The Election of 1800, ostensibly between
Federalist incumbent John Adams (1735-1826) and Democratic-Republican
challenger Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), famously resulted in an Electoral
College tie between the aforementioned Jefferson and his running-mate,
former-Senator Aaron Burr (1756-1836). The plan – such as it was – was for all
but one of the Electors chosen to represent the Democratic-Republicans to cast
one of their ballots for Jefferson and one of their ballots for Burr. The
single exception to this rule would then cast one of their ballots for
Jefferson and leave the other blank, thus ensuring that Jefferson would receive
exactly one more vote than Burr. Under the unamended terms of Article II,
Section 1, this would have allowed the former to claim the office of President
and the latter the office of Vice-President. In actual fact, however, some
manner of miscommunication occurred which prevented that key Elector from
performing their assigned duty. All seventy-three of the Democratic-Republican
Electors cast one vote each for Jefferson and Burr, resulting in a 73-73
tie. Seventy votes constituted a majority; both men had cleared the bar. But as
long as neither of them was inclined to give way to the other, the only way
forward was through the intervention of the House. Thus, in February of 1801,
the lower house of Congress was convened for the first time in its brief
history for the express purpose of electing the next President of the United
States.
This was the outgoing House, of course. A House
controlled by the Federalists, whose leading members had just been severely
rebuked at the polls. These men had no reason to offer their swift cooperation.
Not only had many of them just been voted out of office, but their
standard-bearer – President John Adams (1735-1826) – had just come in third
place to a pair of Democratic-Republican upstarts. And so, with the fate of the
presidency – and of the nation, one might argue – very much in their hands,
they began to act as good party men tend to do, with the interests of their
particular faction very much at front of mind. Their preferred candidate, to be
sure, would have been the aforementioned Adams, but he had fallen five votes
short of eligibility with only sixty-five ballots in his favor. Instead, it
fell to them to decide between two men whom most of them actively disliked.
What to do, then? How to vote? Some of the Federalists, perhaps thinking that
the New Yorker might be amendable to cooperation down the line, opted to
elevate Burr over Jefferson, doubtless believing that their actions would
entitle them to a warm relationship with the incoming president. It did not
hurt, of course, that Jefferson was the great enemy of their faction, that he
had pledged to undo all that they had accomplished, and that an opportunity to
so powerfully spite the man was not likely to come along again. Petty as this
plan of action may now seem, however, it was quite tame compared to what could
have happened. That is, compared to what certain members of the House intended
to happen.
Choosing Burr over Jefferson, in point of fact,
would not have subverted the will of the voters. Yes, it had always been the
Democratic-Republicans’ intention to see Jefferson become President and Burr
become Vice-President, but the ballots submitted by the Electoral College
placed the two men on equal standing. Each was entitled to claim the office of
President, and the House was just as entitled to choose whichever of them it
wished. But what if, as certain Federalists Representatives were actively
contemplating, the House opted to choose neither? What if, instead of attending
to their duty, they worked to engineer a non-result? In terms of deciding upon a
victor, the rules governing the contingent election process were relatively
clear. “In chusing the President,” the Framers wrote in Article II, Section 1,
“The Votes shall be taken by States, the Representation from each State having
one Vote; A quorum for this Purpose shall consist of a Member or Members from
two thirds of the States, and a Majority of all the States shall be necessary
to a Choice.” If no candidate received the support of an absolute majority of
the state delegations at the end of a round of balloting, therefore, further
rounds would commence until such a majority eventually emerged. And because
there was no time limit imposed on this process by the relevant text of the
Constitution, the number of ballots which could be held was theoretically
infinite. What was not infinite, however, was the term of the outgoing
president. Regardless of the decision that the House ultimately arrived at,
President Adams would leave office on March 4th, 1801. The House was
also supposed to end its term on that day, of course, but it wasn’t necessarily
clear if this would affect an ongoing session.
According to Article II, Section 2, the President
may, “On extraordinary Occasions, convene both Houses, or either of them, and
in Case of Disagreement between them, with Respect to the Time of Adjournment,
he may adjourn them to such Time as he shall think proper [.]” If there is no
disagreement between the two houses of Congress, therefore, and the House is
disinclined to adjourn itself, then it would seem as though a given session may
also continue on indefinitely. There is nothing in the Constitution, recall,
regulating the beginnings and endings of congressional terms. March 4th
was indeed the date upon which the two-year terms of the sitting members was
then due to expire, but it would have been a matter for the courts to determine
if a session sitting on that day would lose its claim to authority if its
leadership refused to end the proceedings in question. If the contingent
election continued, therefore, beyond March 4th, who would then
become President? Not Adams, surely; his term would just have expired. And
neither Jefferson nor Burr would seem to qualify unless the House chose one or
the other. The answer, it turned out, was a matter of statute law rather than
fundamental law. It was governed, that is, by an act of Congress rather than by
the terms of the Constitution.
