Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power (34 page)

O
n the day of the news of the New York results, Jefferson met with Adams on other business in Philadelphia. The president, Jefferson said, was “very sensibly affected” by the Jeffersonian victory in New York and “accosted” the vice president.

“Well, I understand that you are to beat me in this contest,” Adams told Jefferson, “and I will only say that I will be as faithful a subject as any you will have.”

“Mr. Adams, this is no personal contest between you and me,” Jefferson recalled himself saying.

Two systems of principles on the subject of government divide our fellow-citizens into two parties. With one of these you concur, and I with the other. As we have been longer on the public stage than most of those now living, our names happen to be more generally known. One of these parties therefore has put your name at its head, the other mine. Were we both to die today, tomorrow two other names would be in the place of ours, without any change in the motion of the machine. Its motion is from its principle, not from you or myself.

“I believe you are right that we are but passive instruments,” said Adams, “and should not suffer this matter to affect our personal dispositions.”

From Jefferson's perspective, however, Adams “did not long retain this just view of the subject. I have always believed that the thousand calumnies which the Federalists, in bitterness of heart, and mortification at their ejection, daily invented against me, were carried to him by their busy intriguers, and made some impression.”

Jefferson was right that the Federalists were not going quietly. There was talk of fielding another potentially disruptive Pinckney of South Carolina. In 1796 it had been Thomas; in 1800 it was to be his brother Charles Cotesworth Pinckney who would stand as a Federalist candidate along with Adams. It was the 1796 play all over again. The letter of the law said that each elector voted for two candidates but could not designate which was for president and which for vice president. Anti-Adams Federalists such as Hamilton hoped that South Carolina's electors would choose Jefferson and their native son Pinckney, thus propelling Pinckney (who, combining the votes he won in Adams states with South Carolina's vote, stood a good chance of winning the whole election) to the presidency.

“To support
Adams
and
Pinckney
equally is the only thing that can possibly save us from the fangs of
Jefferson,
” Hamilton wrote a fellow Federalist in May 1800. Although Jefferson referred to the Federalists' tactics as “hocus-pocus maneuvers,” he could be vulnerable if everything broke Hamilton's way.

Adams was under assault from all directions. In October 1800, Hamilton published an attack on the second president. Entitled
Letter from Alexander Hamilton, Concerning the Public Conduct and Character of John Adams,
Esq, President of the United States,
it argued that Adams did “not possess the talents adapted to the administration of
government,
” and that “there are great intrinsic defects in his character which unfit him for the office of chief magistrate.” Writing to the diplomat Rufus King in Great Britain, the New York Federalist Robert Troup said he thought the Hamilton-Adams division fatal to Federalist hopes: “Our enemies are universally in triumph.”

Hamilton, however, believed there was little to lose. “If we must have an
enemy
at the head of the Government,” Hamilton said, “let it be one whom we can oppose and for whom we are not responsible, who will not involve our party in the disgrace of his foolish and bad measures.”

T
he fall of 1800 was the most momentous of autumns for Jefferson, a time of dizzying anxiety and exultant hopes. He was on the cusp of consummate command, of national approval, of glorious victory. The emotions of the hour were stormy.

At Monticello, he fell into existential worry. “I have sometimes asked myself whether my country is the better for my having lived at all,” he wrote in a private memorandum. “I do not know that it is. I have been the instrument of doing the following things; but they would have been done by others; some of them perhaps a little later.” He listed the navigational improvements he made to the Rivanna River in his burgess days, the Declaration of Independence, his work on the revision of the laws of Virginia—and the introduction of olive trees to the United States.

Slowly but steadily results from the states reached Monticello. Republicans were winning where they needed to win, holding the South and doing well in Pennsylvania and New York. “Democratic principles seem to be evidently increasing,” said former secretary of state Timothy Pickering, unhappily.

On hearing that the South Carolina ploy to elect Pinckney had failed and that Jefferson was likely to become president, a New England clergyman wrote, “I have never heard bad tidings on anything which gave me such a shock.”

