Mr. President (34 page)

Ironically, anticipation of the election in some ways softened dissent. The Virginia legislature had appealed to other states to follow its lead in declaring the Alien and Sedition Acts “unconstitutional,” but none did. The rebels in Pennsylvania had hoped others would join them in resisting wartime taxes, but none did. Instead, with the election looming, most Republicans chose to alter their tactics, preferring electoral politics over direct or violent confrontation; playing too strong a hand, they reasoned, would only hurt their chances at the ballot box. Here was a payoff for free and reasonably frequent elections, which not only prevented dictatorship but also provided an alternative to revolutionary upheavals. Yet the election would not proceed along the lines the delegates to the Federal Convention had intended, because they had failed to predict the hardening of party lines. Viewing the presidency as a winner-take-all affair, each side, of necessity, tried to muscle its way into power, pushing the limits of the system stipulated in the Constitution.

The jockeying began at the state level. Since electors were to be chosen in a manner determined by state legislatures, Republicans and Federalists alike realized that to elect a president, they would have to organize locally and secure majorities in those bodies. Organizational techniques varied from state to state, but partisans had previously figured out ways to solidify support for candidates to state offices and
Congress. Legislative leaders in Massachusetts, New York, and Virginia caucused to nominate candidates and strategize. Party activists in Delaware and New Jersey gathered in state conventions. In Pennsylvania and Maryland, local party committees coordinated efforts to select slates and bring out the vote. By 1800, these fledgling party organizations were poised to tackle the much larger task of electing a president.
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Several states were not competitive, but a few were. In Pennsylvania in 1799, Republicans prevailed in a close gubernatorial election, but the state senate remained in the hands of Federalists, and the two parties couldn’t agree on the manner of selecting electors. Confident they had a majority, Republicans favored statewide elections that would give them all of Pennsylvania’s fifteen electors, but Federalists pushed for district elections, in which they would capture several spots. Fearful that the new governor, Thomas McKean, would try to rig the system in favor of the Republicans, the U.S. senator James Ross, the Federalist whom McKean defeated, introduced a bill in Congress that would allow a committee of thirteen—six senators, six representatives, and one representative selected by the Senate—to judge the eligibility of contested electors from any state.
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Republicans immediately cried foul. Both the Senate and the House were under Federalist control, and if Ross’s bill passed, Federalists could police the election in such a manner as to produce a president of their own persuasion. Republican senators tried amending the bill to make it less conspiratorial; committee members should be chosen by lot, they said, and the proceedings should be open to the public. The Federalist majority rejected both amendments, and the bill proceeded through its first and second readings.
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On the third and final reading, the South Carolina Republican Charles Pinckney (son of Thomas Pinckney’s cousin) took the floor and assailed the bill as “even more alarming than the alien and sedition law.” His central argument was irrefutable: “By the Constitution, electors of a President are to be chosen in the manner directed by the State Legislatures—this is all that is said…. There is not a single word in the Constitution which can, by the most tortured construction, be extended to give Congress, or any part of our Federal Government, a right to make or alter the State Legislature’s directions on this subject.” This was true not only in the letter of the law but in the spirit as well. Pinckney, who had been a delegate to the Federal Convention,
reminded the House that he and his colleagues, when writing the Constitution, had intentionally stripped Congress of its authority to choose the president, except when electors could not produce a majority winner. They had done this in the hopes of preventing intrigue and ensuring presidential independence, but if Ross’s bill passed, intrigue would be the inevitable result, and the president would become a creature of Congress. In a contested election, he predicted, “party spirit” would “govern every decision.” Losers at the state level would raise objections that their friends in Congress would uphold, thereby invalidating their opponents’ electors. Free elections would thus become farcical. “Give the power of deciding on their votes, and of rejecting or receiving them as they please, to thirteen men, all of the same political description, all wishing the same men, sitting behind closed doors, and whose deliberations are removed from the public eye, and you will find it difficult to avoid suspicion.” Citizens would understandably lose faith in “the integrity of government”—the bedrock of a republican nation.
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It was a carefully prepared and persuasive speech, but fortunately for the bill’s proponents there was no need for a reasoned rebuttal. Immediately after Pinckney relinquished the floor the question was called, and Ross’s bill passed the Senate along strict party lines, 16 to 12.
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The House, though, killed the measure by making alterations the Senate did not accept. Members there had their own reasons for not going along with the Senate’s plan. According to the Constitution, the House would choose the president if electors produced no clear winner, but Ross’s bill would effectively give control of the election to the Senate, which determined the majority of the committee’s thirteen members. Further, moderate Federalists in the House faced elections by the people every two years, and once the Republican newspaper
Aurora
pirated a copy of the bill and published it, congressmen who supported it would do so at their peril.
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Defeat of the Ross bill averted a national disaster, for it would have undercut the authority of the president by delegitimizing the electoral process. But other dangers lurked. The contentious political environment that produced the Ross bill and allowed it to advance as far as it did would produce another crisis not so readily circumvented.

To understand the election of 1800, we need to know the playing field and the time line. Congress had stipulated that electors would meet at
their respective state capitals to cast their votes on December 3. Since each state was at liberty to decide how and when electors would be chosen, “election day” in 1800 could be anytime before then. Four years earlier, eight states had permitted the people to choose their electors, but now that number had dwindled to five. In these states the election could be as late as November, but in the eleven states in which the legislatures chose electors, the people’s only say in the matter would come during the annual election for state legislators, which could be up to a year earlier; after that, the choice of electors, and therefore the president, was in the hands of those we would today call politicians.

