Jefferson and Hamilton (61 page)

While his prospects in New York were favorable, Jefferson knew that he would not do as well in Pennsylvania as he had in 1796, when he had won fourteen of the Keystone State’s fifteen votes. The difference was that in 1800 the lower house of the state assembly was controlled by the Republicans and the upper chamber by the Federalists, and the two parties differed over the selection of presidential electors. Republicans favored a winner-take-all system, which had worked well for them in 1796. Federalists preferred to have the electors chosen in districts, through which the party seemed certain to win three or four electoral votes. If the two houses could not concur on how the electors were to be chosen, Pennsylvania would not cast any electoral votes. That would help the Federalists. If there was a compromise, it was inconceivable that the Federalists would agree to a solution that awarded Jefferson more than eight or nine votes. It was certain that Jefferson would win fewer votes in Pennsylvania than he had in the last election.

In 1796, South Carolina had done something unique. Its legislature had decreed that each of the state’s presidential electors was to cast one vote for Jefferson, the Republican, and one for the favorite son Thomas Pinckney, a Federalist. What the state’s electors would do in 1800 hinged on whether the Federalists once again nominated a South Carolinian and on which party controlled the assembly. The composition of the legislature would not be determined until the autumn elections.

Through the early months of 1800, Jefferson continued to tell friends that he hoped to remain the vice president, as the office enabled him to spend most of each year at home. His friends responded by telling him that they
wanted him to become their president, and they expected him to be elected, as the “tyde of the Political affairs” had changed. If the chief executive was chosen by a popular vote, said one, Jefferson would receive 75 percent of the votes.
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Like Washington in 1788 and 1789, Jefferson in 1800 was genuinely conflicted. He wanted to be president to shape America’s future, but he longed to stay at home “where all is love and peace.” What is more, he thought of the presidency as a “splendid misery.” Nothing else that he said so encapsulated his ambivalence over the price he would have to pay to hold the office.
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While Jefferson was torn over the presidency, Hamilton knew that his chances of holding meaningful power in the near future were slim. On the occasion of his forty-fifth birthday in 1800, Hamilton appeared to say that he might have chosen a more promising political course. After leaving Washington’s cabinet, he might have agreed to a European diplomatic assignment, or perhaps he could have served in Congress. Instead, he “had left every thing else to
follow the Drum
,” to soldier. Yet, through an “Injustice,” his “sacred” service had, if anything, diminished his standing. Never denying his obsessive ambition, Hamilton looked toward a distant future for vindication: “I feel that I stand on ground which, sooner or later, will ensure me a triump over all my enemies.”
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Hamilton had intrigued in the three previous presidential elections. He intended to do so again. In 1800, he would seek Adams’s political destruction, “even though the consequence should be the election of
Jefferson
.”
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Hamilton seethed with hatred for Adams, who had resisted the creation of the New Army and his appointment as inspector general. He was embittered that Adams had pursued negotiations to end the Quasi-War crisis. What he must have regarded as his belittling treatment at the hands of the president during their meeting in Trenton only further infuriated Hamilton. It was Hamilton’s hope that General Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, brother of the 1796 nominee and second in command of the fading New Army, would be one of the Federalist nominees. And Hamilton planned to do all he could to ensure Pinckney’s election, as it offered the best hope of his speedy return to some powerful position.

Hamilton’s task of electing any Federalist grew more formidable in the wake of the New York assembly elections in April. Just as Burr had forecast, the Republicans won all the lower house seats up for grabs in Manhattan and seven of the nine that were contested in the upper house. The outcome gave the party control of the legislature. Shut out in New York in 1796, the Republicans were now guaranteed all twelve of the state’s electoral votes in 1800.

