CHAPTER XII. THOMAS JEFFERSON, 1800.
In 1800 Adams was a candidate for re-election, and fully expected to be successful. But the Democratic-Republican party, as the opposition was now called, defeated him, and elected to the Presidency its great leader, Thomas Jefferson.
At a glance, it will be seen that the Republican of 1800 was the father of the Democratic party, the canonized Thomas Jefferson. The people, even thus early in the history of our nation, had begun to give evidence of that discontent at the aristocratic tendencies that even “The Father of his Country,” George Washington, and his successor, John Adams, displayed.
It would be considered almost sacrilege were we to republish here the many attacks that were made upon George Washington, when President of the United States, on account of the odor of aristocracy with which he had become so strongly impregnated before the Revolution, and which clung to him like the scent of the roses to the shattered vase. While there can be no doubt, of course, in the minds of us all, that Washington was pre-eminently a patriot, with a firm and steadfast faith in the doctrine of the rights of the people; still, he belonged to a section, to a State, that had been settled by Cavaliers who believed that they were somewhat better by birth than the Pilgrims of New England. And, having been born and educated in that atmosphere, it is small wonder that his character should have been somewhat attainted by his surroundings.
Upon Washington’s elevation to the Presidential chair he surrounded the executive mansion with more of the air of ceremony and evidences of “caste” than were pleasant to the mass of the people. He was attacked, during his first and second terms, by pamphleteers, who, in most scurrilous articles, wrote of him as one designing to perpetuate aristocracy and “caste” in our country. The debt of gratitude which the new Republic and the people thereof owed Washington was too great for any effect to be produced similar to the revolution in 1892. However, an impression was made; reluctantly, John Adams, Washington’s Vice-President, was elected as second President of the Union. This reluctance became apparent by his failure to be re-elected four years later.
A Minister from the United States to England always seems to become a suspicious object in the minds of the people of America. No man ever added to his popularity by being sent as Minister to the Court of St. James. John Adams, who was our first Minister, was but the beginning of a long list of unfortunates. In fact, the American people will heartily endorse the opinion of that great statesman, James G. Blaine, which is being so vigorously advocated by the New York Herald, that foreign Ministers are expensive and useless appendages of this Republic. The election of John Adams was occasioned more by the reflected glory of Washington and the gratitude of the people, which, like the rays of the declining sun, became diminished as it sunk behind the horizon of time. In Thomas Jefferson, the people, even thus early in the history of our nation, saw their friend. His simplicity of life, purity of character, and honesty of purpose, surrounded his name with the same halo, in the sight of the people, as that with which the names of Jackson, Lincoln and Cleveland have since been made luminous. Though Jefferson was called a Republican, still, to the people, he was a Democrat in the sense that democracy means equality.
Never was there a statesman more thoroughly imbued with the principles of popular liberty than Jefferson. “Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God”—Oliver Cromwell’s saying—was the motto engraved on his seal. He had taken a leading part in the colonies’ struggle for freedom. He was a member of the Continental Congress, Governor of Virginia during the war, and—a yet greater title to immortality—author of the Declaration of Independence. After the war he had been sent as American Minister to France, where he sympathized warmly with the revolution against Bourbon tyranny.
Jefferson’s election to the Presidency was universally regarded as a great popular triumph. He was hailed everywhere as “the Man of the People,” and the day that saw him inaugurated was celebrated with such rejoicings as had not been witnessed since the news of peace came, in 1783. No business, no labor was done on the 4th of March, 1801. It was a day of powder and parades, of church services, of bell-ringing, of speeches, and illuminations. The country’s satisfaction seemed unanimous.
“The exit of aristocracy” was a toast drunk at one great banquet that evening; and when it had been duly honored, the band appropriately struck up the “Rogue’s March.”
