American Experiment (29 page)

Powerful forces lay behind even this slender effort. An economic depression in the South had resulted in more hardship on the plantations and in extensive selling and leasing of black people. Prosser and his fellow rebels were mostly artisans and domestic workers, more removed from the field and the lash but also more marginal in their work and more likely to be uprooted. They were also more exposed to the cries of liberty and equality echoing throughout the Western world. At one meeting a rebel leader threw his arms around another and exclaimed, “We have as much right to fight for our liberty as any men.” Having achieved a little status, insecure though it was, they were motivated by needs for more status, prestige, self-esteem—one reason for the hunger for military titles that were awarded to the more active recruiters. They knew their Bible, and brother Martin quoted from Scripture to prove that delay bred danger and that, as he told the leaders, God had said that “five of you shall conquer an hundred, and a hundred a thousand of our enemies.”

So now the one thousand huddled near the brook, already rising fast from the downpour, and awaited the command to move across the bridge to the city. The plan was to attack the Capitol, the magazine, the penitentiary, and the governor in his house; to seize large quantities of ammunition and warehouse goods; then to set houses on fire. As the white residents tried to put out the conflagration, the rebels would fall upon them. The conquest of Richmond, the leaders expected, would ignite a chain reaction of local uprisings. Civil war would engulf the nation as free blacks, mulattoes, Catawba Indians, French troops, and even poor whites joined the cause. White women were to be spared, as were Quakers, Methodists, and French persons, for the rebels “conceived of their being friendly to liberty.” French warships would land troops on the coast to help fight the slavocracy, as they had done a quarter century before to fight the British oppressors.

But none of this dream was to be. The rainstorm raged through the night, turning more ferocious by the hour, washing away the only bridge the rebels could use to get to Richmond. Neither God nor good fortune
seemed on the side of the smaller battalions. Even if the bridge had remained, Governor James Monroe and his troops were ready in Richmond, for Gabriel and his men had been betrayed by a black man on the day the revolt was to happen. Quickly Monroe had fortified the Capitol with cannon, called up six hundred troops, and sent the alarm to militia commanders throughout Virginia. Retribution was swift and hard. A number of rebel leaders were quickly rounded up and executed. Gabriel escaped on a schooner but was apprehended and brought back to the capital in chains.

Monroe had vainly hoped to minimize the affair, for fear of uprisings elsewhere and of Federalist efforts to exploit the revolt in the presidential campaign. Soon a Philadelphia newspaper was proclaiming that the insurrection, which was seen as organized on
“the true French plan,”
must be decisive for Adams. Monroe turned to the Republican candidate for advice. When, he asked Jefferson, should one “arrest the hand of the Executioner?” The sage of Monticello was ambivalent. He could well understand how some would want to extend the executions. But: “Even here, where everything has been perfectly tranquil, but where a familiarity with slavery, and a possibility of danger from that quarter prepare the general mind for some severities, there is a strong sentiment that there has been hanging enough. The other states & the world at large will forever condemn us if we indulge a principle of revenge, or go one step beyond absolute necessity.”

But, added the presidential candidate, “I hazard these thoughts for your own consideration only, as I should be unwilling to be quoted in the case.”

Gabriel went to his death in silence, even when he was brought before the governor to explain his act; “he seemed to have made up his mind to die,” Monroe said later. Another rebel did speak on facing the judge. He had nothing more to offer in defense than what George Washington would have had to offer, he said, had he been taken by the British and put to trial by them. “I have adventured my life in endeavoring to obtain the liberty of my countrymen, and am a willing sacrifice to their cause.” He asked only to be led at once to execution.