According to the Presidential Succession
Act of 1792 – the product of a Federalist-controlled Congress –
In case of removal, death,
resignation or inability both of the President and Vice President of the United
States, the President of the Senate pro tempore, and in case there shall
be no President of the Senate, then the Speaker of the House of
Representatives, for the time being shall act as President of the United States
until the disability be removed or a President shall be elected.
Granting that this
would seem to get into a rather tricky area of law, the effect of this act,
circa 1801, would appear to have been to grant the Federalists a significant
potential advantage. Within the context of the scenario described above, the
arrival of March 4th absent a majority ballot in the House would
theoretically trigger the following series of events. Their terms in office
having come to an end, the President (John Adams), Vice-President (Thomas
Jefferson), and the membership of the Senate would immediately vacate their
positions within the existing federal power structure. The House would normally
follow suit, of course, but the ongoing contingent election would presumably
prevent this from occurring. At the moment, then, that their ceased to be a
sitting President, Vice-President, or President pro tem of the Senate, the
Speaker of the House – whose term, it could be argued, had yet to expire as
long as the session over which he was presiding had yet to adjourn – would then
assume the powers of the President of the United States. As the Speaker of the
House, as of February, 1801, was still Federalist Theodore Sedgwick
(1746-1813), the Federalists would accordingly maintain control of the White
House until such time – as mandated by the aforementioned act of Congress – a
special election could be held to fill the vacant office of President.
Granted, this would have made for a
tremendously complicated path to power, the only guaranteed result of which
would have been a second presidential election in as many years. Not only that,
but it almost certainly would have resulted in a degree of civil unrest the
likes of which the American people had not witnessed since the end of the
Revolutionary War. As it stood, even before the aforementioned Federalists were
able to put this plan into motion, tension and uncertainty reigned across the
country as suspicions began to circulate of the potential for foul play in the
House. As the assembled Congressmen cycled through ballot after ballot for
several days in the middle of February without either arriving at a viable
result or prompting Jefferson or Burr to offer some form of concession,
Republican-controlled newspapers began to call for military intervention to
settle the matter. Thus spurred to action, the Republican governors of Virginia
and Pennsylvania – James Monroe (1758-1831) and Thomas McKean (1734-1817),
respectively – began readying their state militias. Mobs also began gathering
in the new capital of Washington, D.C. as murmurs of discontent abounded. And
yet Jefferson, surveying what should have been an eminently distressing state
of affairs, appeared remarkably sanguine.
Writing to the aforementioned Governor
Monroe, the leader of the Democratic-Republicans expressed his opinion on
February 15th that any attempt by the Federalists to throw out the
results of the late election by way of laws that they themselves had written
was bound to bring about a campaign of armed resistance on the part of powerful
“middle states” like Pennsylvania and Virginia. In order to prevent such an
outcome, Jefferson continued, the Republicans may find themselves compelled to
call another constitutional convention, the purpose of which – with its
implicit threat of crafting an even more radical governing charter – was to
shock the Federalists into ceasing their machinations. Truly, in more ways than
one, it was a chaotic moment for the American republic. Less than a decade had
passed since the ratification of the Constitution, and already the nation it
had created was threatening to fly apart at the seams. Some portion of the
people’s chosen representatives seemed to be actively plotting to circumvent
the results of an extremely consequential election, the response to which, on
the part of their opponents, were preparations for mob action, the creation of
a parallel constitution, and the beginnings of a civil war. Under the circumstances,
however, for at least some of the Federalists in the House, it was all worth
the risk to keep the Democratic-Republicans out of the White House. The 1790s
had been a bruising time for both factions, and neither seemed inclined to
either forgive or forget now that the highest office in the land was
effectively up for grabs.
Fortunately for all involved – and doubly
so for the America people – cooler heads eventually prevailed. After
thirty-five ballots – during which, without fail, eight states voted for
Jefferson, one short of the necessary nine – the thirty-sixth ballot brought
about a viable result. Congressman James Bayard (1767-1815), a Federalist from
Delaware, had evidently received a clandestine assurance from Maryland
Republican Samuel Smith (1752-1839) that if Jefferson was elected President, he
would refrain from tampering either with the Federalist-erected financial
system or the nascent American Navy – both of which most Federalist feared
would be dismantled – and decline from dismissing Federalists officeholders
except in such cases as their removal was warranted for cause. This promise,
along with the unexpectedly fervent lobbying efforts of former Treasury
Secretary Alexander Hamilton (1757-1804) – who, though he was arguably Jefferson’s
most notable political rival, claimed to fear Burr’s supposed lack of guiding
principles even more – brought about exactly the shift which Jefferson needed
to claim victory. Bayard left his thirty-sixth ballot blank instead of marking
it for Burr at the same time that two of his Federalists colleagues from
Maryland and Vermont did the same. Delaware’s vote for Burr therefore became an
abstention while Maryland’s and Vermont’s became votes in favor of Jefferson.