The inauguration itself was a simple affair enough. It has, indeed, been asserted that Jefferson rode up Capitol Hill without a single attendant, tied his horse to a picket fence, and walked alone into the Senate chamber to take the oath of office. Professor McMaster offers evidence to prove this story inaccurate. Jefferson was not surrounded, on his induction into the Presidency, by such throngs as attended the inaugurations of Washington and Adams in New York and Philadelphia. But he went to the Capitol in the midst of a gathering of citizens, with the accompaniment of drums, flags, cannon, and a troop of militia. His dress was, as usual, that of a plain citizen, without any distinctive badge of office. On taking the oath of office he said, in a brief speech to the Senate: “I know that some honest men fear that a republican government cannot be strong—that this government is not strong enough. I believe this, on the contrary, to be the strongest government on earth.”
Jefferson’s administration—so economical, business-like, and democratic as to have made “Jeffersonian simplicity” a proverb—met with such approval that when he was re-elected in 1804 only fourteen votes were recorded against him. Only in one State—Massachusetts—was there any excitement in the campaign.
The supremacy of the Democratic-Republican party lasted practically unchallenged until John Quincy Adams was elected, under peculiar circumstances, in 1824. There were in that year three leading candidates for the Presidency—Adams, Clay, and Jackson. As neither of them commanded a majority of the Electoral College, the question was referred to the House of Representatives, which selected Adams as being, in a measure, a compromise candidate.
John Quincy Adams was at that time acting with the Democratic party, but he was, as James Parton points out in his “Life of Jackson,” “a Federalist by birth, by disposition, by early association, by confirmed habit.” And it soon became clear that Federalism, long supposed to be dead, was “living, rampant, and sitting in the seat of power.” Federalists were appointed to office—notably Rufus King, the most conspicuous survivor of the original Federalists—who was sent as minister to England. Adams was for stretching the Constitution, as the old Federalists were. In his first message to Congress he advocated government roads and canals, a government university and observatory, government exploring expeditions, and the like.
His personality and manners revived the aristocratic traditions of his father. In the state he maintained at Washington he was said to go beyond the first President Adams. He refurnished the White House on a grand scale, and shocked the frugal taste of the day by placing a billiard table in it. The East Room, in which his excellent mother had hung clothes to dry, was now a luxuriously fitted apartment.
“John II.” was the name that John Randolph of Roanoke bestowed upon the son and heir of the “Duke of Braintree.” Randolph had hated the Adams family since an incident that occurred on the day of Washington’s inauguration, which he recalled long afterwards in one of his speeches. “I remember,” he said, “the manner in which my brother was spurned by the coachman of the Vice-President—John Adams—for coming too near the vice-regal carriage.”
Even Mr. Blaine, who in his “Twenty Years of Congress” shows himself a kindly critic of the Federalist ideas and Federalist leaders, admits the “general unpopularity attached to the name of Adams.”
During John Quincy Adams’ administration the mutterings of a coming political upheaval began to be heard. It began to be said that the Presidency was growing too much like an hereditary monarchy. It was becoming too settled a practice for each incumbent, after eight years in office, to make his Secretary of State his political heir. It gave the President what was almost equivalent to the power of appointing his successor. John Quincy Adams, it was said, counted confidently on the usual double term, and upon seeing his friend Clay, to whom he had given the chief post in his Cabinet, elected to succeed him.
“The issue is fairly made out: Shall the government or the people rule?” asked Andrew Jackson, and on that issue he appealed to the country in his memorable electoral campaign against Adams, in 1828. That was the bitterest Presidential contest that had ever been fought. Jackson was attacked with unexampled ferocity. One day at his Tennessee home, the Hermitage, his wife found him in tears. “Myself I can defend,” he said, pointing to a newspaper which he had been reading; “you I can defend; but now they have assailed even the memory of my mother.” And it was, in great part, her distress at the invective that was heaped upon her husband that caused the death of Mrs. Jackson just after the election.
It was a pitched battle between the “classes” and the “masses.” As James Parton says, in his biography of Jackson: “Nearly all the talent, nearly all the learning, nearly all the ancient wealth, nearly all the business activity, nearly all the book-nourished intelligence, nearly all the silver-forked civilization of the country, united in opposition to General Jackson, who represented the country’s untutored instincts.”