By fall the presidential race was reaching a climax. Slander on both sides was uncontained—and the politicos of the day were masters at it. Adams was called a would-be dictator and a “monocrat” who would make the country a monarchy and his children successors to the throne. Even Adams could smile at a story that he had sent a United States frigate to England to procure mistresses for himself. The Federalists gave even better than they got. Jefferson was an infidel, a “howling” atheist, an “intellectual
voluptuary” who would “destroy religion, introduce immorality, and loosen all the bonds of society” at home. The Jacobin leader was the real debauchee, Federalists whispered, having sired mulatto children at Monticello. Somehow the voters groped their way through the invective to a sense of the genuine issues. They faced a real choice. Jefferson was still silent as a candidate, but he had repeatedly made clear his stands for a frugal government, a small Navy and Army, states’ rights, the Bill of Rights liberties, a small diplomatic establishment. The Federalists had made their positions clear through legislation they had passed, or tried to pass. The election would be a showdown between men, platforms, and ideologies.

Slowly the returns came in as electors met and voted in their states. The Federalists had a moment of euphoria as Adams picked up some unexpected support. By late November the two parties were running neck and neck. For a time Federalist hopes were pinned on South Carolina, on whether Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, Adams’ running mate, could deliver that state’s eight electoral votes. But Pinckney could not even deliver all the Pinckneys, least of all Charles Pinckney, leader of the Republican branch of the family, who through generous offers of jobs under a Republican administration, managed to persuade enough members of the state legislature to choose a pro-Jefferson slate of electors.

By late December the total vote was in. It was Jefferson over Adams, 73 to 65. But it was also Burr over Pinckney, 73 to 64, with one of Pinckney’s votes diverted to John Jay.

The Republicans had won, but Jefferson had not been elected. Burr had an equal constitutional claim to the presidency. Something new and extraordinary had happened in American politics: the parties had disciplined their ranks enough to produce the same total (73) for the two Republican, running mates and an almost equal tally (65 to 64) for the two Federalists. In order to prevent votes from being thrown away, each party caucus had pledged equal support to both candidates on the ticket. To do this was to run the risk that, under the Constitution, a presidential tie vote would go to the House of Representatives for decision. Both parties knowingly ran that risk. But the politics of the lower chamber would be quite different from the politics of the electoral groups meeting separately in the state capitols. The presidential race would now be focused in the nation’s capitol; it would take place in a lame-duck, Federalist-dominated House of Representatives; and each state delegation in the House, whether large or small, would have a single vote.

The remarkable result was that the Federalists had lost the presidency, but in the Congress they had the power to throw the election to either Jefferson or Burr, or possibly stall indefinitely. What would they do with
this exquisite consolation prize? Most of the congressional Federalists feared Jefferson the ideologue more than they hated Burr the opportunist. “They consider Burr as actuated by ordinary ambition, Jefferson by that & the pride of the Jacobinic philosophy,” high Federalist George Cabot wrote Hamilton. “The former may be satisfied by power & property, the latter must see the roots of our Society pulled up & a new course of cultivation substituted.” If Burr was ambitious, slippery, and even venal, well, perhaps the Federalists could make use of such qualities; “they loved Burr for his vices,” John Miller has noted. Other Federalists disagreed. No matter how much they hated Jefferson, they were not going to put into the presidency a man they considered a knave and a blackguard.

The competing forces were so counterpoised that the House of Representatives went through thirty-five ballotings, all resulting in a vote of eight states for Jefferson, six for Burr, and two divided. The stalemate lasted as long as the representatives stuck to their convictions, or biases; it ended when three men—Jefferson, Burr, and Hamilton—acted out of character. Jefferson, no longer the relaxed and diffident philosopher, responded to the looming crisis with anger, but also with decisiveness and determination. He began to act like the President-elect as soon as the unofficial returns were in; thus he wrote Robert R. Livingston to ask him to serve as Secretary of the Navy—the New Yorker declined—and incidentally to discuss the bones of a mammoth that had been found near New York. He wrote Burr, congratulating him on the election results but implying ever so delicately that Jefferson expected him to serve as Vice-President. He wrote Burr again to warn that the “enemy” would try to “sow tares between us,” and branding as a forgery a letter purportedly by Jefferson that criticized Burr. At the same time Jefferson subtly let out word that, while he would not make deals—he knew that Burr could outdeal him—he could be counted on to act moderately as President, to be “liberal and accommodating.”

