A Quick Sojourn Back in Time
There's a Lot I Didn't Learn in High School History Classes
Disclaimer: I am entering a busy period at work. I will keep writing, and I hope to continue sending out articles 1-2 times per week, but research-heavy, time-intensive articles are going to be a little less frequent. So, buckle up for some wild conjecture and dangerous falsehoods.
This post was originally going to be about something else—about two questions I would use as checks in running a campaign:
Will it help us get more votes?
Will it help us govern more effectively once we’ve gotten more votes?
The two questions—the two impulses—are in tension. Perhaps you can win an election with a vicious, no-holds-barred approach, but I’m not convinced that sets you up to govern well post-election. And I still want to write about that—to look at the Trump/Vance and Harris/Walz campaigns through that lens.
But for today, we’re just going to take a quick trip back in time, one I hope might be comforting for anyone concerned that the current level of contention in our politics is permanent, or that it necessarily portends the end of our democracy.
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The year was 1800. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were running against each other for president.
Adams was running for the Federalists, Jefferson for the Democratic-Republicans (a name retroactively given to them by historians).
Making the race a little awkward was the fact that Adams was the sitting president and Jefferson the sitting vice president.
Making the race more awkward was that this wasn’t some intraparty feud that turned into a primary challenge—Adams was a Federalist when he was inaugurated in January 1797, and Jefferson was a Democratic-Republican.
Under the Constitution as originally ratified, members of the Electoral College—138 in all—cast two votes each. Whoever received the most electoral votes became president, and whoever received the second-most became vice president. Sounds simple enough, but it created enough issues that Congress saw fit to get the Twelfth Amendment ratified in time for the 1804 election.
There were two major political parties at that point: the conservative, more nationalist Federalist Party of Adams and Alexander Hamilton, and the more classically liberal Democratic-Republican Party of Jefferson and James Madison. In 1796, the Federalists ran Adams, then George Washington’s vice president, and U.S. Minister to Great Britain Thomas Pinckney of South Carolina, while the Democratic-Republicans ran former Secretary of State Jefferson and New York Senator Aaron Burr. Keep in mind that a tie between two members of the same ticket would send the election to the House of Representatives—if, say, a majority of electors voted for a joint Adams-Pinckney ticket and no other electors defected to one or the other, the House could elect either man as president, with the other serving as vice. Keep in mind also that too much trickery behind the scenes could result in the president and vice president coming from different parties, which is exactly what happened.
In order to not send the election to the House, the parties tried to manipulate the results by having some electors cast one vote for the intended presidential candidate and the other for someone besides the intended vice-presidential candidate, leading to the vice-presidential candidate having a couple of votes fewer than the presidential candidate, but still enough to beat the other party’s presidential candidate. Great plan!
But, all electoral votes were cast on the same day and they couldn’t exactly text or email at the time, so there were some issues in coordination. There were also rumors—accurate ones—that Hamilton, believing Adams was too moderate, was working behind the scenes to have Jefferson voters from South Carolina cast their second vote for Pinckney, not Burr, in hopes of Pinckney becoming president.
The long and short of it is that Adams won the election with 71 electoral votes, while his running mate, Pinckney, came in third with 59. Second place went to Jefferson, with 68 electoral votes, so Adams became president and Jefferson his vice.
Looking back—especially if your knowledge about the era, like mine, is restricted mostly to what might be taught in a high school history course—it seems normal that Adams and Jefferson, two of the greatest Founding Fathers, would serve together, but they were bitter rivals at the time. Throughout the Adams presidency, Jefferson worked to undermine Adams, and Adams worked to undermine the underminer.
To give an idea of how well Federalists and Democratic-Republicans got along, in 1798, Federalists in Congress passed the Sedition Act 44-41. The Sedition Act, one of the four Alien and Sedition Acts, criminalized false and malicious statements about the federal government, and was used by Adams to suppress speech critical of his administration. Prominent prosecutions included that of Matthew Lyons, Congressman of Vermont, who spent four months in jail after accusing the administration in an essay of “ridiculous pomp, foolish adulation, and selfish avarice,” and David Baldwin, who received a $480 fine and 18 months in prison after setting up a liberty pole in Dedham, Massachusetts that read “No Stamp Act, No Sedition Act, No Alien Bills, No Land Tax, downfall to the Tyrants of America; peace and retirement to the President; Long Live the Vice President.”