On Friday, December 12, 1800, Jefferson felt confident enough of the results to declare privately that he was likely to be the next president of the United States. “I believe we may consider the election as now decided,” he wrote Thomas Mann Randolph, Jr. Delaware Republican Caesar A. Rodney rejoiced; he was convinced that Jefferson's election signaled the end of the “tempests and tornadoes” of the Adams years.

Still, Jefferson's sense of fragility kept him in mind of Federalist traps. Several “highflying Federalists,” Jefferson wrote Aaron Burr, “have expressed their hope that the two republican tickets may be equal, and their determination in that case to prevent a choice by the H. of R. (which they are strong enough to do) and let the government devolve on a President of the Senate.”

The possibility of a tie, Jefferson told Madison in December, “has produced great dismay and gloom on the republican gentlemen here, and equal exultation in the federalists, who openly declare they will prevent an election, and will name a President of the Senate pro tem by what they say would only be a
stretch
of the Constitution.… The month of February therefore will present us storms of a new character.”

There was much uncertainty. “Some of the Jacobins are afraid Mr. J. will not administer the Govt. according to their wishes,” Massachusetts Federalist George Cabot wrote Rufus King on Sunday, December 28, 1800. “Others of them think it was easy and pleasant to rail and find fault but difficult to govern and vindicate; they are unwilling to take responsibility upon themselves or friends: others are afraid Burr will be Chief.”

The drama was seen by some in light of the larger struggle between monarchy and republicanism. “Our Tories begin to give themselves air[s] already in expectation of a
tie,
” John Randolph of Roanoke wrote Representative Joseph of Maryland on Tuesday, December 16, 1800. “I fear that, in this event, they will give us some trouble; at the same time I know that it will be damnatory of their party with [those] who are not devoted to the monarchy.”

Though some Federalists spoke of throwing support to Burr in exchange for political and policy concessions, the New Yorker showed no outward signs of working against Jefferson. “I do not … apprehend any embarrassment even in case the votes should come out alike for us—My personal friends are perfectly informed of my wishes on the subject and can never think of diverting a single vote from you,” Burr told Jefferson. “On the contrary, they will be found among your most zealous adherents.” There is no evidence that Burr considered betraying Jefferson, but Jefferson soon came to believe that his running mate was an unreliable and undesirable ally. The eventual outcome of the election of 1800, Jefferson told his son-in-law John Wayles Eppes, passed all understanding.

“The President, I am told, is in a state of deep dejection; his feelings are not to be envied,” wrote Timothy Pickering on Monday, January 5, 1801. “To his
UNADVISED
(to use a mild term) measures are traced the evils with which the whole of our country is now perplexed and depressed. And many discerning Federalists at least doubted which was to be most deprecated—his reelection, or Mr. Jefferson's elevation to the Presidency.”

Republicans worried about a Federalist defeat of the popular will. “The dread now,” a correspondent wrote John Breckinridge in late December 1800, “is that Jefferson and Burr are equal as the vote of the electors, and that Burr will be preferred by the Eastern states, not because they think him really the most capable, but because Jefferson is the choice of the people … and their will
shall not prevail;
this certainly would be a wicked and contrary disposition in them. But what will they not do or attempt?”

The year ended in fog and mystery. “The Feds appear determined to prevent an election, and pass a bill giving the government to Mr. Jay, appointed Chief Justice, or to Marshall as Secy. of State,” Jefferson wrote Madison on the day after Christmas. “Yet I am rather of the opinion that Maryland and Jersey will join the 7 republican majorities.” By the last Sunday in December 1800, the votes were all in. They came to Jefferson as president of the Senate.

It was a tie.

J
ames McHenry put the key question to Rufus King on the second day of 1801.

“Where,” McHenry asked, “is all this to end?”

THIRTY
-
ONE

A DESPERATE STATE OF AFFAIRS

Rumors are various, and intrigues great.