Hamilton had no time for subtleties. His clear hierarchy of animosities—he resented Adams, hated Jefferson, and despised Burr—helped him to decide early that if the choice lay between Jefferson and Burr, he would thwart the latter. While Jefferson was only a “contemptible hypocrite,” crafty, unscrupulous, and dishonest, Hamilton told his Federalist friends, Burr was a “most unfit and dangerous man,” a Jacobin who would overthrow the fiscal system, a rogue who would “employ the rogues of all parties to overrule the good men of all parties,” and above all a Catiline who would take over the government as Napoleon had just done in France. Hamilton had little influence with the Federalist “high-flyers” (as Jefferson called them) in Congress, but his principled view that his party must not
bargain with the likes of Aaron Burr carried weight with national Federalist leaders such as John Jay.

Burr played a waiting game. He assured Jefferson and his friends so convincingly that he would not deal with the enemy and balk the real will of the people that Jefferson confided to his daughter: “The Federalists were confident, at first, they could debauch Col. B from his good faith by offering him their vote to be President,” but his “conduct has been honorable and decisive, and greatly embarrasses them.” Burr’s behavior was curious all the way through. He evidently did spurn a deal with the Federalists, but he did not take the honorable course of simply withdrawing; he never made perfectly clear that he would not serve as President if elected; he apparently allowed some of his friends to put out feelers on his behalf; and his best strategy in any event would have been inaction, since the Federalist bloc in Congress was cemented to his cause as a result of their hatred and fear of Jefferson. Still, the long-drawn-out constitutional crisis afforded Burr countless opportunities to undercut Jefferson and perhaps to win the presidency—but he remained in Albany, attending to his law practice.

Twelve weeks passed as Jefferson remained resolute, Hamilton busy, Burr inactive, and the election stalemated. There is no record of all that happened in the last confused, crisis-ridden days; in particular we know little of the role of less visible but influential politicians. John Marshall evidently angled for his own selection as President should the deadlock persist. But this much seems clear: during the final weeks the nation veered toward disunion and civil war, as Republicans threatened to bring in state militias from Pennsylvania and Virginia if the Federalists further thwarted the “popular will.” The crisis revealed not merely two parties in combat but four party factions: Jeffersonians, Burrites, high Federalists mainly centered in Congress, and a group of moderate Federalists led on this occasion by Hamilton and nurtured in the nationalist, moderate leadership of George Washington.

As March 4, 1801, approached and tension mounted two developments staved off a constitutional and perhaps military debacle. Jefferson, all the while asserting that he would not “receive the government” on capitulation, that he would not go into it “with my hands tied,” told a Federalist intermediary that the public credit would be safe, the Navy increased, and lesser federal jobholders left in their places. And ingenious mediators worked out an artifice that enabled Jefferson to be elected President without a single Federalist voting for him. A number of Federalists cast blank ballots, and a single congressman from Vermont now cast his state’s vote for Jefferson. That congressman was “Spitting Matt” Lyon.

The crisis was over—Thomas Jefferson was elected President of the United States. Much would be made in later years of this unprecedented example of a peaceful shift from one party to another, of the avoidance of violence and bloodshed, of the example Americans had set for other constitutional republics. But it had been a close-run thing. If Jefferson had not been firm in his ambition, Hamilton not principled in his hatred, Burr not inactive; if moderates in both parties had not been in control, or if fewer politicians had respected the Constitution, the American republic probably would have lived a briefer life than many republics before and since. Perhaps most decisive in the whole episode was the willingness of state and local leaders, Federalist and Republican, to wait for the crisis to be resolved rather than break into local magazines, gather arms, and march on the Capitol. Once again “followers” had acted as leaders.

The suspense of the election quickly changed into excitement over the coming of a new President, a new party, a new government, a new program. Later Jefferson would argue that the “Revolution of 1800 was as real a revolution in the principles of our government as that of 1776 was in its form.” But whether 1800 would be a real revolution—that is, a
transformation
of ideological, economic, social, and political structure—would depend on the leadership of a man who glorified revolution in theory but exercised moderation in practice.