A Magnificent Catastrophe Read online

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  FREE PRESS

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  Copyright © 2007 by Edward J. Larson

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Larson, Edward J. (Edward John)

  A magnificent catastrophe: the tumultuous election of 1800:

  America’s first presidential campaign / Edward J. Larson.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  1. Presidents—United States—Election—1800. 2. Jefferson, Thomas, 1743–1826. 3. Adams, John, 1735–1826. 4. Burr, Aaron, 1756–1836. 5. Hamilton, Alexander, 1757–1804. 6. United States—Politics and government—1797–1801. 7. Political culture—United

  States—History—18th century. 8. Political culture—United States—History—19th century. I. Title.

  E330.L37 2007

  324.973—dc22 2007016017

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-6840-7

  ISBN-10: 1-4165-6840-9

  Illustration credits will be found on back matter.

  Visit us on the World Wide Web:

  http://www.SimonSays.com

  In the spirit of

  John Adams and Thomas Jefferson

  whose fatherly love and respect for their daughters

  ran through and enriched their adult lives,

  I dedicate this book to our daughter,

  Sarah Marie Larson

  “Be assured that to yourself, your sister, and those dear to you, everything in my life is devoted. Ambition has no hold on me but through you.”

  —THOMAS JEFFERSON TO HIS DAUGHTER, MARTHA FEBRUARY 5, 1801

  “Heaven has blessed you, my daughter, with an understanding and a consideration that is not found everyday among young women…. With the most fervent wishes for your happiness, I am your affectionate father.”

  —JOHN ADAMS TO HIS DAUGHTER, NABBY AUGUST 13, 1783

  “[My] happiness is wrapped up in yours.”

  —THOMAS JEFFERSON TO HIS DAUGHTER, MARIA JULY 4, 1800

  CONTENTS

  Preface

  INTRODUCTION: Independence Day, July 4, 1776

  CHAPTER ONE: From Friends to Rivals

  CHAPTER TWO: Crossing the Bar

  CHAPTER THREE: “Electioneering Has Already Begun”

  CHAPTER FOUR: Burr v. Hamilton

  CHAPTER FIVE: Caucuses and Calumny

  CHAPTER SIX: A New Kind of Campaign

  CHAPTER SEVEN: For God and Party

  CHAPTER EIGHT: Insurrection

  CHAPTER NINE: Thunderstruck

  CHAPTER TEN: The Tie

  EPILOGUE: Inauguration Day, March 4, 1801

  Notes

  Index

  Photographic Insert

  PREFACE

  THE RESEARCH that culminated in this book commenced with an invitation to deliver a single lecture on the role of science and religion in the election of 1800. Coming as it did at the sunset of the Enlightenment and the dawn of the Great Revival, the 1800 campaign occurred at the pivot point of massive cultural forces in the history of American science and religion. Those forces necessarily affected the election, and not simply because Thomas Jefferson bore the mantle of Enlightenment science while John Adams invoked Protestant traditionalism as a vital prop for civil society.

  Exploring this topic, I found a rich interplay of ideas and actions among protagonists who cared deeply about issues and knew that they were forging the traditions of a great new nation. Jefferson’s Republican running mate, Aaron Burr, was the grandson of America’s greatest evangelical theologian, Jonathan Edwards, for example, and Adams’s Federalist running mate, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, served for fifteen years as the president of the Bible Society of Charleston. In the end, however, I could not separate the topic of science and religion from other issues driving this critical election that, more than any other, stamped American democracy with its distinctive bipartisan character. Over time, my brief lecture grew into this book dealing with the election as a whole.

  As my topic grew, my indebtedness to other scholars grew as well. For a season, I titled my manuscript “The Founders’ Coda” in recognition of the role played by the nation’s founders in this election. Here, as participants in an extraordinarily bitter election contest, they transformed the political structure of the American union and set it on its modern course. Their names, first made famous during the Revolutionary Era, sounded again in 1800: Adams, Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison, Jay, Monroe, Gouverneur Morris, George Clinton, John Marshall, Thomas McKean, and even George Washington. For generations, some of the nation’s finest historians have examined and reexamined these founders, with an extraordinary flowering of such books published over the past two decades. I have benefited immeasurably from their broad insights in my focused study of the 1800 election. I have also profited from the considerable scholarship on the election itself, including recent books by my friend Susan Dunn, who frequently collaborates with my esteemed former teacher at Williams College, James MacGregor Burns, and by my cross-state colleague within the University of Georgia system, John Ferling. Further, over the years, archivists, librarians and historians have assembled remarkably comprehensive collections of the letters and writings of Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison, Marshall, and other founders, and of early American newspapers and pamphlets. In exploiting these resources for this book, I have regularized punctuation, capitalization, and spelling. The medieval scholar Bernard of Chartres first spoke of seeing further by standing on the shoulders of giants, and it certainly applies to me in this work.

