Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power (31 page)

Given the season of these remarks—the middle of June 1796, almost six months to the day before the electoral college was to meet to choose a successor to Washington—Jefferson entertained thoughts about America's prospects should the pilot of the vessel be a Republican. And, more to the point, whether he himself should be that pilot. Decorous silence on the explicit question of a candidacy for the office was to be maintained, but Jefferson was about to face the most momentous decision of his public life since he chose country over king in the hurly-burly of the Revolution: Would he allow his name to go forward as a candidate for president of the United States after all?

First, he wanted to clear up some worrisome business with Washington himself. Always sensitive about the opinions of others and particularly anxious for Washington to think well of him, Jefferson had read a report in the June 9, 1796,
Aurora
that drew on a confidential document Washington had given to members of his cabinet during the neutrality debates. Jefferson was determined to convince Washington that he, at least, had not betrayed the president's trust. Swearing on “everything sacred and honorable,” Jefferson promised Washington on June 19 that the document had “never been from under my own lock and key.”

Jefferson was concerned about what Washington thought of him in these early summer weeks of 1796, for he knew that the president was hearing rumors that Jefferson had been privately critical of—even condescending toward—his old chief. Worried about such impressions, Jefferson wrote Washington warning that some people may “try to sow tares between you and me” by presenting Jefferson as “still engaged in the bustle of politics, and in turbulence and intrigue against the government.”

When Washington replied in July 1796, he absolved Jefferson of responsibility for the
Aurora
matter but used the occasion to address Jefferson's views of the administration. “As you have mentioned the subject yourself,” said Washington, “it would not be frank, candid, or friendly to conceal that your conduct has been represented as derogating from that opinion
I
had conceived you entertained of me.”

The Federalists were busy maneuvering for the approaching presidential election. Their tactics included overtures to Jefferson nemesis Patrick Henry to stand for president. Henry was uninterested, but the latter suggestion, which, if adopted, would have divided Virginia, underscored the Federalists' conviction that Jefferson was likely to be their main foe.

From the West, the legislator William Cocke, a native Virginian now among the leading men of Tennessee, made himself plain to Jefferson in August 1796. It was Cocke's happy duty, he wrote, “to inform you that the people of this State, of every description, express a wish that you should be the next President of the United States, and Mr. Burr, Vice President.”

Jefferson's reply was at once clear and equivocal. “I have not the arrogance to say I would refuse the honorable office you mention to me; but I can say with truth that I would rather be thought worthy of it than to be appointed to it,” he wrote Cocke. For “well I know that no man will ever bring out of that office the reputation which carries him into it.”

TWENTY
-
EIGHT

TO THE VICE PRESIDENCY

There is a debt of service due from every man to his country, proportioned to the bounties which nature and fortune have measured to him.

—T
HOMAS
J
EFFERSON

You and I have formerly seen warm debates and high political passions. But gentlemen of different politics would then speak to each other.…
It is not so now. Men who have been intimate all their lives cross the streets to avoid meeting, and turn their heads another way, lest they should be obliged to touch their hat.

—T
HOMAS
J
EFFERSON
to Edward Rutledge

T
HE
PUBLICATION
OF
W
ASHIN
GTON
'
S
farewell address on Monday, September 19, 1796, set off America's first contested presidential election. The Washington announcement was, Massachusetts congressman Fisher Ames said, “a signal, like dropping a hat, for the party racers to start.”

Presidential elections in the first decades of the republic were odd affairs. Candidates did not campaign. They allowed, obliquely or through friends and allies, that they were available to be elected. Networks of the like-minded put together a ticket for president and vice president. In most states individual electors let it be known that a vote for them would be a vote for their favorites for both offices. Until the ratification of the Twelfth Amendment in 1804 there was no distinction between the two offices in the electoral college. The second place finisher became vice president.

However different in form presidential contests were, one feature has been constant from the beginning: They have been rife with attacks and counterattacks.

It took just ten days from the publication of Washington's farewell for Jefferson's enemies to strike against him, and strike hard. On Thursday, September 29, 1796,
The
Columbian Mirror and Alexandria Gazette
published a statement from Charles Simms, a Federalist lawyer close to President Washington. Simms was campaigning to become a presidential elector for John Adams from Prince William, Stafford, and Fairfax counties in Virginia. He took Jefferson on directly in his late September broadside. Jefferson, Simms charged, was not fit for high office, for he had fled the wartime governorship “at the moment of an invasion of the enemy, by which great confusion, loss, and distress accrued to the State in the destruction of public records.” Such a man was too weak to be president, Simms said, “for no one can know how soon or from whence a storm may come.” Jefferson was, in other words, a coward driven by vanity. Adams, on the other hand, was a statesman who could be counted on to stay the course set by George Washington.