In several states, politicians in the legislatures altered the rules of the game to favor their particular party, which, under the Constitution, they were perfectly entitled to do. In Massachusetts and New Hampshire, Federalist legislatures took the decision out of the hands of the people and gave it to themselves, thereby ensuring a complete slate of Federalist electors. The Republican legislature in Georgia did likewise. In Virginia, the Republican-dominated legislature changed from district voting to statewide voting to keep Federalists from capturing a few seats. The Federalist legislature in Maryland wanted to eliminate popular elections by district, which had produced a split group of electors in 1796, and choose the electors themselves to produce a Federalist sweep, but this itself became a major campaign issue, and in October Republicans gained control of the legislature. In Pennsylvania the Republican assembly quarreled with the Federalist senate, and only at the last minute did the two bodies arrive at a compromise that split the state’s electors almost equally, eight Republicans and seven Federalists.
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New York was a special case, and very consequential. As the law stood early in 1800, electors were to be chosen by the legislature, which Federalists controlled. Unless that changed, New York would end up totally in the Federalist column, as it had in 1796. Hoping to take a few votes this time around, Republicans took the high ground and pushed for district elections by the people, but the Federalist legislature held firm. Then, in the April state election, aggressive door-to-door campaigning by Republicans placed the legislature unexpectedly in their hands. Each party immediately switched its position: Federalists favored district elections so they could capture a few seats, while Republicans thought it best to keep the decision with the legislature. Real-world politics trumped political theory. What counted was the result, not the process.

Alexander Hamilton took the shift of power in his home state hard. Like any astute observer at the time, he saw that the loss of New York’s twelve electoral votes would be difficult to make up elsewhere and his party might very likely lose. In a panic, he wrote to the state’s governor, John Jay, his friend, political ally, and co-author of
The Federalist
. Immediately, Jay should call an emergency session of the outgoing Federalist legislature in order to institute district elections, Hamilton proposed, thereby preempting the appointment of electors by the incoming Republicans. Recognizing his blatantly political proposal might be viewed harshly, he tried to muster some semblance of a moral argument to support it:

Pressuring Jay as best he could, Hamilton concluded, “Appreciate the extreme danger of the crisis, and I am unusually mistaken in my view of the matter, if you do not see it right and expedient to adopt the measure.” The governor saw it differently. At the bottom of Hamilton’s letter he scribbled, “Proposing a measure for party purposes wh. I think it wd. not become me to adopt.”
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While much of the political maneuvering in the early going was independent of the actual candidates, neither party could succeed without settling on a standard-bearer; if either party split its votes, it would likely lose. Selecting a candidate, of necessity, was an insiders’ game. The framers had tried to decentralize the choice of president by requiring electors to meet separately and simultaneously in the state capitals, but the emerging parties undercut their intention. If parties were national, as they had to be in order to have any chance of success, they needed to gather in some central location to nominate candidates, and the most logical place was Philadelphia, the nation’s temporary capital. There, congressmen separated into their respective parties and caucused. On May 3, Federalists gathered within the Senate chamber and decided to
support John Adams for president and Charles Cotesworth Pinckney for vice president, and they discussed strategies to get them elected. On May 11, at Maraché’s boardinghouse nearby, Republicans tapped Thomas Jefferson for president and Aaron Burr for vice president.

Jefferson’s nomination was uncontested. He was currently vice president, he had almost been elected president four years earlier, and he was willing. As in 1796, Burr was added to provide regional balance, but this time his inclusion seemed to make more sense, for he had played a major hand in delivering New York to the Republicans. His nomination did present one problem, however. In the previous election, numerous southern Republicans had balked and left him off their tickets, and if they did so again, John Adams might come in second and become vice president, which no Republican wanted. Party loyalty was therefore paramount, and Republicans vowed to make sure their electors voted for both nominees.

Adams proved more problematic. He had softened his stance on France and disbanded the additional army, thereby widening the rift with High Federalists, but he had strong support in New England, and by avoiding a war with France, he had even placated some moderate Republicans. To leave the sitting president off the ticket would be suicidal, the caucus concluded—but could they get him elected? As they had done four years earlier, they tried to make inroads into the Republican South by nominating a Pinckney from South Carolina for vice president—not Thomas Pinckney this time, but his brother. Yet Adams’s supporters worried, with good reason, that Hamilton and his allies might try to play the same trick as they had in 1796, when they tried to get Pinckney elected over Adams. At the caucus, New Englanders vowed to hold true and get their electors to vote for both candidates, but would that happen? What if it did, and Pinckney out-polled Adams in South Carolina to elevate him to the presidency? The alliance between moderate Federalists, dubbed Adamsites, and High Federalists, led by Hamilton, was tenuous at best.

Note the featured factors in these debates and decisions: nominating caucuses, tickets with regional balance, party loyalty, pledged electors. None of these had been anticipated at the Federal Convention, yet all would become fixtures in presidential politics.

So thorough was the obsession with capturing the presidency that it competed with actual governance. “Our parties in Congress seem to
regard the approaching election as the only object of attention,” wrote Fisher Ames, a High Federalist. A year before electors were to meet and cast their votes, Speaker of the House Theodore Sedgwick offered proof of Ames’s assessment in a letter to a fellow Federalist: “In all our measures, we must never lose sight of the next election of President.”
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