The American Vice Presidency (11 page)

ELBRIDGE GERRY

OF MASSACHUSETTS

W
ith the vice presidency remaining vacant for nearly a year after the death of George Clinton, predictably a northern Republican would be sought as Madison’s running mate in 1812, in order to bring the strength of New England to the Virginian’s bid for presidential reelection.

The Republican congressional caucus first turned to John Langdon of New Hampshire, giving him sixty-four votes to only sixteen for Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts. But when Langdon declined the nomination, the caucus held a second vote, and Gerry, an enthusiastic backer of Madison on the prosecution of the War of 1812, which had just begun in response to British interference with American shipping and commerce, won seventy-four of the seventy-seven ballots cast.

After two terms as governor of Massachusetts, Gerry had just been defeated for a third term, in part for his support of Madison’s foreign policies, unpopular in New England. But like Clinton, his vice presidential predecessor, Gerry had a long and distinguished history as a son of the American Revolution—a signer of the Declaration of Independence, a member of the Continental and Confederation Congresses, a delegate to the Constitutional Convention, and a member of the first U.S. House of Representatives.

He was the son of a successful prominent Marblehead trader, shipowner,
and merchant whose vessels carried fish, whale oil, and lumber products to the West Indies, returning with rum, sugar, and molasses. The father, Thomas Gerry, a member of what was called “the codfish aristocracy” in New England, also sent his ship to ports in Spain for choice wines. Then he sold them in his general store on the family wharf in Marblehead, eventually the prime fishing harbor among the North American colonies under British rule.
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The town had a reputation for rugged independence. A minister in neighboring Salem, William Bentley, once described its denizens “as profane, intemperate and ungoverned as any people on the Continent.”
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Elbridge Gerry, named after a favored uncle, John Elbridge, was committed to the family business, enrolled at Harvard at the age of fourteen, and later moved to Cambridge. On a business trip to New York he met Thomas Jefferson and eventually married a New York woman but in his demeanor remained a Marblehead elitist, like his father, and a fierce patriot of the soon-to-be American Republic. Early on, when the British Parliament began to impose taxes detrimental to the town’s prosperity, Elbridge’s voice could be heard in loud dissent in local councils and town meetings.

The Boston Massacre of 1770, in which British troops fired into a crowd of angry protesters, triggered Gerry’s entry into full-throated opposition to British occupation. He initiated a boycott on the sale or use of imported tea, which remained a subject of British taxation. Eventually, after joining with Samuel Adams in a Boston-Marblehead campaign of resistance to British edicts, he gained new prominence in New England politics. When in 1772 Adams created a Boston committee of correspondence to show solidarity against the English, Gerry helped organize one in Marblehead. His further outspoken protests against British taxation and other impositions finally led to Gerry’s election as Marblehead’s representative to the Massachusetts legislature.

Subsequently, however, a local fight over the construction of a hospital in Marblehead to cope with a smallpox epidemic led to a mob burning it down, demonstrating to Gerry that the British were not the only inhibitions to local rule. He resigned from the Marblehead committee of correspondence for a time, rejoining when a British edict closed Boston Harbor to commerce after the destruction caused by the Boston Tea Party. By 1775, he was a member of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress, formed in defiance of
the British after a new governor, General Thomas Gage, had dissolved the old legislature. Gerry quickly served on key committees, including one considering means of self-defense, presumably against growing British oppression, and another against colonial taxes in an act of open revolt.
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At the same time, he proposed to Adams that other steps be taken to put the colony on a war footing, foreseeing a threat not only to political but also to religious freedom. “I understand that Soldiers are attended to their Graves with Mass,” he wrote, “and I expect that popery [Catholicism] will be soon not only tolerated but established in Boston.” And in Marblehead, Gerry was elected at a town meeting to direct extra pay for local “minutemen” to train “in the arts of war, on which alone … depends the Salvation of the Country from Slavery.”
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As a result of such preparations, Marblehead came close to replacing Lexington and Concord as the places where “the shots heard ’round the world” announcing the start of the American Revolutionary War were fired. On the night of April 18, 1775, as Gerry and his colleagues were asleep in the Black Horse Tavern after discussing the movement of armaments to avoid British detection, they were awakened by the sound of marching British troops on their way to Concord. They fled, and troops entered the tavern but found only empty beds. The war could have begun right there but for the flight of Gerry and his party.
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Once the fighting started, Gerry took a leading role in acquiring arms from the other colonies and from overseas for a Massachusetts army in the making. He plunged deeply into financial and currency matters to pay for the war and was among the first to propose Washington as commander-in-chief of what became the Continental army. After holding out for a time for a conciliation with the British, Gerry became a strong voice in the Continental Congress for declaring American independence and was a signer of the Declaration, penned by Jefferson. Originally favoring the creation of a new central government to prosecute the war, he also defended states’ rights and sovereignty and opposed the extension of powers to a central entity, in line with Anti-Federalist principles in debates over the Articles of Confederation in 1777, which in the end he also signed.
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After enactment of the Paris Peace Treaty, officially ending the Revolutionary War in 1783, Gerry reverted to an earlier fear not only of a return to monarchy but also of a military aristocracy, opposing a standing peacetime
army and favoring state militias. A congressional debate the next year ended in disbanding most of the Continental army for reliance chiefly on the militias.

