The Activist

by Lawrence Goldstone

  To Republicans, however, any potential benefit to the common citizen was overwhelmed by the incendiary prospect of scores of new Federalist judges, and so the bill was fiercely debated in Congress during the final week of March. On March 25 and again on March 28, Republicans tried to defer debate until December 1—after the voting for president was done—but failed each time, the first time by six votes and the second by eight. After the March 28 vote, the bill was returned to committee and redrafted.

  On March 31, 1800, an amended bill, now called “An act to provide for the more convenient organization of the Courts of the United States,” was presented to the full House.2 The Republican minority had been unable to derail the reorganization, but had nonetheless made inroads. The number of districts had been reduced from twenty-nine to nineteen, all of which would have a circuit judge, and the number of circuit courts from nine to six. President Adams would thus have fewer judgeships to fill with loyal Federalists.

  In the interim, Adams’s popularity had plummeted still further and his chances of reelection had become slimmer. Securing a Federalist judiciary had become a top priority. One Federalist congressman wrote, “the close of the present executive’s authority was at hand, and, from his experience [Adams] was more capable to choose suitable persons to fill the offices than another.”3 On April 1, the bill was given two of three readings necessary before it could be voted on, and then consigned to a committee of the whole House.*

  Finally, after two weeks of additional debate, on April 14, a motion was made to postpone consideration of the bill until December 1. To the shock of most Federalists, the motion passed, 48–46. The vote to postpone was made possible by four New England Federalists who abandoned their party and changed sides: Jonathan Freeman of New Hampshire; William Shepard of Connecticut; and Dwight Foster and John Davenport of Massachusetts. They did not make their reasons for siding with the Republican minority clear, although Foster did write later that he thought parts of the bill (which he did not specify) were ill-considered and needed amendment. It was not beyond possibility that some Federalists were so furious with Adams that they were willing to deny him the appointments out of spite.

  With reorganization of the judiciary on hold, attention turned to the coming national elections. There was no specific national election day in 1800; each state decided when and in what manner its presidential electors were chosen. Electoral votes would be reported (but not made public) in the various state capitals on December 3 and then transmitted to Congress, where they would be revealed with great ceremony before a joint session on the following February 11. In eleven of the sixteen states (Vermont, Kentucky, and Tennessee having joined the Union), electors were appointed by the state legislatures, while Kentucky, North Carolina, Maryland, Virginia, and Rhode Island chose electors by popular vote. Thirteen states had a general ballot, winner-take-all rule, while Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Maryland chose electors by district, allowing for a split in their delegations’ electoral votes.

  Rules in each state were subject to change at the whim of its legislature, and whether or not changes were made was based on which rules would favor the party currently in power. In 1796, for example, Virginia electors had been chosen by district, but the Republican-dominated Virginia legislature had changed to general ballot in 1799 to ensure that Jefferson would receive all twenty-one electoral votes in 1800. Massachusetts had similarly switched from a district system to general ballot to ensure that all its electoral votes went to Adams. New York had chosen electors by general ballot in 1796, but in early 1800 Federalists beat back a Republican effort to change to a district rule, a gamble since the state had exhibited increasingly Republican tendencies, but a necessary one since it was widely assumed that Adams needed all twelve of its electoral votes to be reelected.

  This jockeying could not have been more vital, since, Adams’s woes notwithstanding, the election promised once more to be razor-close. In 1796, as Republicans never tired of pointing out, Adams had won by the tiny margin of three electoral votes.* This time, Adams was certain to carry New England and Jefferson was equally certain to carry most of the South, including Virginia’s now-unified bloc of twenty-one electoral votes. Pennsylvania had turned sharply Republican in the four years since the last election, as had Maryland, and both states’ votes promised to split roughly 50–50. New York, as during ratification, would be a major test of the political winds, and that test would come early: voting for the New York legislature—the body that would choose electors—was scheduled for three days in the last week in April, the result of which might very well decide the next president.

  The vote in New York City would determine who would carry the state, and each party threw its best men into the breach. For the Federalists, Alexander Hamilton led the charge, riding about the city, speaking on street corners and in meetings. Aaron Burr, who saw a path to the vice presidency if he could deliver New York for the Republicans, was prepared to meet Hamilton’s challenge. “That April, New Yorkers out for a stroll could have stumbled upon either Alexander Hamilton or Aaron Burr addressing crowds on street corners, sometimes alternating on the same platform.”4

