Read The American Vice Presidency Online
Authors: Jules Witcover
Clinton notified Washington that “with a Degree of Pain” he was requesting to leave his military post when “the Designs of the Enemy are not fully known.” He added, “I will most cheerfully return to the army until the Fate of the present campaign is determined” if the obligations of his new position should permit it. Hamilton, as a lieutenant-general and Washington’s chief aide, wrote to Major General Israel Putnam, Clinton’s superior officer: “It is regretted that so useful an officer is obliged to leave the posts under his superintendency at a time like this,” a sentiment in which Washington joined while extending good wishes to Clinton as governor.
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Clinton’s early optimism about the security of the Hudson Highlands was soon dashed. In September, after the British occupied Philadelphia, a large flotilla of ships laden with British and Hessian troops sailed up the Hudson, causing Washington to order his generals to call out the militias in Connecticut and New York. He urgently requested that Clinton take personal direction of Forts Clinton and Montgomery in guarding the New York Highlands against the assaults of the British general John Burgoyne.
In a fight between more than four thousand invaders and six hundred American militiamen, many unarmed, the defenders inflicted heavy casualties but eventually surrendered the forts. Clinton barely evaded capture and resumed direction of the resistance, which ultimately prevented the British forces in northern New York from joining up and relieving Burgoyne’s beleaguered forces, which eventually surrendered.
After the war, Clinton resumed his full-time responsibilities as the governor of New York, by this time sufficiently entrenched to repel easily another challenge from the aristocratic Schuyler. During the war, with much of the southern part of New York State under British occupation, Clinton had been a strong advocate for increasing the power of Congress to prosecute the war and achieve a greater sense of nationhood at home. Afterward, as governor he became more concerned about the rights and liberties of his state and of fellow New Yorkers within the developing and expanding federal government and about the state’s heavy financial burden to it. His earlier flirtations with national office, including brief Anti-Federalist campaigns in New York and Virginia to elect him president or vice president in 1789 and vice president in 1792, did not divert him from his prime allegiance and defense of the interests of his home state.
But in early 1804, with Burr summarily dismissed for a second vice presidential term and Clinton fixed on retiring from the New York governorship, his selection to be Jefferson’s reelection running mate became obvious. With his long service in Albany, his war experience, and his solid Anti-Federalist credentials, Clinton at sixty-five was just right as one who would not pose a serious challenge to the younger Madison for the presidency in 1808.
Jefferson accordingly paid little attention to Clinton, disregarding him on patronage matters in New York and turning a deaf ear to his urgings for more protection of American shipping, critical to the port of New York, amid turmoil in Europe. Clinton deplored as inadequate the ultimate appropriation of one million dollars to defend the entire east coast, about which he was not consulted.
As John Quincy Adams so uncharitably observed after Clinton took the chair as presiding officer of the Senate, he was a fish out of water after so many years of swimming in familiar political waters in Albany. He returned often to his home in Poughkeepsie and, unlike Burr, usually
absented himself from the Washington social circuit, seldom entertaining colleagues and living mostly in boardinghouses, his wife, Cornelia, having died in 1800.
After so many years in power in New York and with an abundance of free time as the vice president, Clinton tried to keep his hand in his state’s politics. In 1807, in desperation to reestablish Republican control in New York, some of the vice president’s loyalists called on him to return and seek yet another gubernatorial nomination. Irritated, he asked his friends not to force him to make an “absolute refusal” of any such nomination.
Meanwhile, as the so-called Burr Conspiracy in the West spread, Clinton applauded Jefferson’s disavowal of any administration involvement and warned his nephew DeWitt Clinton to steer clear of it. He expressed strong doubts that Burr’s activities reflected only interest in land speculation.
At the same time, the national party that Jefferson had constructed was suffering divisions over his successor in 1808. Publicly he remained silent while clearly preferring Madison. But because Clinton, increasingly out of the loop of the Jefferson inner circle, had reservations about the administration’s foreign policies, his name again began to surface for the next presidential nomination, although he now was in his late sixties. His New York base could appeal to many voters, especially elsewhere in the North, who felt that sixteen years of the last twenty of a Virginian in the presidency was enough. Also being injected into the speculation was another Virginian, James Monroe, who along with William Pinckney had negotiated the treaty with Great Britain in 1806, which Jefferson found so unsatisfactory.
The Republican congressional caucuses that had emerged in 1800 and were continued in 1804 were essentially to select the vice presidential nominees, since in both years Jefferson was the agreed presidential choice. In 1808, for the first time the party presidential nomination involved real competition. Madison’s strong support in Congress made the caucus his favored device, whereas Monroe’s and Clinton’s chances seemed better in a process of broader representation. Both hoped that at the least the caucus would be delayed, preventing an early Madison nomination. But it was called for in January, long before adjournment, because a movement for Monroe was growing in the Virginia legislature and the Madison backers hoped to undercut it.
On January 23, 1808, Senator Stephen Bradley of Vermont as the
previous Republican caucus chairman, summoned party members of Congress to the Senate chamber to nominate the Republican ticket. His right to call the caucus was challenged by a New York Republican, but eighty-nine members showed up, of whom eighty-three voted to nominate Secretary of State Madison for the presidency. The caucus then voted on the vice presidential nomination, and seventy-nine went for Clinton for a second term.
Most Clinton and Monroe supporters in Congress declined to attend, but Madison still had a majority of the party legislators. In Virginia, backers of Monroe refused to recognize the result of the caucus or of another by the party members in the state legislature that nominated Madison electors. They formed a rival faction that nominated electors pledged to Monroe. Clinton meanwhile, still considering himself a candidate for the presidency, complained that he had not been told of the congressional caucus or its purpose, and he never formally accepted its vice presidential nomination.