What had occurred in New York disclosed a looming seismic shift in American politics. New York City had been a Federalist stronghold for the past dozen years. Manhattan had supported the ratification of the Constitution
and thereafter the lion’s share of its residents consistently embraced Hamiltonian economics, which both the city’s tradesmen and unskilled workers viewed as the facilitator of trade, jobs, and prosperity. But in the late stages of the 1790s, those who worked with their hands turned away from the Federalist Party, increasingly seeing politics—as Hamilton discerned in an analysis in 1796—as “a question between the Rich & the poor.”
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Workers saw the Federalist Party as the home of the gentry, and viewed its tight money policies as securing the “advantage of the Few,” but offering nothing to the cash-hungry members of society’s lower strata. Growing numbers were put off by the party’s social traditionalism and its national policies, especially the Alien and Sedition Acts, its standing army and seeming lust for war with France, and the new taxes levied to pay for the army. Some even noted that following Jefferson’s departure from the State Department, the Federalists had removed from the federal currency all symbols of liberty, such as the Liberty Tree or the Liberty Cap.

The growing disenchantment with Federalist attitudes and programs, which Jefferson and others had noticed as early as 1798, had to be politically harnessed. That was precisely what Burr did in Manhattan in 1800, displaying a nearly unmatched awareness of what was soon to become standard urban political practice. He organized an operation in which decisions flowed down from a central committee to small councils at the ward level. The Republican Party published its message and held street rallies at which leaders, including Burr, addressed the crowds. Party workers campaigned door-to-door and got the voters to the polls on election day. Burr also picked legislative candidates with name recognition, including former Governor Clinton and General Horatio Gates, to run against the Federalist slate of bankers and lawyers from elite law firms. The only thing that was not modern about the Republican campaign was that—as Burr told Jefferson—it had been conducted in a “highly honorable” manner with “no indecency, no unfairness, no personal abuse.”
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When Jefferson learned of the results in New York, he remarked that the Republican triumph went “far towards deciding the great election.” Indeed, he thought it would have determined the outcome of the general election had it not been for the “peculiar circumstances” in Pennsylvania.
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For Hamilton, however, South Carolina was now the crucial battleground. He urged his party to choose General Pinckney, a South Carolinian, as one of its nominees. Moreover, fully aware that in 1796 eighteen New England electors—fearing anti-Adams intrigue, chiefly by Hamilton—had cast their second vote for someone other than Thomas Pinckney, Hamilton appealed to the party’s leaders to pledge in “a distinct & solemn concert” to “support
Adams
&
Pinckney
, equally.” This, he added, “is the only thing that can possibly save us from the fangs of
Jefferson
.”
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Hamilton took an additional step, one that not only laid bare his gnawing disdain for America’s emerging democratic practices but that also exposed him as a relic of an earlier era. He beseeched Governor John Jay to override the recent legislative elections by summoning the current Federalist-dominated assembly into a special session to draw up a new set of rules for the selection of presidential electors. Ever the schemer, Hamilton’s shocking plan was to have the outgoing legislature vote that the electors be chosen according to the popular vote in each congressional district, and for this arrangement to be retroactive. Through this ploy, the Federalists would win perhaps ten of New York’s twelve electoral votes. It “will not do to be over-scrupulous” when striving “to prevent an
Atheist
in Religion and a
Fanatic
in politics from getting possession of the helm of the State,” Hamilton reasoned. Jay refused to be part of such a contemptible scheme.
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Soon after New York’s election, congressional Federalists caucused and named Adams and General Pinckney as their candidates. Thinking along the same lines as Hamilton, Jefferson observed that Pinckney’s selection was one of the Federalists’ typical “hocus-pocus maneuvers” to siphon Republican votes in both of the Carolinas, as they had done in 1796.
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A few days later, the Republicans in Congress chose their candidates. Jefferson’s selection was never in question, but some preferred George Clinton as the other nominee, thinking him more popular than Burr with Southerners. However, Clinton endorsed Burr, who was chosen. This time the Republican caucus stipulated that Jefferson was the party’s first choice for the presidency.
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Burr’s selection was just one of the rip currents set off by the pivotal New York election. Soon thereafter, and within hours of again receiving his party’s nomination, Adams settled old scores with the disloyal McHenry and Pickering. He fired both men. His action was premeditated and vengeful, but it was political as well. Needing Connecticut’s votes if he was to have any chance of winning, Adams did not oust Wolcott, whose treachery had been as great as that of his colleagues. What is more, in ridding himself of McHenry and Pickering, Adams sought to demonstrate his independence and commitment to an honorable peace, and to show that he was unfettered by the radical right wing of his party. Trolling for support in the South, more crucial than ever now that New York was lost, Adams named Virginia’s John Marshall as Pickering’s successor.

