The presidential election of 1800 was epoch-making in several meanings of the term. It was a reaction against the bold and defiant attitude of the party in power. It was a revolution of the people. Yet it was neither a dissolution of all government, as it appeared to the defeated, nor a permanent conversion of the people to democracy, as the victorious element was inclined to consider it. Sixty years later, the people would rise against the victorious party, grown to be a slave-truckling organisation, overscrupulous of the individual when the world was turning to aggregation, and would take the sceptre from them for a quarter of a century at least. The masses punish arrogance in a party as in an individual. Unlimited success is always fatal. No sooner has the party passed the safety-line in one direction than the tide of popular favour turns in the opposite way and leaves it stranded. Owing to such reaction, the National Government has never approximated anarchy on the individualistic side of Jeffersonianism, nor has it been in danger of monarchy under Hamiltonian centralising principles at the other extremity. To-day it is as far from the ideals of the one as the other. Controlled constantly by centrifugal and centripetal forces, the fixed orbit of the Union has been maintained.
The election of 1800 marked the first transfer of the national control from one party to another. So accustomed has time made us to these changes, that it is difficult to appreciate the anxiety with which the people of that day awaited the transition. Well-known party issues, announced in party platforms, now give a fair assurance of the policies to be pursued. Yet no serious suggestion emanated from the Federalists that they would not yield to the ballot. Fitness for self-government was again demonstrated, especially when contrasted with some other American nations, by the peaceful eviction of one party, yielding to no more warlike weapon in the hands of its opponents than the suffrage of citizens.
The anxiety of the hour was increased because the national machinery had suddenly come to a standstill. The defect predicted by its enemies and feared by its friends had suddenly appeared in the method of electing a President. According to the Constitution, each elector wrote two names upon his ballot. The man receiving the highest number, if a majority, was declared President, and the next highest, Vice-President. Every Republican elector chosen in 1800 had written upon his ballot the names of Jefferson and Burr. Consequently neither was elected, because neither had a majority. The superiority of Hamilton over Jefferson as a party manager is manifest by the fact that Hamilton had feared a Federalist tie in the election of 1789 and had taken steps to prevent it. The Republicans were now in a quandary. John Adams had received only sixty-five votes, cut off with one term, a vicarious sacrifice, as he thought himself; yet neither Jefferson nor Burr was elected, each having seventy-three votes. Various rumours disturbed the peace. It was said that Congress would appoint a President for the interim; that Adams would hold over; or that Hamilton, disappointed in not being made President, would turn dictator. Governor Monroe promised Jefferson that he would immediately re-convene the Virginia Assembly "should any plan of usurpation be attempted at the federal town." Monroe's remedy was an amendment which would correct the Constitution in this particular. The fathers had not foreseen this precise accident, but, in their wisdom, had provided a remedy for a defective election by casting a decision in the House of Representatives, the most popular body next to the electors. Jefferson had undoubtedly been the choice of the people, and his selection had been the intention of the Republican electors. This was ultimately accomplished in the House. An amendment to the Constitution was adopted before the next election to prevent the recurrence of such an accident, and the Union had by good fortune passed a crisis in a presidential election second only to that of 1876.
The discomfited Federalists sought an explanation for their defeat in everything save their own actions. After only twelve years, and twelve years passed in creating an efficient from a deficient government, the people had turned against them. "No party ever existed knew itself so little," said John Adams, "or so vainly overrated its own influence and popularity as ours. None ever understood so ill the causes of its own power or so wantonly destroyed them." State debt assumption, the bank, the excise, the increased debt, the war expenditures, the direct taxes, and the Alien and Sedition laws would seem to furnish a sufficient list of reasons for the downfall of a party, which came into the Administration by only three votes. Yet, by common consent, the blame for the defeat was placed on the aliens and their presses. "A group of foreign liars," was the forceful way in which the defeated President explained it, "encouraged by a few ambitious native gentlemen, have discomfited the education, the talents, the virtues, and the property of our country." Chagrined that Washington should have two terms and he cut off with one, smarting under the treacherous letter of Hamilton, to which he speedily framed a reply, the ex-President "trotted the bogs" back to Massachusetts, as he termed it, without paying his successor the courtesy of waiting to see him inaugurated. Gadsden, the old Revolutionary leader of South Carolina, now relegated to the line of spectators, lamented the short-sightedness of early days in not sufficiently guarding American citizenship from the admission of foreign meddlers. "Our old-standers and independent men of long, well-tried patriotism, sound understanding, and good property," said he, "have now in general very little influence in our public matters." He wished the advice of John Rutledge had been taken. He would have admitted only the sons of aliens to citizenship.