  But whereas Hamilton had banked on his own abilities and spoke in support of a lackluster Federalist slate of nominees, Burr had been more clever and persuaded some well-known—albeit long-in-the-tooth—Republicans, such as George Clinton and Horatio Gates, to stand for election. Burr himself was everywhere. He spoke; he cajoled; he charmed; he organized. He threw open his home to campaign workers, providing food and mattresses for the two months leading up to the vote. Burr employed some remarkably farsighted techniques, maintaining detailed notes on any influential citizen who might be able to deliver votes. Everyone in the organization knew what to say to whom and, more importantly, what not to say. It would not be an overstatement to assert that, in the spring of 1800, Aaron Burr invented the modern political campaign.5

  By May 1, it was clear that Burr had bested Hamilton and almost single-handedly engineered a Republican victory in the elections for the New York legislature. “We have beat you by superior management,” Burr said afterward.6 Federalists were stunned, none more so than Hamilton. He tried to salvage partial victory by proposing to Governor Jay that the now lameduck Federalist state assembly vote to change New York’s method of selecting electors from general ballot to district rule, the precise measure that the Federalists had killed just months before. Jay considered the scheme underhanded and refused to support it.7

  The only strategy left for the Federalists was to try to steal a Southern or middle state, as the Republicans had stolen one in the North. In Maryland, one of the three states with popular vote where electors were chosen by district, a move was initiated to shift the choice to the state legislature, which would mean general ballot. Maryland’s legislature, which had recently adjourned, had traditionally been Federalist and thus could have delivered its ten electoral votes to Adams. But with Republicanism on the rise, Federalists needed to maintain control of the legislature in the new elections in order to change the voting rules, as uncertain a prospect as it had been in New York. Although Federalists spent a good deal of money, made an enormous public effort, and said some particularly nasty things about Jefferson, Republicans won a majority in the legislature and so Maryland retained its by-district system. Prominent among Federalist campaigners was a Baltimore merchant and financier named William Marbury.

  In another attempt to steal a Southern state after the loss in New York, Hamilton urged the nomination of Charles Cotesworth Pinckney of South Carolina as Adams’s vice president. Unfortunately for Adams, to many High Federalists—including Hamilton—Pinckney was seen as not just a number two, but possibly as a better presidential candidate than the incumbent. A plot was hatched by Hamiltonians, abetted if not actually fomented by Hamilton himself, to have Federalist electors dump Adams and vote in the South Carolinian, and the plotters made virtually no effort to keep the details secret from the president.

 
; Adams, for all his faults, was being treated detestably. He had stuck to a moderate course to keep the country out of war and disbanded Hamilton’s army to keep the nation solvent. Adams was repaid for moderation and statesmanship with invective and personal attack. Members of his own party speculated publicly as to whether or not the president had lost his reason. Hamilton, behaving like a petulant child, scurried about, planting rumors and hatching plots, furious that he was being denied the preeminent position in government that he thought should be his by right.8 Even worse, Adams was by this time being actively undermined by members of his own cabinet, the group he had held over from the Washington administration as a gesture of loyalty and to ensure continuity.

  The three main culprits were unabashed Hamiltonians: Wolcott, Pickering, and McHenry. Adams fumed at the divided loyalties—if they were indeed divided—but chose to tolerate the situation rather than rip the party apart. On May 3, 1800, however, the party held a nominating caucus in which it more or less adopted a plan that called for “equal support” for Adams and Pinckney, an open slap to a sitting president, and Adams had had enough.

  Within a week, he demanded the resignations of McHenry and Pickering. The timid, poetry-writing McHenry’s dismissal was particularly disagreeable. Adams subjected him to a screaming harangue about disloyalty, one of the displays of temper that would later be cited as proof that the president had come unhinged.9 During the tirade, Adams assailed Hamilton as “a man devoid of every moral principle,” and “a Bastard.” Adams even declared that Jefferson, his other archenemy, was “an infinitely better man” and “a wiser one.”10 McHenry dutifully resigned on May 5.

  John Adams

  On May 7, 1800, Adams sent a message to the Senate naming his replacement: “I nominate the Honorable John Marshall, Esq. of Virginia, to be Secretary of the Department of War, in the place of the Honorable James McHenry, Esq. who has requested that he may be permitted to resign, and that his resignation be accepted to take place on the first day of June next.”11 Unfortunately, Adams had neglected to consult Marshall before submitting his name, and Marshall was forced to tell Adams that he had no wish to be secretary of war.

