinking along the same lines in terms of partisanship. By the end of the 1790s he could even be contemptuous of politicians who held themselves above party. “A few individuals of no fixed system at all, governed by the panic or the prowess of the moment, flap as the breeze blows against the republican or the aristocratic bodies, and give to the one or the other a preponderance entirely accidental,” he wrote Burr in June 1797.
The Jefferson political style, though, remained smooth rather than rough, polite rather than confrontational. He was a ferocious warrior for the causes in which he believed, but he conducted his battles at a remove, tending to use friends and allies to write and publish and promulgate the messages he thought crucial to the public debate. Part of the reason for his largely genial mien lay in the Virginia culture of grace and hospitality; another factor was a calculated decision, based on his experience of men and of politics, that direct conflict was unproductive and ineffective.
Jefferson articulated this understanding of politics and the management of conflicting interests in a long, thoughtful letter to a grandson. “A determination never to do what is wrong, prudence, and good humor, will go far towards securing to you the estimation of the world,” he wrote to Patsy’s son Thomas Jefferson Randolph. Good humor, Jefferson added, “is the practice of sacrificing to those whom we meet in society all the little conveniences and preferences which will gratify them, and deprive us of nothing worth a moment’s consideration; it is the giving a pleasing and flattering turn to our expressions which will conciliate others and make them pleased with us as well as themselves. How cheap a price for the good will of another!” Jefferson went on:
When this is in return for a rude thing said by another, it brings him to his senses, it mortifies and corrects him in the most salutary way, and places him at the feet of your good nature in the eyes of the company. But in stating prudential rules for our government in society I must not omit the important one of never entering into dispute or argument with another. I never yet saw an instance of one of two disputants convincing the other by argument. I have seen many of their getting warm, becoming rude, and shooting one another. Conviction is the effect of our own dispassionate reasoning, either in solitude, or weighing within ourselves dispassionately what we hear from others standing uncommitted in argument ourselves. It was one of the rules which above all others made Doctr. Franklin the most amiable of men in society, “never to contradict anybody.”
The pro-English Jay Treaty had produced a cataclysmic reaction in France. The efforts to keep peace with Britain in part because of France now led to fears of war with France because of Britain. Such were the politics of the 1790s.
French ships began seizing American craft. “I anticipate the burning of our seaports, havoc of our frontiers, household insurgency, with a long train of etceteras which it is enough for a man to have met once in his life,” Jefferson wrote.
The perpetual threat of conflict—first with one European power, then with another—infused American politics with a sense of constant crisis. Both Federalists and Republicans believed the fate of the United States could turn on the confrontation of the hour. In the broad public discourse, driven by partisan editors publishing partisan newspapers, there seemed no middle ground, only extremes of opinion or of outcome.
Into this culture of entrenched division came the publication of a 1796 letter of Jefferson’s that appeared to attack President Washington as a tool of the British interest.
It was May 1797 when Philip Mazzei publicized the Washington letter Jefferson had written him the year before. “It would give you a fever were I to name to you the apostates who have gone over to these heresies, men who were Samsons in the field and Solomons in the council, but who have had their heads shorn by the harlot England,” Jefferson had written of the Jay Treaty controversy. “In short, we are likely to preserve the liberty we have obtained only by unremitting labors and perils.” The letter was taken as a Jeffersonian assault on Washington and the president’s allegedly pro-British tendencies, which made it perfect fodder for the Federalist press. “The passions are too high at present to be cooled in our day,” Jefferson wrote an old friend.
About that, at least, both Republicans and Federalists might have agreed, for anecdotes suggesting the other side’s extremism and unreasonableness were in substantial supply.
The Federalists had Jefferson’s Mazzei letter, and Republicans heard plenty about their enemies, too. On Christmas Day, 1797, Madison repeated worries that Adams was using a new yellow fever epidemic to seize additional power by possibly postponing the meeting of Congress.
And word reached Jefferson that Adams, upset at Republican George Clinton’s respectable showing in the 1792 balloting for vice president, had said: “Damn ’em, Damn ’em, you see that an elective government will not do,” and that Adams had reportedly recently remarked that “Republicanism must be disgraced, sir.”
Jefferson was intrigued by similar tales about Hamilton. In late 1797, Tench Coxe alleged that Hamilton had said “ ‘For my part … I avow myself a monarchist; I have no objection to a trial being made of this thing of a republic, but’ etc.” Such stories did little to calm Jefferson’s fears about his Federalist colleagues.