Thus, with ten states in his favor, the Sage of Monticello finally claimed the office
of President.
No one involved in this nearly-disastrous
series of events should have had any reason to look back upon what had just
occurred – and what had only narrowly been avoided – with anything like a sense
of satisfaction. Yes, the contingent election procedure described by Article
II, Section 1 of the Constitution had indeed produced a viable result in the face
of a stalemate in the Electoral College, but only just. The defeated
Federalists, bent on some combination of revenge and an utter refusal to
relinquish power, had very nearly plunged the nation into civil war by
threatening to use their constitutional authority to engineer a kind of
statutory coup d’état. In theory, as aforementioned, everything from prolonging
the stalemate to bringing about the elevation of Speaker Sedgwick to the office
of Acting President would have been within the power of the members of the
House of Representatives to accomplish under the law. But this fact – which
was, and is, arguable at best – could not possibly have made such a course of
action either right in itself or desirable in a practical sense. The
Republicans would not have allowed it, they seemed quite prepared to force the
issue, and bloodshed would doubtless have resulted. And while this outcome
thankfully did not transpire, the events of – and those surrounding – the
contingent election of 1801 nevertheless made it painfully clear to the
contemporary American political class that some manner of institutional reform
was necessary. Clearly, certain of the mechanisms laid out in the Constitution
were inadequate to the realities of political life in the American republic.
As ideal a time as this most certainly
would have been to address the wisdom of placing the outcome of a contingent
election for president in the hands of the outgoing House of Representatives –
a circumstance which lay at the very heart of the recent controversy – the
reformist efforts that followed the successful elevation of Thomas Jefferson
instead focused their energies on an earlier step in the process. Rather than
address the potentially disastrous implications of an inconclusive result in
the Electoral College, the Democratic-Republicans who finally took control of
Congress in March of 1801 – and who maintained that control through the
mid-terms of 1802 – sought to reduce the likelihood that such inconclusive
results would occur in the first place. The result of their efforts was the 12th
Amendment – spoken about a number of times already in this discussion series –
the effect of which was to make a clearer differentiation, during the election
process, between candidates for the offices of President and Vice-President. In
many ways, this modification of the existing election procedure represented an
eminently practical concession to the emerging realities of contemporary
domestic politics. The Constitution was not designed with the existence of
permanent political factions in mind. On the contrary, the Framers located the
central threat to republican government in ambitious individual actors
and sought to structure the relevant government in such a way as to alternately
channel or frustrate the energies of the same. To their thinking, factionalism
was inherently undesirable, liable as it was to promote competition for its own
sake, and any institutional admissions to the existence of the same would only
serve to give such competition room to take root and thrive. Within such an
intellectual framework as this, there should not have been anything to fear
from either allowing the offices of President and Vice-President to be filled
in an intentionally non-partisan manner – with the top two vote getter simply
getting the top two jobs – or from granting the membership of the outgoing
House the power to break stalemates in the course of presidential elections. If
the relevant individuals, it was imagined, ever arrived at a disagreement, they
would be compelled to sort it out in keeping only with their personal
convictions and the best interests of the nation at large.
The members of the contemporary American
political class were substantially less optimistic in the aftermath of the
contingent election of 1801 than they had been when the Constitution was being
drafted in 1787. Granted, the stalemate which went on to produce the relevant
crisis was as much the result of personal ambition as partisan disagreement. It
certainly hadn’t been a source of harmony and mutual accord for the
arch-Federalist John Adams to have as his Vice-President the arch-Republican
Thomas Jefferson. And there was no denying that the near crisis that unfolded
over the course of the first two months of 1801 was the direct result of
existing factional enmities between the incoming Jefferson and the outgoing
Federalists in the House. But the strained relationship between Jefferson and
Burr – a Southerner and a New Yorker, respectively, with very different
approaches to politics – was arguably at the heart of the controversy. If one
or the other of them had simply agreed to give way, the issue would likely have
been settled within a single ballot in the House. Jefferson, of course, would
never have dreamed of sacrificing his chance at truly “republicanizing” the
American republic simply in the name of conciliation, and Burr was too personally
ambitious to let slip the opportunity to occupy the highest office to which any
American statesman could aspire. In the immediate aftermath of the predicament
caused by these two men’s egos, however, the victorious Republicans saw only
the immediate political significance. If, they theorized, Jefferson and Burr
had been on a single “ticket,” Jefferson would still have won handily and a
stalemate would have been avoided. Thus altering the federal electoral system,
it was true, would have represented a break with the Framer’s vision of a
constitutionally non-partisan republic. Indeed, it would have created an
institutional space in which permanent factions could begin to establish
themselves. Under the circumstances, however, as long as it solved the problem
at hand, the Republicans framers of the 12th Amendment seemed to be
willing to make the change.