At the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787, Gerry set out to restructure the Articles of Confederation to strengthen the central government in dealing with civil unrest, as in the Shays Rebellion, the protests against farm mortgage foreclosures. At the same time, however, he insisted on dual powers in the states, putting him on a middle course between extreme nationalists like Hamilton and Madison, in favor of reducing the role of the states. In the end, Gerry successfully argued for equal small-state representation in the Senate. Interesting in light of later developments, Gerry also protested the very creation of the office of the vice presidency and the notion of making him the president of the Senate with power only to break a tie. “We might as well put the President himself at the head of the Legislature,” he complained, citing the separation of powers doctrine.
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Unhappy with various other proposals that he deemed would put too much power in the hands of the executive, Gerry finally resorted to stalling tactics, calling for more debate on issues already voted on and for a second constitutional convention to consider amendments. At last, he moved for the incorporation of a national bill of citizen rights that would assure trial by jury and freedom of the press, and he declined to sign the Constitution without one, fighting ratification in Massachusetts. Eventually, however, he declared his support.

In the administration of John Adams, Gerry served as minister to France during the notorious XYZ Affair. As one of three Adams negotiators with France to avert a looming war, he was victimized in the scandalous effort by the French agents of Talleyrand who tried but failed to bribe the negotiators to achieve a favorable peace treaty but nevertheless tarnished Gerry’s reputation in the process. When the other two American negotiators returned home, however, Gerry stayed on and was able finally to report a more conciliatory French attitude. He remained in Adams’s confidence and one of his closest friends over the years.
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Back home and back in politics as a member of Congress, Gerry at first embraced Federalist policies but soon broke away over the faction’s pro-British inclinations, siding with the pro-French leanings of the Anti-Federalists. He later lost four bids for governor of Massachusetts before
finally winning election in 1810. In his first term, he functioned as a moderate and conciliatory figure, striving to unite Federalists and Republicans as he had sought to do as a state legislator. In his second term, however, with the advent of the war that divided pro-British Federalists and pro-French Republicans, Gerry himself became fiercely partisan, using his office and an inventive scheme to maximize Republican and minimize Federalist strengths.

After a long history of Federalist dominance in Massachusetts, the Republicans began to take hold, gaining control of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches in the Bay State in 1811. Under Gerry, they first focused on the state Senate, passing a bill abandoning old county lines and dividing Massachusetts into senatorial districts and drawing the borders in a way to assure more and stronger Republican election results. They did the same for congressional districts, and in Gerry’s home Essex County they elected three Republicans where the Federalists previously had swept all five seats. A little-known Federalist artist drew a map of the new voting district whose shape resembled a salamander. A wit renamed it “gerrymander,” and the label quickly entered into the political lexicon and has never left.
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The practice actually goes back to colonial times but has been memorialized by Gerry’s usage, although pronounced with a soft
g
as in
jerry
, rather than the hard
g
as in his name.

In 1812, Gerry was an odd choice of a running mate for Madison, having just been defeated for a third term as governor of Massachusetts, but coming from a northern state he provided the regional balance that had been honored on all the previous winning tickets. Also, because New England was strongly against war with England, Gerry’s selection as representing the pro-war position was considered a means of softening the prevailing sentiment.
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And like his predecessor George Clinton of New York, he was in his late sixties and not considered likely to seek the presidency when his term ended, facilitating the selection of the successor the sitting president wanted. Gerry also was another revolutionary-era hero, though not in uniform.

As was the custom, in the 1812 campaign neither Madison and Gerry nor their challengers running as Federalists, New York mayor DeWitt Clinton and Jared Ingersoll of Philadelphia, spoke in their own behalf, letting rival newspapers in each camp joust among themselves. Gerry was quoted
as later telling a friend who urged him to speak out: “I cannot alter the method which brought me to high political office and make a direct appeal to the voters.”
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In the electoral college, Madison and Gerry won easily, picking up three additional Federalist electors from New England. They carried all states except Clinton’s New York and the neighboring New Jersey but won the popular vote by only 2.8 percent.

Gerry’s deportment in national office resembled his service as governor, originally seeking comity with the opposing Federalists as he presided over the Senate but soon shifting to sharp partisanship. Amid his increasing concerns about Federalist intentions to somehow restore British and even monarchical influence in America, Gerry came into the vice presidency in 1813 as a strong supporter of Madison’s decision to go to war against the British in defense of American shipping rights. Upon Jefferson’s 1809 enactment of the embargo against the British and French, Gerry had envisioned Federalist secession plots to extract New England from the infant Union or a civil war and had written to Jefferson of his fears.
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Now his suspicions of Federalist disloyalty made him particularly partisan and ever more strongly supportive of Madison, though like previous vice presidents he had little voice in the administration’s deliberations.

Indeed, Gerry seemed to welcome the War of 1812 as a way to revive the patriotic fervor of the Revolution in defense of American freedom. “We have been long enough at peace,” he wrote. “We are losing our spirit, our character, and our independence. We are degenerating into a mere nation of traders, and forgetting the honour of our ancestors and the interest of posterity. We must be aroused by some great event that may stir up the ancient patriotism of the people.”
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Gerry was a popular figure on the Washington social scene, more cordial in such circumstances than he was in the heat of political debate as a wary and suspicious enemy of wayward Federalists. When he reached the age of seventy, however, the strain began to show itself. On the morning of November 23, 1814, he arose complaining of chest pains. After breakfast he took a carriage to the Senate, but as the pains increased he returned to his boardinghouse, where he stretched out on his bed and died. He thus was the second vice president in a row to succumb while in office, four months before completion of his term. Again the vice presidency was vacant, to remain so until the next national election.