1800 Presidential Election
The Presidential Election of 1800 was a significant event in American history, marking the first peaceful transfer of power between political parties. It was a highly contentious election between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, resulting in a tie in the Electoral College. The election was ultimately decided by the House of Representatives, leading to the victory of Thomas Jefferson and the beginning of the Democratic-Republican era in American politics.
6 Key excerpts on "1800 Presidential Election"
eBook - ePub- Ian Barnes, Charles Royster, Charles Royster(Authors)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Federalists tended to be English, dislike participatory democracy, support authority, and oppose Southern economic interests. In the 1796 presidential elections, the Federalist John Adams became President, with Thomas Jefferson, a Republican as Vice-President because the vagaries of the electoral system. This divided partnership inaugurated a period of political inconsistency with increasing dissent leading to a Sedition Act (1798) by which Adams hoped to make political opposition a crime. Jefferson and Madison campaigned in state legislatures, inciting Republican support to oppose alleged tyrannical authority. In the run up to the 1800 Presidential Election, the Federalists split into Adams versus Hamilton camps regarding the Quasi War with France. The Republicans entered the contest united behind Jefferson and Burr. They won the southern states, while the Federalists gained New England with the middle states split; but, overall, the Republican vote won. Because the Republicans voted for their candidates together, the Federalist-dominated House of Representatives had to decide between them with each state’s congressmen acting in unison. Jefferson was elected President. This 1800 revolution led to Amendment Twelve whereby voting in the electoral college allowed a party ticket and separate ballots had to be cast for both President and Vice-President. People of the New Nation The 1790 census, demanded by the Constitution, was designed to estimate representation requirements and the allotment of direct taxes among the states. The census shows the population’s mix in terms of race, gender, and age, but its statistics can be criticized. Slaves were not differentiated by age or sex and they were only considered 60 percent worth of a free person...
eBook - ePubInventing a Nation
Washington, Adams, Jefferson
- Gore Vidal(Author)
- 2008(Publication Date)
- Yale University Press(Publisher)
...Political parties as such did not yet exist, but since foreign affairs dominated the life of the new republic, the great division was between those who still adhered to things British—the Federalists—and “the French party”: the Republicans who looked to Thomas Jefferson as their icon for all seasons. Jefferson not only was pro-French but while American minister to France had actually taken secret part in the early days of the Revolution. When it came to the mechanics of presidential elections, the Constitution had rather light-heartedly ruled that the candidate who got the most votes in the Electoral College would become president, while the runner-up would become the vice president. This deliberately ignored the matter of faction or party, which came to a head in 1796, when the Proto-Federalist Adams was elected president while the Proto-Republican Jefferson became vice president. In 1804 the Twelfth Amendment allowed for party interest by requiring separate balloting for president and vice president. The Electoral College, however, remains to this day solidly in place to ensure that majoritarian governance can never interfere with those rights of property that the founders believed not only inalienable but possibly divine. At first, Adams was unaware that Hamilton meant to control the new government. Washington was aging, and Hamilton still knew how to play surrogate son. Washington himself was a highly competent, even awesome, chief executive. But though he could run the War Department unassisted, the treasury was beyond his capacities: Hamilton was given a free hand because, within the Federalist faction, only Adams was of equal intelligence, learning, and experience: in Adams’s ambassadorial years abroad, raising money for the Revolution, he was known and trusted by Europe’s principal bankers, particularly those in the Netherlands. Sidelined to the vice presidency, he was hardly a threat to Hamilton. But Hamilton enjoyed unscrupulous detail work for its own sake...
- Gregory Feldmeth, Christine Custred(Authors)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Research & Education Association(Publisher)
...Chapter 6 Democracy, Economic Growth, and Social Reform (1800–1848) With the victory of Thomas Jefferson and the Democrat-Republican Party over John Adams and the Federalists in the 1800 Presidential Election, the United States experienced its first transition of political power. While some predicted popular unrest and even anarchy, the changeover was peaceful, though the Federalists attempted to retain power. The Federalist Congress passed a new Judiciary Act early in 1801 and President Adams filled the newly created vacancies with party supporters, many of them with last-minute commissions. John Marshall was appointed Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, thus guaranteeing continuation of Federalist policies from the bench of the high court. The Jeffersonian Era Thomas Jefferson and his Republican followers envisioned a society in vivid contrast to that of Hamilton and the Federalists. They dreamed of a nation of independent small farmers, living under a central government that exercised a minimum of control over their lives and served mainly to protect the individual liberties guaranteed by the Constitution. This agrarian paradise would be free from the industrial smoke and urban blight of Europe, and would serve as a beacon of Enlightenment rationalism to a world searching for direction. That vision was to prove a mirage, and Jefferson was to preside over a nation that was growing more industrialized and urban, and one that seemed to need an ever-stronger hand at the presidential tiller. The New Federal City The city of Washington had been designed by Pierre L’Enfant and was briefly occupied by the Adams administration. When Jefferson moved in, it was a provincial town, with muddy streets and muggy summers...