It does rather put our current issues into perspective a bit.
But anyway, after four years of contention, Adams and Jefferson ran it back in 1800. It remains one of the most vicious campaigns in American history. Federalists argued that if the godless Jacobin Jefferson were elected, “murder, robbery, rape, adultery, and incest will be openly taught and practiced,” and that voters should pick “God—and a religious president” over “Jefferson…and no God.” Meanwhile, one of Jefferson’s top supporters published a pamphlet calling Adams “a hideous, hermaphroditical character, which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness or sensibility of a woman,” and someone leaked a letter from Hamilton describing Adams, his fellow Federalist, as having “great and intrinsic defects in his character.”
I realize that none of this language seems all that unusual in light of what we hear today, but keep in mind that at this point it wasn’t all that rare for a pair of disputatious gentlemen to elect to resolve things by seeing if they could shoot each other from ten paces—the original “[musket] ball don’t lie.”
Anyway, helped along by broad backlash to the Alien and Sedition Acts, Jefferson and his Democratic-Republican running mate, Aaron Burr, won the 1800 election handily over Adams and Pinckney—but they tied with each other. To the House the election went: for thirty-five ballots, the men remained deadlocked, with Federalists supporting the Northerner Burr and Democratic-Republicans supporting the man they’d wanted to make president in the first place. On the thirty-sixth ballot, Jefferson prevailed, Hamilton having convinced a number of Federalists to defect from Burr.
The aftermath of the election? Two days before his term ended, Adams appointed several dozen Federalist Party supporters to new circuit judge and justice of the peace positions (eventually leading to the Supreme Court case that started them all, Marbury v. Madison), then didn’t bother attending Jefferson’s inauguration. Burr was praised for his work in presiding over the Senate, but was shut out of party matters—Jefferson never trusted him. Oh— and four years later, Burr shot Hamilton.
But, despite how his term started, Jefferson is generally considered by historians to be one of our five best presidents.
And what of Adams and Jefferson? They died on the same day, July 4, 1826—fifty years to the day after twelve colonies approved the Declaration of Independence—as friends.
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I don’t know who will win the election in November, and I don’t know what the next four years will look like. It’s also a bit much to just say “it will all be okay” and move on—“okay” hangs in the balance from time to time, and “okay” for a country does not mean “okay” for each of its citizens and the others it impacts. Reality is a lot more complicated than that.
But I find it helpful to understand a bit more about where the country has been, and, in seeing where it was and where it’s gone in the years since, to look forward with a little more optimism. Has it been smooth sailing since 1800? Obviously, unequivocally not. But we’re still here.
Random Fact
The last couple of weeks of the Olympics have been incredible. In that spirit, here’s a fun Olympics fact: I feel like many people know the Olympics are ancient—the first Games were held in 776 BC—but what was news to me was that they continued to hold the Olympic Games every four years for twelve centuries. The last recorded Olympic Games were held in 393 AD during the reign of Theodosius I, but there is some archaeological evidence that they continued to be held at least until sometime during the reign of Theodosius II. Either way, one or both of the Theodosii totally blew it and banned all pagan festivals, including the Olympics. The first modern Olympics were held in 1896 in Athens.
Random Recommendation
Give this a watch. If there’s an NBC version, I’d love to see that too.
Subscriber Update
Thanks very much to every new and old subscriber, and an especial thanks to everyone that has shared the newsletter with someone. Today—my dad’s birthday—is the day I’d originally set to start writing. I got impatient, and I’m glad I did. It feels good to be on post #20. If you like what you read, please share with others that might too—for better or worse, that’s the best way I’ve found for the newsletter to grow, and it’s not close.
As for last week’s pullup challenge, we’ll get back to that.