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Clinton told New York senator Samuel Mitchell he thought himself “treated with great disrespect and cruelty” by the caucus goers, apparently to be cavalierly dismissed as a serious presidential prospect.
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Some of the Clintonians complained that Virginia’s pride in the presidencies of Washington and Jefferson had “stimulated the people of that state to believe that Virginia geese are all swans.”
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Mitchell wrote his wife about Madison’s and Clinton’s prospects: “There does not appear the remotest probability of [Clinton’s] success as President. The former gives dinners and makes generous displays to the members. The latter lives snug at his lodgings, and keeps aloof from such captivating exhibitions. The Secretary of State has a wife to aid his pretensions. The Vice-President has nothing of female succor on his side.”
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Clinton meanwhile, demonstrating what he now thought of Jefferson’s conduct of foreign policy and how its continuance under Madison would imperil the country, wrote to DeWitt Clinton: “It is in my Opinion impossible that the Cause of Republicanism can exist much longer under the present visionary Feeble and I might add Corrupt Management of our National Affairs. It is calculated to disgust our best Friends and is fast doing so.”
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John Randolph of Virginia undertook to rally his state’s “Tertium Quids”—a third faction of the Republican Party—to Clinton as a way to
detour Madison, but Clinton’s unusual behavior hampered the effort. He continued to ignore and say nothing of the Republican caucus endorsement of him for another term as vice president, generating a belief in some quarters that he had left the party. He denied it and refused to withdraw his presidential candidacy.
Meanwhile, in August of the election year, some two dozen or so prominent Federalists from seven New England and mid-Atlantic states, plus South Carolina, caucused to consider nominating the party’s ticket. But when some of the New York and Pennsylvania delegates balked at Clinton, the Federalist caucus settled on Pinckney of South Carolina and Rufus King of New York.
Clinton’s advanced age—he as now sixty-nine and in declining physical condition—also was raised against him as a presidential nominee. But if he was too old, his defenders asked, why had the Republican congressional caucus chosen him to continue as vice president, first in line of succession for the presidency? At the same time, they challenged the legitimacy of the congressional caucus to nominate the Republican ticket, since the Constitution specifically provided for electors to decide the election, taking it out of the hands of Congress.
Some Pennsylvania Republicans favored Clinton for president and Monroe for vice president but on reflection concluded that Clinton could prevail only in league with Federalists, an unacceptable circumstance. In the end, they gave all their twenty electoral votes to Madison. In Clinton’s own New York, fears of being out in the cold in a Madison administration produced a split in the state’s electoral votes, with thirteen for Madison and six for their former governor.
In Virginia, bad feelings remained over Clinton’s stubbornness in refusing to say whether he accepted the vice presidential nomination again. Later, Monroe’s supporters, recognizing he trailed Madison, contrived the notion of running Clinton for president and Monroe for vice president as a means of bringing Monroe decisive support from New York. Unsaid was the prospect that Clinton, if elected president, might not live out his term or seek a second term, leaving Monroe well positioned to ascend to the presidency. Randolph, a veteran Anti-Federalist but a fierce foe of Jefferson in Virginia, endorsed the Clinton-Monroe ticket but now carried little weight in the Old Dominion.
Once again Clinton was disappointed at the prospect of another four years as vice president. He had had enough of presiding over the Senate and enough of the foreign policy of Jefferson and Madison. But he had no alternative and quietly went along for the ride into the general election, in which the Republican ticket of Madison and Clinton easily prevailed.
In the new Madison administration, inaugurated on March 4, 1809, Clinton didn’t bother to put in an appearance until weeks later, when the first congressional session began. While there, he was as isolated from power as he had been in the last four years of the Jefferson administration. But by this time Clinton neither had the vigor nor the inclination to take any significant task. Dutifully he continued to preside over the Senate when he was in Washington, but ill health and his desire to be back home in New York diminished that time. Why he agreed to serve another term as vice president under another president with whom he had major differences, in a position he long before had grown tired of, remained a mystery.
Clinton’s last significant action as vice president came in 1811, three years after election to his second term, when he cast the deciding vote breaking a 17–17 tie in the Senate on rechartering the Bank of the United States, sought by Madison and Gallatin. Clinton, siding with the seventeen old Republicans and against the seven Federalists and ten Republicans for rechartering, killed the bank with only the eleventh vote he cast in his two vice presidential terms.
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In doing so, he weighed in as the champion of government of limited, proscribed powers. Questioning the constitutionality of creating such a national bank not expressly mentioned by the founders, he wrote that were it needed, “the Constitution happily furnishes the means for remedying the evil by amendment.” The aging vice president was true to his old Anti-Federalist moorings. “In the course of a long life,” he concluded, “I have found that Government is not to be strengthened by an assumption of doubtful powers, but by a wise and energetic execution of those which are incontestable; the former never fails to produce suspicion and distrust, while the latter inspires respect and confidence.”
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Two months later, George Clinton died at age seventy-three. Gouverneur Morris in his eulogy frankly declared that although Clinton had regularly presided over the Senate, “to share in the measures of administration was not his part. To influence them was not in his power,” and the man’s
sense of duty and propriety “induced him to be silent.”
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The observations, which could have been taken as an indictment of Jefferson and Madison for not making better use of this upright and committed fellow Republican, were no more than a description of what little was expected of the American vice president in those first years of the Republic and for many years thereafter.
For the first time, the American vice presidency was vacant and would remain so for the remaining eleven months of Clinton’s second term. There existed no provision for a replacement, either by election or appointment, and few seemed to care or even notice. The circumstance was yet another commentary on the continuing insignificant regard for the office. The vacancy left Senator Pro Tem William H. Crawford of Georgia, who was in the Senate for only five years and little known in the country, next in the line of presidential succession until the inauguration of the next elected vice president.