—G
OUVERNEUR
M
ORRIS

It is extremely uncertain on whom the choice will fall.

—J
OHN
M
ARS
HALL

T
HE
W
ASHINGTON
, D.C.,
OF
1800–1801 was a makeshift affair. Six or seven boardinghouses were in competition with Conrad and McMunn's, where Jefferson lodged. A Philadelphia boot maker had recently set up shop near the Capitol, as had a bookstore. Benjamin W. Morris and Co. Groceries stocked Madeira wine, brandy, and spirits, along with soap, lamp oil, and hair powder. The sides of Capitol Hill itself were still wild, wooded, and filled with game.

Moving between the Senate, where he remained the presiding officer, and his quarters at Conrad and McMunn's, Jefferson tried to keep his equilibrium. It was not easy. No one knew what each day would bring. “The election,” Jefferson wrote a son-in-law, “is still problematical.”

Once an ally, Aaron Burr now seemed a possible a threat. On Monday, January 5, 1801, the
Philadelphia Gazette
wrote that Burr “was heard to insinuate that he felt as competent to the exercise of the Presidential functions as Mr. Jefferson.” On the same day, Benjamin Hichborn, a Jeffersonian, reported, “Some of our friends, as they call themselves, are willing to join the other party in case they should unite in favor of Col. Burr.”

Jefferson's enemies were indeed at work, open to considering any outcome that would keep Jefferson out of power. “There would be really cause to fear that the government would not survive the course of moral and political experiments to which it would be subjected in the hands of Mr. Jefferson,” said Delaware congressman James Bayard, a Federalist.

Albert Gallatin, writing to his wife, said, “What will be the plans of the Federalists? Will they usurp the Presidential powers? … I see some danger in the fate of the election.”

Roger Griswold lamented the sorry pass things had come to. “Jefferson as a politician I believe to be the weakest of all men—he may be honest but it is a point which is much doubted by those acquainted with his private life,” Griswold said.

On Sunday, January 11, 1801, Jefferson attended morning services in the Capitol. The Right Reverend Thomas Claggett, the Episcopal bishop of Maryland and chaplain of the Senate, was presiding. Roger Griswold was there, too, and could watch Jefferson as the sermon unfolded. Claggett—with, Griswold said, “more learning perhaps than wisdom”—was trying to link some biblical prophecy to the events of the French Revolution. In doing so, Griswold wrote, the bishop “was obliged to dwell at some length upon the mischief which had grown out of the visionary plans of the French philosophers.… Then [their] infidelity was described, and [the] pernicious tendency of their schemes, both as they related to politics and morals, was painted in glowing colors.”

To Griswold's eye, Jefferson “took every word to himself, and thought the Bishop was delivering a Philippic upon his theories, and visions.” Jefferson “blushed like a young girl of fifteen, and I make no doubt wished the Bishop and his prophecies at the devil.”

A
long the mid-Atlantic, Jefferson partisans considered arming themselves to march on the capital. The denial of the popular will, Jefferson said privately, “opens upon us an abyss at which every sincere patriot must shudder.” Elbridge Gerry was told by “high authority” that Jefferson's election “would put the constitution to the test.”

Rumors grew as days passed. “Some strange reports are circulating here of the views of the Federal party in the present desperate state of its affairs,” Monroe wrote Jefferson from Richmond on Tuesday, January 6, 1801. “It is said they are resolved to prevent the designation by the H. of Reps. of the person to be president, and that they mean to commit the power by a legislative act to John Marshall, Samuel A. Otis or some other person till another election.”

Lawmakers in Richmond were debating whether to remain in session, Monroe said, “to be on the ground to take such steps as might be deemed proper to defeat” any measure that denied Jefferson the presidency.

Everyone was to be watched. “Unfriendly foreign ministers should be observed,” wrote Tench Coxe on Saturday, January 10, 1801. “The professions of Federalists should not be too hastily credited.… It is a case wherein we cannot fear too far, if we preserve our firmness, and temper.”

