Don't Know Much About History, Anniversary Edition: Everything You Need to Know About American History but Never Learned (Don't Know Much About®) (25 page)
Authors: Kenneth C. Davis
What was the Revolution of 1800?
With Washington’s retirement came the first true presidential campaign, which got under way in 1796. Gathering in a “caucus,” the Federalist congressmen selected John Adams, the vice president, as their standard-bearer, with Thomas Pinckney of South Carolina as a second candidate. The other Federalist leader, Alexander Hamilton, was deemed too strong-willed and monarchist for even the staunchest of Federalists. Jefferson was the obvious choice of the Democratic Republicans, with their second on the ticket being Aaron Burr, an ambitious New Yorker who brought control of Tammany Hall, the first “political machine,” to the ticket.
Shrewd and ambitious, Hamilton thought he could pull a power play by getting Pinckney elected and becoming the man pulling the strings, but this stratagem backfired when New England Federalists caught on to Hamilton’s plan and voted for Jefferson instead. Adams squeaked into the presidency, and Jefferson, although of the opposing party, won the second most electoral votes and became vice president. Obviously, it would be back to the drawing board for presidential elections.
Adams’s years in office were distinguished mostly by the animosity that had been unleashed between the two competing parties. Although the Federalists had held sway through Washington’s administrations and into that of Adams, their power was beginning to decline. Neither the Jay Treaty nor Adams was broadly popular, and Adams endured much abuse from the Republican press. His greatest accomplishment was managing to avoid a wider war with France when it seemed likely; his low point came with passage of a series of repressive measures called the Alien and Sedition Acts, which expressed the fear of foreigners in the young nation while attempting to suppress all criticism of the Federalist administration.
Yet the next election, in 1800, would be a close one, in more than one way. Adams once again led the Federalist ticket, with Charles C. Pinckney (the brother of Thomas Pinckney) as his party’s number two choice. Jefferson and Burr were again the Republican nominees. The campaign produced a torrent of slurs and abuses from both sides. And newspapers loyal to either party were filled with crude rumors of sexual philandering by both Adams and Jefferson. To the Federalists, Jefferson was an atheist who would allow the excesses of the French Revolution to come to America.
When the ballots were counted, however, the Republicans held the day. But the problem was, which Republican? There was no separate election of president and vice president, and Jefferson and Burr had collected seventy-three votes each. Under the Constitution, the tie meant the House of Representatives, still under Federalist control, would decide the question.
Faced with a choice between these two, Alexander Hamilton lobbied for Jefferson. He hated Jefferson but he detested fellow New Yorker Burr, in his opinion a “most unfit and dangerous man.” Burr played his hand cautiously, not campaigning for himself, but not withdrawing, either. The votes of nine of the House’s state delegations were needed to win, and Jefferson failed to gain them through thirty-five ballots. The crisis was real, and some historians believe that civil war over this election was not only possible but likely. Some Republican leaders were threatening to call out their state militias to enforce the popular will. Finally, with Jefferson privately assuring the Federalists that he would maintain much of the status quo, the House elected him on February 17, 1801. He was inaugurated on March 4, 1801, in the new federal capital of Washington. (The difficulties of selecting the president in 1800 resulted in passage of the Twelfth Amendment in 1804, which provides for separate balloting for the vice president and president. See Appendix 1 for more on this amendment.)
This electoral crisis marked a triumph of level heads in both parties, who put the orderly succession and continuity of government first. This Revolution of 1800, as Jefferson called it, was a bloodless one, but its impact was real. The Federalist Party was all but guillotined; it lost both the presidency and Congress, but John Adams had made certain that its influence did not die with his defeat.
Must Read:
John Adams
by David McCullough.
In his last weeks before leaving the presidency, John Adams did what Franklin D. Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan, and other presidents have only dreamed of accomplishing. Working with a “lame duck” Federalist Congress that would soon be out of power, Adams created dozens of new judgeships. He signed appointments until late into the night before Jefferson was inaugurated, and these “midnight judges” of staunch Federalist beliefs throughout the federal courts resulted in the most successful “court-packing” operation in American judicial history. In doing so, Adams influenced the course of events long after his rather inconsequential four years in office were over.
Most prominent among Adams’s appointments was that of John Marshall, who had served as Adams’s secretary of state, to be chief justice of the United States in 1801. Although he had studied law only briefly and had no judicial experience, Marshall held that post until his death in 1835. He placed a stamp on the Court and the young nation that is still felt today. Of his many decisions, one of the most important came in the 1803 case of
Marbury v. Madison
.
The case grew out of the ongoing political fight to the death between the Federalists and the Jeffersonian Democratic Republicans. In the last-minute rush to appoint judges who would uphold the Federalist principle of a strong central government, William Marbury, one of the “midnight judges,” was named to a lower federal court. But Marshall, as secretary of state, had failed to present Marbury with his commission, and James Madison, the secretary of state for the incoming Jefferson administration, refused to grant Marbury’s commission. Marbury sued and appealed to the Supreme Court—now with Marshall presiding—to order Madison to grant the commission.
But Marshall refused Marbury’s request, saying that although Marbury was theoretically entitled to the post, a section of the Judiciary Act of 1789, which had established the federal court system, was unconstitutional and void. For the first time the Supreme Court had overturned an act of Congress. Although Marshall’s decision in this case affected only the right of the court to interpret its own powers, the concept of judicial review, a key principle in the constitutional system of checks and balances, got its first test.
A
MERICAN
V
OICES
From C
HIEF
J
USTICE
M
ARSHALL’S
decision in
Marbury v. Madison
:
It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is. . . . Thus the particular phraseology of the constitution of the United States confirms and strengthens the principle, supposed to be essential to all written constitutions, that a law repugnant to the constitution is void. . . .