The Jeffersonians reacted with force. John Taylor of Caroline, a pro-Jefferson Virginian, drafted a reply for publication. It made the case that Governor Jefferson had
not
failed in his duty, telling again the story of the invasion of 1781. Most important, in what was to become a perennially useful political theme, the Republicans argued that the contest of the hour was about the present, not the past. It was, they said, about the conflict between republican and monarchical visions of American government.

Taylor illustrated his point by describing a 1794 conversation with Vice President Adams and New Hampshire senator John Langdon in which Adams allegedly said that “no government could long exist, or that no people could be happy, without an hereditary first magistrate, and an hereditary senate, or a senate for life.” Campaign literature read: “Thomas Jefferson is a firm
REPUBLICAN
—John Adams is an avowed
MONARCHIST
.”

After the Jay Treaty, the next president faced the rising prospect of war with France—a possibility that imbued the election with an even greater sense of urgency that it already had.

Enduring a late-autumn cold spell at Monticello—the temperature had dropped to 12 degrees, freezing the ink in its well on his desk—Jefferson awaited news of the 1796 election results. Given the tasks facing the next president, he said the vice presidency might be preferable to winning the presidency itself. “Few will believe the true dispositions of my mind on that subject,” Jefferson wrote. “It is not the less true however that I do sincerely wish to be the second on that vote rather than the first.”

Hamilton, who opposed both Adams and Jefferson, was a complicating factor. He devised a fascinating strategy to deny his two rivals the presidency by urging Federalist electors in South Carolina to cast ballots for Adams's choice for vice president, native son Thomas Pinckney, for president rather than vice president. Hamilton's motive? Madison wrote to Jefferson that Hamilton believed Adams “too headstrong to be a fit puppet for the intriguers behind the screen.”

One sign that Jefferson was more invested in a personal victory than his formulaic protestations to the contrary lies in a note Madison wrote him on Saturday, December 10, 1796. “You
must
reconcile yourself to the secondary as well as the primary station, if that should be your lot,” Madison told Jefferson. The emphasis on “must” is Madison's—suggesting that Jefferson's closest political friend and counselor knew the presidential candidate to be anxious for the top post. Madison was also preparing his friend for the possibility that the Hamiltonian maneuvering could throw the election into the House of Representatives if Adams and Jefferson ended up in a tie in the vote.

Jefferson knew that a subsequent numerical deadlock in the House was also possible—“a difficulty from which the constitution has provided no issue,” he wrote Madison. Should he and Adams find themselves in such a situation, Jefferson authorized Madison to “fully to solicit on my behalf that Mr. Adams may be preferred. He has always been my senior from the commencement of our public life, and the expression of the public will being equal, this circumstance ought to give him the preference.”

A
s the returns reached Philadelphia, Pinckney faded to third, and Madison's worries reverted to the fear that Jefferson had been so set on becoming president that he might refuse the second spot. Appealing first to Jefferson's concern for reputation, Madison wrote that “it is expected that as you had made up your mind to obey the call of your country, you will let it decide on the particular place where your services are to be rendered.” Moreover, having a Republican influence in close proximity to the president could be important, even critical. “There is reason to believe also that your neighborhood to Adams may have a valuable effect on his councils particularly in relation to our external system,” Madison wrote.

On Wednesday, February 8, 1797, the votes were tallied. Adams won, barely, by a margin of 71 to Jefferson's 68. Pinckney carried 59. The Federalists fretted about Jefferson's winning the vice presidency. One anti-Jeffersonian clergyman was reported to have prayed: “O Lord! Wilt Thou bestow upon the Vice President a double portion of Thy grace,
for Thou knowest he needs it
.”

Adams was thrilled to become president. As he had written Abigail, he believed deeply in “the sense, spirit, and resources of this country, which few other men in the world know so well [or] have so long tried and found solid.” Despite the second-place finish, Jefferson found the results flattering. “I value the late vote highly,” he said, “but it is only as the index of the place I hold in the esteem of my fellow-citizens.”

Jefferson spent the cold weeks after the election ruminating on politics. “I knew it was impossible Mr. Adams should lose a vote North of the Delaware, and that the free and moral agency of the South would furnish him an abundant supplement,” he wrote. “On principles of public respect I should not have refused [the presidency]: but I protest before my God that I shall, from the bottom of my heart, rejoice at escaping.”

He took a wry, knowing tone: “The honeymoon would be as short in that case as in any other, and its moments of ecstasy would be ransomed by years of torment and hatred.” The vice presidency was the better place at this hour. “This is certainly not a moment to covet the helm,” Jefferson said.