The new President was to the manor born, but he held theories dangerously akin to those put forth by the foreign faction, against which the Alien and Sedition laws had been aimed. Speculative philosophy, however philanthropic in its intent, was heresy to the practical Federalists. Hamilton, in the midst of the uncertain election, was reported to have given in a toast his preference for "a dreamer rather than a Catiline," as between Jefferson and Burr. During the campaign, pamphlets appeared describing Jefferson as a wild philosopher, one who believed the savage more independent and happy than the civilised man; who preferred newspapers to government; who believed that a little rebellion now and then was a good thing; who esteemed property and obligations of so little value as to declare that the actions of one generation were not binding on the next; who justified the excesses of the French Revolution by saying that if only an Adam and an Eve were left in every country and left free, it would be better than it had been before. Memories of Tory confiscations and penalties were sufficiently fresh to give credence to a rumour that the President-elect contemplated such retributive measures toward his political opponents. Memories of the disunion sentiments contained in the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions were still fresher, although Jefferson's close connection with the latter was not yet generally known.
Thomas Jefferson was an exponent of the democracy of his day, and with him democracy came into the National Administration. The "well-born" were discomfited. Yet it was not the democracy of Andrew Jackson's time. It was a democracy reflected from Europe like everything else in America at the time. It was the democracy of Montesquieu and the encyclopædists. It was a democracy which could be led by a college graduate and lawyer, who was also a gentleman farmer and a large landholder, bound to his party by a country residence, by being a borrower, and by speculative theories. Only such aristocratic democracy was possible on the Atlantic coast-plain. Pure American democracy would be born only after advancing civilisation found a majority in the mid-valley of the continent, with the barrier of the Alleghenies at its back. It reached a crude form in Andrew Jackson, the Indian fighter, and a slightly higher type in Abraham Lincoln, the prairie lawyer.
Jefferson's democracy in the abstract was a kind of political millennium, in which the people collectively exhibited traits quite different from their individual components. The people, to Jefferson's mind, were unselfish, by nature good, and needing no restraining bonds. They were their own censors. His democracy in the concrete took the shape of a great uprising of the people in 1800, temporarily led astray from the true principles of self-government by the undue influence of Alexander Hamilton acting through the moneyed interests, but returning joyously and regenerate to the path of constitutional rectitude. The election of 1800 he pronounced as real a revolution in the principles of government as was that of 1776 in its form; the material difference being that one was effected by the sword and the other by the rational and peaceable method of suffrage. Jefferson had no more conception of a modern political party than had Washington,—the latter because he saw in them only factions; the former because his party embraced the entire people.
For several years, it is true, Jefferson had been directing the pens of his lieutenants in the various States, circulating sound Republican literature, patronising Republican newspapers, and tabulating Federalist defeats as skilfully as a modern political manager. He encouraged the people to mass-meetings or county conventions of delegates. This was probably the beginning of the county political machinery. He lamented that the South had no towns, such as New England had, which would make smaller units for popular gatherings. The Federalists scorned this political machinery as too trivial and feared it as too popular. It would have a tendency to make the people less amenable to the control of their leaders. They preferred to continue the Revolutionary custom of committees of correspondence to manage party affairs.
All this herculean effort was felt by Jefferson to be necessary to win popular attention and support from the centralisation of Hamilton, which, to his myopic vision, was monarchism. Years after, he testified that nothing on earth was more certain than that if he, placed by his office of Vice-President at the head of the anti-monarchists, had given way and had withdrawn from his post, the people would have given up in despair and the cause of liberty have been lost. By his efforts, and the aid of the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, the Constitution and the Union had been saved when "at its last gasp."
As the time of Jefferson's inauguration approached, rumours of revolutionary action grew into a general alarm lest all the union-making of twelve years should be annihilated and the Federation days be brought back again. Jefferson's well-known antipathy to taxation and a national debt caused a rumour that he planned repudiation of the national obligation, perhaps an agrarian law, and even the distribution of all property. The vested interests were as much alarmed as ever they were in subsequent elections. "We have seen," cried one holder of national certificates and a subscriber to the bank, "the French clergy stripped in a night. One vote of Congress would put our federal debt into the family tomb with the paper money of Revolutionary days." Among the measures supposed to be contemplated by the victorious "mobocrats," as the Federalists called them, were the abolition of the United States Senate, destruction of foreign commerce and public schools, the abolition of internal taxes, the annihilation of the bank, and the Europeanising of the country by French immigrants. "God is punishing the manifold sins of this nation by delivering it over to projectors and philosophists," said a New England clergyman. Governor Strong, of Massachusetts, appointed a day of fasting and prayer, that the first magistrate and other rulers of the nation might rise superior to private interests and the prejudice of party. The lower branch of Congress had gone over to the Jeffersonians, and the upper House would be lost after the next session. No check was possible upon the reformers.