The Constitution had yet to take on the air
of an immutable sacred text, of course. And it wasn’t as though the alterations
contained in the 12th Amendment aimed to completely restructure the
whole of the federal government around the needs and whims of the era’s
emerging political factions. It was a slight change, on the contrary; a bit of
procedural tidying-up so as to head-off future uncertainty. The fact that the
beginnings and endings of federal terms were otherwise left untouched would
seem to speak to the intentionally limited scope of the exercise. If the
framers of the 12th Amendment truly believed, in 1803, that the
existing political factions were a permanent feature rather than a passing
phase, it would seem the height of folly to have left the outgoing House in a
position to potentially determine the outcome of presidential elections. Even
once the modifications they had drafted as part of the 12th
Amendment took effect – thus reducing the likelihood of an Electoral College
tie – it would still have been possible for a presidential election to produce
a non-viable result. It also would have possible – albeit increasingly unlikely
– for the Federalists to retake the House in time for them to be in the
driver’s seat during a contingent election. In the elections of 1812 and 1814,
the party came close to capturing forty percent of the relevant seats, and
after the latter election they controlled six delegations outright. Had the
events of the War of 1812 (1812-1815) played out less satisfactorily for the
Republican Madison Administration, the numbers could have easily shifted enough
to give the Federalists a House majority. Under such an altered set of
circumstances, a competition between several candidates during the Election of
1816 – a species of event far from unheard of in the annals of American history
– might have resulted in a stalemate at the polls, a contingent election in the
House, and the elevation of a Federalist to the office of President for the
first time in twenty years.
The Republicans doubtless failed to account
for the emergence of this most unpleasant of scenarios because they were
convinced, after 1800, that the Federalists were all but done for. The years of
the Adams Administration had been particularly punishing for the latter, with
the events of the ongoing French Revolution prompting a series of diplomatic crises
between the United States and the French Republic. And while President Adams
ultimately succeeded in preventing a series of naval skirmishes known
collectively as the Quasi-War (1798-1800) from boiling over into a full-scale
conflict, the actions which he felt compelled to take during the many months
when it seemed as though an armed confrontation with France was on the horizon
did little to endear either him or his party to the American people at large.
The Federalists opted to enlarge the much-reduced US Army so as to stave off
potential French invasion, raised taxes in order to pay for the same, and
drafted and approved the notorious Alien and Seditions Acts (1798), the net
result of which was a domestic political atmosphere characterized by suspicion,
fear, and distrust. The Republicans took particular advantage of this, drawing
attention to the degree to which the Adams Administration seemed to be leading
the American republic inexorably closer to a British-style fiscal/military
state wherein taxes would fund military adventurism, which would give rise to
empire, which would lead to military expansion, which would prompt higher
taxes. The Federalist defeat in 1800, as far as the Republicans were concerned,
was a resounding rebuke of this kind of program and signaled the end of the
former faction as a viable threat on the national political stage.
This assessment, by and large, would turn out to be an accurate one. While the Federalists did not disappear entirely until sometime in the late 1820s, they ceased to field presidential candidates after 1816 and the last of their representation in Congress vanished after 1825. They remained a regional political force throughout the period in question, of course, mainly in New England, Delaware, and Southern mercantile states like Maryland. And they did begin what might have turned into a significant comeback between 1812 and 1814. The war with Britain was never particularly popular in the commercial Northeast, and early losses at Detroit (1812) and Fort Niagara (1813), the Burning of Washington (1814), and the wretched state of American finances as the conflict entered its third year spurred something like a revolt in previously Republican-dominated states like New Jersey, Virginia, and New York. By the Election of 1816, however, with the war over, the Battle of New Orleans (1815) having reinvigorated the nation’s spirits, and news of the so-called Hartford Convention – during which delegates from various New England states definitely discussed reforming the United States Constitution and might possibly have discussed secession – having spread far and wide, the Federalist Party found its prospects definitively dashed in the face of Republican triumphalism. Even the adoption by the victorious Republicans of an essential component of the Federalist financial program in the form of the 2nd Bank of the United States – chartered in February of 1816 – could not save the beleaguered party from finally fading away entirely. In that year’s election for President, Federalist nominee Rufus King (1755-1827) made the worst showing of any candidate since Charles C. Pinckney (1746-1825) a dozen years prior. Four years later, Republican incumbent James Monroe (1758-1831) ran completely unopposed.
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