W
ith the outcome uncertain, the Federalists struck while they could, passing the Judiciary Act of 1801 in February. If Jefferson or Burr prevailed, who knew when the Federalist interest might again have the power to act?

Taking advantage of the hour, then, the Congress passed, and President Adams signed, a bill that increased the number of federal judicial officers, strengthened and expanded the circuit courts, and reduced the number of Supreme Court justices from six to five, thus depriving any Republican president of at least one appointment. “The Judiciary bill has been crammed down our throats without a word or letter being suffered to be altered,” Senator Stevens Thomson Mason of Virginia wrote to Senator John Breckinridge of Kentucky.

Jefferson believed the law, coming so late in Adams's term, was a “parasitical plant engrafted at the last session on the judiciary body” and that the Federalist appointees to the new positions had “retired into the judiciary as a stronghold … and from that battery all the works of republicanism are to be beaten down and erased.” Such appointees became colloquially known as Adams's “midnight judges,” and there were “midnight appointments” to lesser offices as well.

The most significant decision Adams made in these months was to name John Marshall, his secretary of state, as chief justice of the United States, giving a Jefferson foe lifetime tenure as head of one of the three branches of the federal government. The Federalists believed Jefferson's Republicans to be every bit as dangerous as Jefferson's Republicans believed the Federalists to be.

Adams and Marshall met in January 1801, while Marshall was still secretary of state, to discuss possible successors to Chief Justice Oliver Ellsworth, who was retiring. Though Adams had sought to reenlist John Jay, the first chief justice, to return to the bench, Jay chose to remain in the New York governorship.

“Who shall I nominate now?” Adams asked Marshall.

As Marshall recalled the conversation, he told the president that he had no counsel to give.

“I believe I must nominate you,” Adams said.

Marshall recalled being “pleased as well as surprised, and bowed in silence.”

The U.S. Senate confirmed the president's nomination in the last week of January 1801.

I
n the weeks after Marshall's confirmation, Republicans took care to encourage one another about the presidential election. “Mr. Jefferson is undoubtedly the rock of our political salvation from which no concurrence of circumstances … should compel us to depart,” Caesar A. Rodney of Delaware wrote Joseph Nicholson on Tuesday, February 17, 1801. “We should consider ourselves as indissolubly bound to him, by a Gordian knot which no intrigue should untie and no force cut asunder.”

Jefferson himself was worried enough about talk of installing the president pro tempore of the Senate in the President's House that he paid a call on Adams with one subject in view: “to have this desperate measure prevented by his [veto].”

Hearing Jefferson's business, Adams flew into a temper. “He grew warm in an instant,” Jefferson recalled, and replied “with a vehemence he had not used towards me before.”

“Sir,” Adams said to Jefferson, “the event of the election is within your own power,” arguing that Jefferson need only commit to certain Federalist policies to end the suspense and become president: The government, Adams said, would “instantly be put in your hands.”

“Mr. Adams,” Jefferson replied, “I know not what part of my conduct, in either public or private life, can have authorized a doubt of my fidelity to the public engagements. I say however I will not come into the government by capitulation. I will not enter on it but in perfect freedom to follow the dictates of my own judgment.”

“Then things must take their course,” Adams said, and the conversation ended.

It was a bitter, uncomfortable moment—“the first time in our lives we had ever parted with anything like dissatisfaction,” Jefferson recalled. Such was the season; such were the stakes.

From Pennsylvania, Governor Thomas McKean saw every possibility. “Interest, character, duty, love of country all conspire to insure [Jefferson's election]; but I have been told that envy, malice, despair and a delight in doing mischief will prompt the Anglo-Federalists to set all other considerations at nought, and that it is intended to so manage as to keep the states equally divided, in order that Congress may in the form of a law appoint a President for us until a new election shall take place.” Though he said he could not believe such a thing could happen, he also believed in preparing for the worst.

“But should it be possible that gentlemen will act the desperate part that has been suggested by the partisans of anarchy and civil war,” McKean asked, by what authority would they be acting? To install anyone other than Jefferson or Burr would be unconstitutional, an act of usurpation.