How did America purchase Louisiana?
While America enjoyed its bloodless Revolution of 1800, France was still in the throes of its more violent contortions. In 1799, Napoleon Bonaparte engineered the coup that overturned the Revolutionary Directory, eventually making himself ruler of France. While most of Napoleon’s grandiose plans focused on Europe, America had a place in the Little Corporal’s heart. His first step was to force a weak Spain to return the Louisiana Territory to France, which it did in 1800. The second step was to regain control of the Caribbean island of St. Domingue. In 1793, at the time of the French Revolution, the island had come under control of a self-taught genius, General Toussaint L’Ouverture, who had led a successful slave revolt. To launch any offensive in North America, Napoleon needed the island as a base, and he sent 20,000 troops to retake it.
All this French scurrying around in America’s backyard alarmed President Jefferson, who knew that French control of New Orleans and the western territories would create an overwhelming threat to America. Jefferson had an option play ready. Although he preferred neutrality between the warring European nations, Jefferson dropped hints to the British about an alliance against the French, and found them receptive. At the same time, he directed Robert Livingston and James Monroe to offer to buy New Orleans and Florida from France. Such a sale seemed unlikely until the French army sent to St. Domingue was practically wiped out by yellow fever after regaining control of the island. (The French withdrew to the eastern half of St. Domingue, and the western half was renamed Haiti, the original Arawak name for the island, with Toussaint’s successor, Dessalines, proclaiming himself emperor. The island, Columbus’s Hispaniola, remains split today between Haiti and the Dominican Republic.)
Without the safe base on the island, a French adventure into Louisiana was out of the question. Preparing to open a new European campaign, Napoleon wrote off the New World. He needed troops and cash. Almost on a whim, he ordered his foreign minister, Talleyrand, to offer not only New Orleans and Florida but the whole of the Louisiana Territory to America. Livingston and Monroe dickered with the French over price, but in May 1803, a treaty turning over all of Louisiana was signed. Nobody knew exactly what Napoleon sold, but under the treaty’s terms, the United States would double in size for about $15 million, or approximately four cents an acre. Left unclear were the rights to Texas, western Florida, and the West Coast above the Spanish settlements in California. Spain had its own ideas about these territories. Ironically, the purchase was made with U.S. bonds, the result of Hamilton’s U.S. Bank initiative, which Jefferson had resisted as unconstitutional.
A
MERICAN
V
OICES
M
ERIWETHER
L
EWIS,
from
The Journals of Lewis and Clark
(February 11, 1805):
about five Oclock this evening one of the wives of Charbon was delivered of a fine boy. it is worthy of remark that this was the first child which this woman had boarn, and as is common in such cases, labour was tedious and the pain violent; Mr. Jessome informed me that he had frequently administered a small portion of the rattle of the rattle-snake, which he assured me had never failed to produce the desired effect, that of hastening the birth of the child; having the rattle of a snake by me I gave it to him and he administered two rings of it to the woman broken in small pieces with the fingers and added to a small quantity of water. Whether this medicine was truly the cause or not I shall not undertake to determine, but I was informed that she had not taken it more than ten minutes before she brought forth perhaps this remedy may be worthy of future experiments, but I must confess that I want faith as to its efficacy.
Months before the purchase was made, Jefferson had the foresight to ask Congress for $2,500 to outfit an expedition into the West. Ostensibly its purpose was to “extend the external commerce” of the United States, but Jefferson had several other motives: to get America into the fur trade; to feel out the political and military uses of the West; and, reflecting his philosophy as a true Enlightenment man, to collect scientific information about this vast, uncharted land.
With the purchase complete, the little expedition now became a major adventure to find out what exactly America now owned. For this job, Jefferson selected thirty-year-old Meriwether Lewis (1774–1809), his private secretary, an army veteran, and a fellow Virginian. Lewis selected another Virginia soldier, thirty-four-year-old William Clark (1770–1838), a veteran of the Indian wars and brother of Revolutionary War hero George Rogers Clark, as his co-commander. With some forty soldiers and civilians, including Clark’s slave York, they set out from St. Louis in the winter of 1803–4 aboard three boats, a fifty-five-foot keelboat with twenty-two oars and two
pirogues
, or dugout canoes, each large enough to hold seven men. They carried twenty one bales of gifts to trade with Indians. Working their way upstream was arduous, and strict martial discipline was maintained with regular floggings, but the company reached what is now North Dakota in the fall of 1804, built Fort Mandan (near present-day Bismarck), and wintered there.
In the spring of 1805, they set out again for the West, now joined by Charbonneau, a French-Canadian trapper, and one of his Indian wives, a pregnant teenager named Sacagawea, who acted as guides and interpreters. Crossing the Rockies in present-day Montana, they built boats to take them down the Clearwater and Columbia rivers, reaching the Pacific coast in November, where they built Fort Clatsop (near the site of Astoria, Oregon). Hearing the Indians speak some “sailor’s” English, presumably learned from traders, the expedition believed a ship might pass and they decided to winter there. When no ship appeared, they set off for an overland return, splitting the expedition in two after crossing the Rockies to explore alternative routes. The parties reunited at the site of Fort Union, and arrived together in St. Louis on September 23, 1806.
After twenty-eight months of incredible hardships met in traveling over difficult, uncharted terrain, in skirmishes with Indians, and in encounters with dangerous animals from rattlesnakes to grizzly bears, the Lewis and Clark expedition had suffered only a single casualty: one man had succumbed to an attack of appendicitis.
The journals they kept, the specimens they brought or sent back, the detailed accounts of Indians they had encountered and with whom they had traded were of inestimable value, priming an America that was eager to press westward.