  As a teacher at the University of Georgia and Pepperdine University, I have learned much from my colleagues and students. For this book, I particularly benefited from my collaboration with Georgia’s exceptional colonialist, Michael Winship, on a book about the Constitutional Convention, and from research assistance provided by Judkin Browning for my initial lecture on science and religion in the election of 1800. My status as the Russell Professor of American History at the University of Georgia facilitated my investigation of this political topic, and I want especially to thank Charles Campbell, the former U.S. Senate aide who now chairs the Russell Foundation, for his interest and support. I also had the good fortune of securing research assistance from Michael Coenan, who worked in Athens, Georgia, during 2005–06 as a campaign aide to my former Harvard Law School classmate, Congressman John Barrow. Coenan, now at Yale Law School, immersed himself in the complexities of the 1800 New York election even as he helped his own candidate win reelection. Further, my thanks go to the librarians at Georgia and Pepperdine who assisted in securing source material used in this book and to Philip J. Lampi of the American Antiquarian Society for providing data from the Society’s extraordinary
First Democracy Project.

  Through their assistance, friends and family made this book into a reality. First came my dogged and determined agent, B. G. Dilworth, who pushed and pulled a book proposal out of me. Then came my initial editor at Free Press, Fred Hills, who helped me to reconceive the book’s basic structure and saw me through the first draft. Following Fred’s retirement, Emily Loose took over my draft chapters and wonderfully transformed them through her editorial suggestions, which were both meticulous in their attention to detail and comprehensive in their conception of the whole. Through it all, my wife, Lucy, and our children, Sarah and Luke, have graciously borne with my preoccupation with this project and encouraged me by their words, actions, and interest. Our dog, Pippin, cheered me on by expectantly lying at my side as I labored on particularly difficult passages—although I suspect his patient expectations revolved more around walks than finished chapters. At every stage, I felt extraordinary support. I hope that the final product is worthy of the assistance that I have received from so many.

  —Edward J. Larson

  A MAGNIFICENT CATASTROPHE

  INTRODUCTION

  INDEPENDENCE DAY, JULY 4, 1776

  THEY COULD write like angels and scheme like demons. Trained as attorneys, they thoroughly mastered that craft only to turn their formidable legal skills toward statecraft. Both men preferred farming to law or politics. But the year was 1776, and their respective colonies—North America’s two most populous British domains—had sent them to Philadelphia as delegates to the Second Continental Congress. When all reasonable hope of reconciliation with Britain expired, the Assembly named them to a special, five-member committee charged with drafting a formal Declaration of Independence for the “united colonies.” Standing shoulder to shoulder with delegates from the thirteen self-proclaimed sovereign states on that first Fourth of July, John Adams of Massachusetts and Thomas Jefferson of Virginia signed the subtly eloquent document that their committee had crafted. Among the delegates, Adams had argued longest and most effectively for independence. Within the committee, Jefferson had taken the lead in writing the Declaration itself.

  John Trumbull’s celebratory painting of the signing ceremony puts Adams and Jefferson front and center, with Benjamin Franklin prominently at their side and the other two committee members obscurely in the rear. Lanky and lean with an unruly sandy-red mane, Jefferson at a youthful thirty-three stood head and shoulders above the balding, rotund, but square-shouldered Adams—then a prematurely old forty. “My good man is so very fat,” Abigail Adams had written about her husband a decade earlier—and he had only grown stouter with age. Regarding his own portrait, Adams once commented, “He should be painted looking like a short thick archbishop” and, writing from Philadelphia in November 1775, had characterized himself as “a morose philosopher and a surly politician.” These comments exposed the inner man. Adams always relished a spirited argument, including with himself, and he inevitably remained his own most astute critic, with his adoring and adored wife a close second. “Vanity,” he wrote, “is my cardinal vice.”

  At over six feet two inches tall, with high cheekbones and deep-set eyes, Jefferson towered over most men of his time even when he slouched—which he often did, especially when seated. Standing, he typically folded his arms tightly across his chest and often had a faraway look. Here, Jefferson’s body language betrayed his character as someone who avoided direct confrontation—even with himself. Although Adams’s proud combativeness competed with Jefferson’s detached coldness in putting off new acquaintances, both men gained the respect of friends and foes alike for their intense self-discipline, studied brilliance, and seriousness of purpose. Along with Franklin and George Washington, they were the central figures in the American Revolutionary leadership.

  On that fateful July 4, John Hancock, speaking as president of the Continental Congress and the nearest thing to an elected leader for the aligned but not yet amalgamated states, warned his fellow delegates, “We must be unanimous. There must be no pulling different ways; we must all hang together.” Wise and worldly, Franklin reportedly added, “Yes, we must, indeed, all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.”