McKean was clear about his intentions. “If bad men will dare traitorously to destroy or embarrass our general government and the union of the states, I shall conceive it my duty to oppose them at every hazard of life and fortune; for I should deem it less inglorious to submit to foreign than domestic tyranny.” The Pennsylvania militia was to be readied, McKean said, and arms prepared for “upwards of twenty thousand,” including “brass field-pieces etc. etc.” The governor was also ready to issue an order “for the arresting and bringing to justice every member of Congress, or other person found in Pennsylvania, who should have been concerned in the treason.”

A few fires at official buildings in Washington raised suspicions. “The burning of the war-office last month and now the treasury have probably been accidental, but as these events were predicted in Philadelphia and subjects of conversation in July last, suspicions of design will be entertained by many,” McKean said. Reporting the fires at the Treasury and War offices, Roger Griswold observed, “It seems heaven has pointed its curses against our national establishments in this city of the wilderness.”

The tension of the time exhausted Jefferson. “I long to be in the midst of the children, and have more pleasure in their little follies than in the wisdom of the wise,” he wrote Patsy. “Here too there is such a mixture of the bad passions of the heart that one feels themselves in an enemy's country.”

T
he House planned to meet on Wednesday, February 11, 1801, to choose a president. “The approach of the 11th Feb. makes the people here
breathe long
with suspense, their anxiety is so great,” wrote Thomas Mann Randolph, Jr., of Albemarle County.

As the lawmakers gathered, the mysteries only deepened. According to notes Jefferson made on Thursday, February 12, of a conversation with Edward Livingston, there was shadowy talk of deal making. “Edward Livingston tells me that [Federalist James] Bayard applied today or last night to Gen. Samuel Smith and represented to him the expediency of his coming over to the states who vote for Burr, that there was nothing in the way of appointment which he might not command, and particularly mentioned the Secretaryship of the navy. Smith asked him if he was authorized to make the offer. He said he was authorized.… Bayard in like manner tempted Livingston.… To Dr. Linn of New Jersey they have offered the government of New Jersey.”

Bayard soon shifted tack and went to Maryland Republican congressman Samuel Smith with a proposition for Jefferson. Bayard later claimed that he explained to Smith what could be done to resolve the impasse and give Jefferson the presidency. If Jefferson would pledge not to dismiss all Federalist officeholders and to preserve the navy and the public debt, all would be well. According to Bayard, Smith went to Jefferson, received Jefferson's acquiescence, and then returned to Bayard with those answers.

“This is absolutely false,” Jefferson wrote later. “No proposition of any kind was ever made to me on that occasion by Genl. Smith, nor any answer authorized by me.” Smith supported Jefferson's version of events, saying that he had discussed broad policy questions with Jefferson but had not told Jefferson why he was asking. Smith's assurances to Bayard, then, were Smith's interpretations of Jefferson's intentions, not a proffer.

Did Jefferson strike a deal to win the presidency? His denials are firm, but the election was unfolding in a charged atmosphere in which no one spoke of anything else. It seems likely that Bayard
believed
he had
sufficient assurance that Jefferson was not going to tear down the whole
works of the previous dozen years. With Smith's representations—however specific or explicit they were—in mind, Bayard moved to end the drama and deliver the presidency to Jefferson.

By his own account the Federalist terms were well known to Jefferson, who had been invited at least twice—once by President Adams himself—to calm the worst of the opposition's fears. New York senator Gouverneur Morris encountered Jefferson one day outside the Senate chamber. “He stopped me and began a conversation on the strange and portentous state of things then existing, and went on to observe that the reasons why the minority of states were so opposed to my being elected, was that they apprehended that 1. I should turn all Federalists out of office, 2. put down the Navy 3. wipe off the public debt and 4. that I need only to declare, or authorize my friends to declare, that I would not take these steps, and instantly the event of the election would be fixed.”