The American Vice Presidency (5 page)

Adams, returning to Philadelphia in early December to await the results, wrote to Abigail of his agonizing and the possibility of losing: “I can pronounce Thomas Jefferson to be chosen P of US with firmness and a good grace that I don’t fear. But here alone abed, by my fireside, nobody to speak to, pouring upon my disgrace and future prospects—this is ugly.”
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The next week, however, as word trickled in from the various states whose electors had voted, Adams was able to write his wife much more brightly of reports that he would be elected. Jefferson, at Monticello,
meanwhile was advised by Madison that he probably would finish second and that he ought to accept the vice presidency. He responded, not entirely believably, that he would have no problem serving under Adams’s presidency, explaining, “He had always been my senior, from the commencement of my public life.” Also before the results were announced, Jefferson wrote Adams a note in which he said he hadn’t doubted for “one single moment” that his principal opponent would win. He also wrote to Madison authorizing him, if a tie resulted, sending the election to the House of Representatives for resolution, to “solicit on my behalf that Mr. Adams be preferred.”
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In February, when all the electoral votes had been tallied by Adams as president of the Senate, he announced his own election to the presidency, by a mere three votes over Jefferson. He had received seventy-one ballots to sixty-eight for the man from Monticello, fifty-nine for Pinckney, thirty for Burr, and eleven for Samuel Adams. The double-balloting scheme had proved to be an electoral monster, producing a president and vice president of opposing factions and objectives. New England electors, aware of Hamilton’s latest plot against native son Adams, gave him all thirty-nine of their first presidential votes and gave only twenty-two of their second votes to Pinckney. Jefferson meanwhile picked up enough electors in the South and elsewhere to beat out Pinckney for the vice presidency. Hamilton thus lost both efforts to keep Adams and Jefferson out of the next administration.
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Adams’s margin of only three electoral votes over Jefferson emphatically announced the arrival of the Republicans and the beginning of the end for the Federalists. Without Washington, their pro-British inclinations, resolutely trumpeted by pro-French Jefferson and Madison, played on the negative sentiments of much of formerly colonial America.

Shortly before Adams and Jefferson were inaugurated, the vice president elect wrote a letter to Adams conveying his support in even more extravagant terms than before. He wrote to Adams, “I have no ambition to govern men. It is a painful and thankless office.… I devoutly wish you may be able to shun for us this war by which our agriculture, commerce and credit will be destroyed. If you are, 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, and sentiments of respect and affectionate attachment.”
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Before mailing the letter, however, Jefferson sent it to Madison, in Philadelphia, unsealed, to read, so that if anything in it “should render the delivery of it ineligible in your opinion, you may return it to me.”
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Madison was aghast at the contents. He held on to the letter and never mailed it. He advised Jefferson that while the expressions of comradeship were well intentioned, he needed to consider how they might read in the event of Adams’s presidency running afoul and prove an embarrassment or politically damaging to the writer in the future. Jefferson revised the letter, limiting himself to extending his good wishes for the new presidency and repeating his view that he could not play an active role in the Adams administration as a member of the legislative branch as president of the Senate.

And so, on March 4, 1797, in Philadelphia, John Adams, Federalist, and Thomas Jefferson, Republican, were sworn in as the second president and vice president of the United States, a pair of political strange bedfellows in the infancy of party strife never contemplated, or at least not desired, by the young nation’s founding fathers.

THOMAS JEFFERSON

OF VIRGINIA

T
he vice presidency of Thomas Jefferson was the consolation prize for having been beaten by John Adams for the presidency by a mere three electoral votes. But Jefferson was not going to be content to stand idly by, as Adams had done as President Washington’s vice president, awaiting and expecting his ascendancy as a loyal Federalist. As the leader of the already emerging rival ideological faction, Jefferson would spend much of his next years nurturing that faction, with a mind to winning control of the new government in the next national election.