  As always, Franklin’s quip carried more than a kernel of truth. In July 1776, the patriot cause looked bleak. Britain had launched the largest foreign military force in its history against its rebellious American colonies. That force would soon smash the ill-trained and ill-equipped patriot troops in New York and drive them from the field. Philadelphia could have fallen that same year, sending the delegates running for their lives. It did fall a year later. When signing the Declaration of Independence, Benjamin Harrison darkly joked to Elbridge Gerry: “I shall have a great advantage over you, Mr. Gerry, when we are all hung for what we are now doing. From the size and weight of my body I shall die in a few minutes, but from the lightness of your body you will dance in the air an hour or two before you are dead.” Harrison, a rotund Virginia planter and direct ancestor of two Presidents, and Gerry, a slender Massachusetts merchant and future Vice President, were family men of substance—not desperate people devoid of hope. The words that Adams spoke and Jefferson wrote in Philadelphia emboldened Americans like Harrison and Gerry to take a historic stand: to stake their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor on the cause of freedom. Success or failure turned in large part on how the patriot leaders responded to the challenges they faced in birthing a nation.

  For two decades, Adams and Jefferson followed the advice of Hancock and Franklin. They pulled together in war and peace, became friends, and helped to forge a sovereign nation from thirteen dependent colonies. During those fateful years, Adams continued his distinguished service in the Continental Congress; drafted his state’s new constitution; joined Franklin as a wartime diplomat in France; and became America’s first postwar ambassador to Britain. Although Jefferson left Congress in 1776, he revised Virginia’s legal code and served two terms as governor before returning to Congress in 1783 and then joining Franklin and Adams as an American commissioner in Paris.

  Jefferson became the country’s ambassador to France in 1785, after Franklin retired from that post and Adams moved on to London. Returning home as national heroes following the ratification of a new federal constitution in 1788, Adams was elected America’s first Vice President and Jefferson became its first Secretary of State.

  The common goals of national independence and sovereignty that united patriot leaders during the Revolutionary Era gave way to differing views on domestic and foreign policy during Washington’s second term as President. After 1797, when Adams succeeded Washington as President and Jefferson became leader of the opposition as Vice President, these differences widened into open antagonisms fed by tensions at home and war abroad. The factions led by Adams and Jefferson crystallized into two distinct political parties with competing visions for America’s future. They became the public personifications of the warring camps. By 1800, the remnants of their former friendship had ended in a tangle of mutual suspicions and partisan animosities. Adams and many in his Federalist Party feared that Jeffersonian rule would bring political, social, and religious upheaval. Jefferson and his most ardent followers in the Republican Party doubted whether the nation’s democratic institutions could survive another four years with Adams at the helm. For both sides, freedom (as they conceived it) hung in the balance. America’s two greatest surviving Revolutionary leaders had separated and the country was coming apart. One election took on extraordinary meaning. Partisans worried that it might be the young republic’s last.

  CHAPTER ONE

  FROM FRIENDS TO RIVALS

  ALTHOUGH the friendship between Adams and Jefferson took root in Philadelphia during the opening days of the American Revolution, it blossomed in Paris at war’s end. Again, the scene included Franklin. For the scene in Philadelphia, John Trumbull created the enduring image of the trio in his monumental painting, The Declaration of Independence. They stood together, seemingly large
r than life, at the focal point of attention amid a sea of delegates at the Continental Congress, their purposeful eyes gazing forward as if into the future. A war with Britain lay ahead, and the task of building a new nation.

  They had changed by the time the war finally ended and they could begin building on the promise of peace. Already the oldest signer of the Declaration in 1776, Franklin was seventy-eight in 1784, stooped with gout and kidney stones, when Jefferson reached Paris to augment the American diplomatic delegation there. Shortly after declaring the nation’s independence, Congress had dispatched Franklin to seek French support for the Revolution. Adams joined him in 1778 and, although Franklin had obtained an alliance with France by then, they worked together with a shifting array of American diplomats to secure loans from the Dutch, peace with Britain, and commercial treaties with other nations.

  Of middling height and decidedly square shouldered, Adams had added to his girth on a diplomat’s diet. Tall for his day, Jefferson had grown into his height by 1784 and typically held himself more upright than before. When the three patriot leaders reunited as diplomats in Paris, the physical contrast between them had become almost comical. Upon making their initial joint appearance at the royal court in Versailles, one bemused observer likened them to a cannonball, a teapot, and a candlestick. America, however, never enjoyed abler representation in a foreign capital.

  Franklin arrived in France already a celebrity and enhanced his reputation further while there. Hailed as the Newton of his day for his discoveries in electricity and renowned also as an inventor, writer, practical philosopher, and statesman, Franklin vied only with Voltaire as the public face of the Enlightenment, which then dominated French culture and influenced thought throughout Europe and America. When the two senior savants embraced at a public meeting of the French Academy of Sciences in 1778, it seemed as if all Europe cheered—or so Adams reported with evident envy. “Qu’il etoit charmant,” he caustically commented in two languages. “How charming it was!”