eBook - ePub- Edward G. Lengel, Edward G. Lengel(Authors)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
...Despite his impassioned pleas for neutrality, many American men and women had chosen to embrace a cause that divided rather than united the country. From the earliest days, then, an upsurge in party conflict marked Washington’s second term in office. Two separate and distinct political factions were emerging in the United States. On the one side were those who came to be known as Federalists, supporters of Washington’s administration who favored strengthening the powers of the central government, enhancing the influence of men of capital, and supporting a policy of neutrality in foreign affairs even while they regarded the British system of government as the model for the U.S. In contrast, Jefferson, Madison, and their supporters, who came to be known as “Democratic-Republicans,” believed that the power of the national government should be limited; that small landholders were the foundation of American society and government; and that despite the Terror, France remained a bastion of revolutionary zeal. Yet beyond their differences in foreign policy and economic affairs, a more fundamental difference split the Federalists from the Democratic-Republicans. This divergence resulted a competing understanding of the meaning and legacy of the American Revolution. For Washington and his supporters, the Revolution had ended when the cause of independence had been won. Although firm believers in republican government, they remained skeptical about the degree to which people should be trusted to govern themselves. They worried that ordinary citizens would not be able to discern the difference between wise leaders and foolish demagogues, between their own transient passions and the country’s long-term best interests. Voters, they believed, should exercise their choice at the ballot box and then defer the actual business of governing to their social and intellectual superiors...
eBook - ePubThomas Jefferson
America's Philosopher-King
- Max Lerner, Max Lerner(Authors)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...What sort of revolution was the “Revolution of 1800”? Clearly it was not what its fearful opponents thought it would be. Jefferson was neither a Robespierre nor a Napoleon, although his enemies tried to link him with both. He had no intention of lopping off heads, setting up a personal dictatorship, instituting a Reign of Terror, expropriating property—or even of so mild a revolutionary measure as sending all the Federalist office-holders packing. If anyone thought that he would carry through an American replica of the French Revolution, the event quickly disproved it. His First Inaugural was a masterpiece of conciliation, offering an olive branch to the Federalists, setting forth a modest and moderate governmental program, and obviously meant to quiet the fears of fearful men. Jefferson’s program, as he was to emphasize repeatedly, was one of peace, a frugal administration, a drastic reduction of the national debt, a lightening of the tax burden, a strict construction of the presidential and federal power, and a close harmony between the Executive and the Congressional majority. Even the purge of Federalist officials, for which the power-hungry Jeffersonians clamored, was carried out slowly, incompletely, and with little rancor. It should be noted about the Jeffersonian revolution that Jefferson was the first of the American presidents to use political patronage as a scrupulous but deliberate instrument of party power. He had ample provocation to organize a purge of Federalist office holders, since after the first cabinet neither Washington nor Adams had knowingly appointed any anti-Federalists to governmental posts. Yet, his only harshness was to get rid of the Federalists who were either hacks, had talked too aggressively as partisans, or had thrown their weight around in office...
eBook - ePub- Brian Holden Reid(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...CHAPTER SIX The Year of Decision: 1860 So even if he couldn’t anticipate no war to save him, back in his mind somewhere he was still confident that Providence would furnish something. WILLIAM FAULKNER, The Mansion 1 In 1860 the United States submitted itself once more to what Nathaniel Hawthorne in his novel The Scarlet Letter called the ‘periodic terrors of a Presidential Election’. 2 The intricate process of nominating and electing a presidential candidate was undertaken in the darkening atmosphere of increasingly hysterical threats of southern secession should a Republican candidate win a majority of votes in the electoral college. In previous years presidential elections had served to defer decisions; in 1860 something was actually decided. The electoral process offered up a decision despite itself, and the result was civil war. The campaign witnessed the disintegration of the Democratic Party. No fewer than four candidates energetically sought to gain entrance to the White House. Indeed, it was a measure of the perceived crisis facing the United States that one candidate even dispensed with tradition and energetically campaigned on his own behalf on the campaign trail. The destruction of the second party system, which had been dominated by the Democratic Party, provided the occasion for the process of disunion that followed the Republican victory at the polls in 1860. This is a complex process, and it is not sufficient to say that the disruption of the party mechanism inevitably led to civil war. Nonetheless, in a political structure as rigidly geared to the workings of the calendar as that laid down by the United States Constitution, and whose parts are so intermeshed with one another in a complicated series of continuing elections at various levels, it was very likely that disruption of one part would lead to ructions, violence and even anarchy in all the others. This chapter offers a case-study of a presidential election...