When the president dismissed McHenry, his bitterness toward his disloyal secretary of war, and his hatred of Hamilton, gushed forth. Near nightfall on May 5, Adams summoned McHenry from dinner to discuss a trivial federal appointment. The conference ended quickly, but as McHenry was leaving the president’s office, something he said—or perhaps his tone of voice—brought Adams’s volcanic rage to the surface. He accused McHenry of having deceitfully
conspired with Hamilton to hamper his presidency. When the secretary tried to object, Adams silenced him. In the grip of long pent-up passions, Adams lashed out. With a burst of incivility, Adams told McHenry that he was inept and two-faced, and called him a toady of “the greatest intriguant in the World,” meaning Hamilton, of course. With a head of steam, Adams insisted that Hamilton was largely responsible for the erosion of Federalist strength in Manhattan and the party’s almost-certain loss of the presidency in 1800. The president did not stop there. Hamilton, he told McHenry, was “devoid of every moral principle—a Bastard, and … a foreigner.” In what Adams must have thought would be the cruelest blow of all, he added: “Mr. Jefferson is an infinitely better man; a wiser one, I am sure, and, if President, will act wisely. I … would rather be Vice President under him … than indebted to such a being as Hamilton for the Presidency.”
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After learning from McHenry of Adams’s tirade, Hamilton set out on a three-week tour of New England. Officially, he went north “to disband Troops.” No one was fooled. His “visit was merely an Electioneering business,” Abigail Adams reported, and she and many others assumed he was beating the bushes on behalf of Pinckney. Soon enough, word reached the President’s House in Philadelphia that Hamilton and some of his officers had encouraged political leaders in Connecticut and Rhode Island to see to it that some electoral votes were withheld from the president.
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For months, Hamilton had been saying privately that Adams was given to capricious and irrational behavior, and that he was “very
unfit
and
incapable
.” Most party leaders despised the president, he had said. In the spring, Hamilton had gone so far as to tell some of his fellow Federalists that the party might be better off if it lost the election, after which it could regroup in opposition to Jefferson’s foreordained “foolish and bad measures.” Once McHenry dutifully reported the president’s uncivil comments, Hamilton responded that Adams was “as wicked as he is mad.”
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There can be no doubt that he aired these feelings in his talks with the Yankee activists.

There is also no question that Hamilton’s trip did not go well. Time and again, New Englanders told him straightaway that they were “decidedly for the re-election of Mr. Adams,” and some warned that if Hamilton persisted in his plot against the president’s reelection, electoral votes would be withheld from Pinckney. Getting word of this, some South Carolinians tried to restrain Hamilton, telling him that his behavior was counterproductive and widely seen as stemming from “private pique” rather than principle.
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For weeks thereafter Hamilton abandoned his open vendetta against Adams, which had been as unwise as it was unnecessary. Based on the information at this disposal, Hamilton knew that Pinckney stood a good chance of outscoring the president. For one thing, South Carolina’s congressional delegation
had given “every assurance” that “such was the popularity of General Pinckney,” that he would receive all of the state’s electoral votes even if the Republicans controlled the state assembly. In other words, in a worst-case scenario, Jefferson and Pinckney would divide South Carolina’s electoral votes. Furthermore, Hamilton was convinced that once it was widely perceived that Adams probably could not win, two or three Federalist electors in Connecticut and New Jersey would withhold their vote from him in the hope of securing Pinckney’s election.
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