The man who was to be called the founder of the Democratic Party was born on April 13, 1743, in the family-built home called Shadwell on the Rivanna River in what is now Albemarle County, Virginia. He was the third child and first son of the successful surveyor, planter, and slave owner Peter Jefferson and his wife, Jane Randolph, of a prominent Virginia family. He took to his studies early under local clergymen. When his father died at forty-nine, young Tom at fourteen assumed the role of male head of the household. Two years later he went off to Williamsburg to attend the College of William and Mary, where he was said to have wasted most of his first year in revelry in the first real town he had ever visited. Thereafter, however, he came under the tutelage of two prominent classical scholars and buckled down. A year later one of them brought Jefferson into his law office there.
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Though he was a shy and reluctant speaker, young Jefferson soon won recognition as an accomplished writer marked for esteem as a public man. He graduated from William and Mary at age nineteen, and after a five-year apprenticeship he was admitted to the Virginia bar in 1767. A year later, with funds inherited from his father, Jefferson began building his hilltop home eventually called Monticello.
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In 1769, Jefferson took a seat in the Virginia House of Burgesses. In 1774, he was assigned to write a paper of guidance for the Virginia delegation to the First Continental Congress, called “A Summary View of the Rights of British America,” an eloquent indictment of the British Parliament’s treatment of the colonies. The next year, when Jefferson was sent to Philadelphia as a replacement in the Virginia delegation to the Second Continental Congress, his pen was called on again. With the American Revolution already started in Lexington and Concord, he was assigned to draft the “Declaration of the Causes and Necessity for Taking Up Arms against the British Crown.” Both documents presaged Jefferson’s historic 1776 Declaration of Independence in its direct and bitter attack not only on the British Parliament but also on King George III himself. As the historian Joseph J. Ellis observed in his Jefferson biography
American Sphinx
, one could readily recognize in Jefferson’s “Summary” and “Causes of Necessity” “a preview of coming attractions” and “a dress rehearsal” of the bill of indictment against the English monarch justifying the colonies’ breaking away from his rule.
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The composition of the final document declaring the independence of “the United States of America” was assigned to John Adams and Jefferson, with Adams readily leaving the actual composition to his admired younger friend from Virginia, while he prepared for the Continental Congress debate on its adoption. From mid-May to early July 1776, while working on drafts for a new Virginia constitution, Jefferson spent only a few days composing America’s most famous document.
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In 1779 he was elected governor, and in 1781, when turncoat General Benedict Arnold invaded the state and torched Richmond just as Jefferson’s term was ending, Jefferson was forced to flee the capital. Amid allegations that he had failed to provide adequate defense for the city, the legislature launched an inquiry, but Jefferson was exonerated.
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Adding to his despondency over the fate of Richmond, in 1782 his wife, Martha, died several
months after giving birth for the seventh time in their ten-year marriage. Jefferson was distraught. It is said that on her deathbed she asked him to promise never to remarry, and he never did.
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In 1784, Jefferson went to France as the American minister, to negotiate commercial contracts with European states and seek loans to pay off Revolutionary War debts. During the Constitutional Convention in 1787 he kept in touch with his friend James Madison, urging him to have a bill of rights incorporated. After witnessing the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789, he returned home and on arrival became Washington’s first secretary of state. At the end of 1793, as previously noted, Jefferson resigned his cabinet post and returned to Monticello.
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By this time, Jefferson was concentrating on the development of the new party that was first designated as the Anti-Federalist faction but was soon to be called Republican and eventually Democratic. In 1796 under its aegis, he ran for the presidency against the Federalist vice president Adams, narrowly losing in the electoral college, as we know, which placed him in the vice presidency under Adams in 1797.

In the wake of the now-ratified Jay Treaty, which seemed so favorable to Britain and hostile to France, there was much anticipation as to what role Adams might have Jefferson, as a prime American admirer of the French, play toward healing the breach. Adams had not forgotten some of Jefferson’s past slights and criticisms, telling a friend, Tristram Dalton, “His entanglements with characters and politics which have been pernicious are and have been a source of inquietude and anxiety to me.”
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A day before the inaugurations of the two men, Jefferson called on Adams at the St. Francis Hotel in Philadelphia, where both would be staying. It was their first meeting in about three years and was sufficiently amiable that Adams returned the call the next morning. As Jefferson recalled and wrote much later, Adams plunged at once into discussing the French crisis, expressing his desire that Jefferson play a leading role in settling it. The Directory of the new French Republic viewed the Jay Treaty as a decidedly pro-British pact, and as a result the American minister there, James Monroe of Virginia, had been recalled, replaced by General Charles Cotesworth Pinckney of South Carolina, a strong Federalist. Now Adams, as Jefferson remembered, said it was “the first wish of his heart” to dispatch the prospective vice president to Paris but that “it did not seem justifiable for him
to send away the person destined to take his place in case of an accident to himself, nor decent to remove from consideration one who was a rival for public favor.”
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Jefferson wrote that he agreed with that thinking and in any event was tired of living in Europe and hoped never to return. He also reminded Adams, as he well knew, that as president of the Senate, the vice president was a constitutional officer of the legislative branch; hence it would be improper for him to undertake executive branch functions.

The episode made clear to both sides that that there would be little party comity in the new administration. Adams, looking back on the affair, wrote, “We parted as good friends as we had always lived; but we consulted very little together afterwards. Party violence soon rendered it impracticable, or at least useless.”
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And Jefferson noted that henceforth Adams never spoke of a role for him regarding French policy or ever consulted with him concerning any aspects of the government.

With Jefferson out of that loop within the Adams administration, the crisis with France deepened. The French Directory forced Pinckney to leave Paris and take temporary haven in Amsterdam, even as more American shipping in the Caribbean was seized by the French in what was becoming an undeclared war against the United States. At the same time, Jefferson did not hesitate to fire partisan barbs at the rival Federalists and, at least by implication, at their president. A letter Jefferson had written a year earlier to an Italian friend, Philip Mazzei, surfaced in a Federalist newspaper, charging that the United States had fallen to “timid men who prefer the calm of despotism to the boisterous sea of liberty.” It was an obvious allegation that Adams preferred accommodation with England over friendship with France.
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Adams countered Jefferson’s harsh words with renewed efforts to achieve peace through negotiations with France, while urging Congress to build up America’s defenses, particularly against attacks and plunder of American shipping at sea. The equipping of three new navy frigates was authorized to put some muscle behind Adams’s words. Meanwhile, the armies of the young French general Napoleon Bonaparte were attacking Austria and Italy and reportedly contemplating an invasion of Britain, increasing the Adams’s urgency to avoid outright war with France.