Whispers of possible secession to form a confederacy of northern states appeared in
The
Connecticut Courant
in November and December 1796—whispers that hinted at a larger source of tension. At issue was the advantage Jefferson and his fellow Southerners had in national elections because of the three-fifths clause, the constitutional provision that counted a slave as three-fifths of a person to establish the number of congressmen and presidential electors allocated to each state. When Jefferson went on to win the presidency four years later, his Federalist critics would disparage him as the “Negro President” because of his dependence on the three-fifths clause. The battles over slavery were thus rooted not only in the debate over the morality of abolition but in the practical political reality that every additional slave state (ironically and tragically) increased the power of white office seekers from those states.

Jefferson found it preferable—and more comfortable—to strike grand notes on secession rather than engage his adversaries on the stark realities of the mathematics of power. “We shall never give up our union, the last anchor of our hope, and that alone which is to prevent this heavenly country from becoming an arena of gladiators,” he told Elbridge Gerry.

I
n the last days of the 1796 election, Jefferson had drafted a kind letter to Adams. After the usual disclaimers (“I have no ambition to govern men”), Jefferson wrote that the presidency was “a painful and thankless office.” Should Adams be able to “shun for us this war by which our agriculture, commerce and credit will be destroyed,” then “the glory will be all your own; and that your administration may be filled with glory and happiness to yourself and advantage to us is the sincere wish of one who though, in the course of our voyage through life, various little incidents have happened or been contrived to separate us, retains still for you the solid esteem of the moments when we were working for our independence.”

On New Year's Day 1797, Jefferson sent Madison a draft of the letter to Adams. “I can particularly have no feelings which would revolt at a secondary position to Mr. Adams,” Jefferson wrote. “I am his junior in life, was his junior in Congress, his junior in the diplomatic line, his junior lately in our civil government.” Nevertheless, he asked Madison whether he should send Adams the letter.

Madison replied with a six-point case against it. The key ones: Since things were currently cordial between the two men, “it deserves to be considered whether the idea of bettering it is not outweighed by the possibility of changing it for the worse.” Another: “May not what is said of ‘the sublime delights of riding the storm etc.' be misconstrued into a reflection on those who have no distaste to the helm at the present crisis? You know the temper of Mr. A. better than I do: but I have always conceived it to be a rather ticklish one.” Another: “The tenderness due to the zealous and active promoters of your election, makes it doubtful whether their anxieties and exertions ought to be depreciated by any thing implying the unreasonableness of them. I know that some individuals who have deeply committed themselves, and probably incurred the political enmity at least of the P. elect, are already sore on this head.” And finally: “Considering the probability that Mr. A.'s course of administration may force an opposition to it from the Republican quarter … there may be real embarrassments from giving written possession to him of the degree of compliment and confidence which your personal delicacy and friendship have suggested.”

Jefferson was grateful for the counsel. He would not mail the letter.

J
efferson reached Philadelphia on Thursday, March 2, 1797. Without delay he called on the president-elect. Adams, who lodged at Francis's on Fourth Street, repaid the courtesy the next morning, visiting Jefferson in his temporary quarters. Closing the door behind him, the president-elect said he was glad Jefferson was alone. The two had much to talk about.

Adams spoke of France, telling Jefferson that he had considered asking the new vice president to undertake a mission to Paris, “but that he supposed it was out of the question, as it did not seem justifiable for him to send away the person destined to take his place in case of accident to himself, nor decent to remove from competition one who was a rival in the public favor.” What did Jefferson think of dispatching Madison to join a diplomatic mission in Paris?

Jefferson agreed that he should not leave the country and thought Madison would refuse such a post. Adams, however, seemed determined. “He said that if Mr. Madison should refuse, he would still appoint him and leave the responsibility on him.”

T
he ceremonial proceedings in Congress Hall on Saturday, March 4, 1797, were brief but memorable. Congress gathered for a short session; the business was the inauguration of the president and the vice president and the swearing-in of new senators and representatives. The president pro tempore of the Senate, William Bingham of Pennsylvania, administered the oath of office to Jefferson in the second-floor Senate chamber.

The first American secretary of state was now the second vice president of the United States. Jefferson, in turn, swore in the eight new senators and delivered a short speech. He alluded to his broad political convictions and, graciously but unmistakably, to the mortality of the president: “No one more sincerely prays that no accident may call me to the higher and more important functions which the constitution eventually devolves on this office.”

In a sign of the virulence of the time, some Jefferson supporters found his speech too conciliatory. “His first act in the Senate was to make a
damned time-serving, trimming speech
in which he declared that it was a great pleasure to him to have an opportunity of serving his country under such a tried patriot as John Adams, which was saying to his friends—I am in; kiss my—and go to H-ll,” one New York Republican was said to have remarked.