  At this point, Adams’s need of Marshall’s skills and ability to negotiate the Federalist minefield was far too acute to let him simply remain in Congress. A few days after he assailed McHenry, Adams had also demanded the resignation of Pickering, but Pickering, contentious and prickly, had haughtily refused. Marshall found Pickering’s job at State, however, more appealing than McHenry’s at the War Department, so on May 12 Adams fired Pickering and sent another message to the Senate: “I nominate the Honorable John Marshall, Esq., of Virginia, to be Secretary of State, in place of the Honorable Timothy Pickering, Esq. removed.”12 The Senate approved the nomination the following day; the day after that, they recessed in Philadelphia for the last time “until the third Monday in November next, to meet in the city of Washington, in the Territory of Columbia.”13

  Marshall quickly became Adams’s most trusted adviser, perhaps by then the president’s only trusted adviser. The wounds that had been opened by the defeat in New York and the forced departure of the two cabinet officers had brought what had heretofore been largely a simmer, at least in public, to a full boil. In June, Hamilton wrote to McHenry of his disgust for the president. “The man is more mad than I had ever thought him and I shall soon be led to say as wicked as he is mad.”14 By then, McHenry had published a letter of his own detailing Adams’s tirade, including the reference to Hamilton’s illegitimacy, the most profound insult possible to a man who had fought his entire life to overcome the circumstances of his birth.

  The battle between the Madman and the Bastard raged all summer, as the coming battle between the Madman and the Great Lama of the Mountain, as Marshall sometimes referred to Jefferson, simmered. In the midst of all this good feeling, the nation began to choose the electors who would decide the next election.

  Both Adams and Jefferson tried to play the statesman. Adams left Philadelphia shortly after the cabinet purge, heading south, through Pennsylvania and then Maryland, to inspect the new federal city, before turning back north through New Jersey on his way home to Quincy, Massachusetts. The reception he received would certainly have encouraged him. In small towns, large and enthusiastic crowds turned out to hear the president speak.15 He arrived in the new capital just as summer was dropping a thick blanket of heat, humidity, and malaria over the region. He spent ten days there, briefly overseeing the transfer of government documents from Philadelphia, and then left for home.16 The trip north was not as encouraging: the president was ignored in New Jersey and was forced to avoid stopping in New York entirely.

  Jefferson, eagerly anticipating New York’s twelve electoral votes, conducted his affairs from Monticello. He received visitors, wrote letters, commissioned pamphlets, and dispensed optimism from his hilltop home. Well aware of the implosion of his opponents, Jefferson was content to draft a series of position papers laying out Republican principles while competing Federalists ripped at each other’s throats.

  While his party fought for survival, Secretary of State Marshall was charged with the unenviable task of remaining for the entire summer in the miasma of the new federal city. In addition to his official duties, which were not excessive, Marshall was also to oversee the ongoing construction of both the new capitol and the president’s residence. After his ten-day visit to the Potomac in June, Adams would remain in Massachusetts until November. Congress was not in session and virtually every other member of the government had gone home, so, in the summer of 1800, John Marshall for all intents and purposes was the government of the United States.

  By October, fifteen of the sixteen states had chosen electors. Although, in theory, the results were under lock and key, secrets as potent as voting results were difficult to keep, and unofficial state-by-state tallies began to leak out. Federalists absorbed the sketchy news with growing concern. Republicans exulted. Adams’s last hope seemed to rest with South Carolina, the only state yet to choose electors, since state legislative elections had not been held there. If Federalists could manage to win control of the South Carolina legislature, they would be certain to vote for Pinckney, who, as a matter of honor, would have also instructed them to vote for Adams. The gain of South Carolina would then balance out the loss of New York, and Adams would be elected to a second term.

  South Carolina had been a state divided since the Constitutional Convention, its low-country, coastal gentry overwhelmingly Federalist, while back-country pioneers were just as fiercely Republican. At the Convention, the planters had squeezed out the pioneers and dominated the Philadelphia proceedings, but the ensuing decade had seen many changes. Although the early election returns for the legislature favored the Federalists, as votes drifted in from the countryside, the Republicans easily overtook them. The South Carolina legislature would not be Federalist.

  It seemed clear that Adams had probably lost.

  Probably, but not for certain.

  The vagaries of the electoral-vote process left open any number of scenarios, some of which would deny Jefferson the presidency in favor of the incumbent, some in which Pinckney would prevail, and one or two that would actually see Jefferson defeated by his own vice presidential candidate, Burr. Obscuring the picture still further was the question of whether or not electors would actually vote for those whom they had been selected to support. Electors had behaved with maverick independence in 1796, and many expected a similar performance here. With months to go before the votes were actually delivered, scheming by both parties ratcheted up still further.

  The second session of the Sixth Congress opened on Monday, November 17, 1800, in the District of Columbia, the first time the business of government would be conducted in the new national capital on the Potomac. The city was anything but imperial. Described by one observer as “almost a wilderness,” much of Washington City’s land remained undeveloped and swampy, and the 1½-mile stretch between the President�
�s House and the Capitol contained “thick groves and forest trees, wide and verdant plains, with only here or there a house along the interesting ways, that could not yet be properly called streets.” The Capitol itself was largely unfinished, but the surrounding area was a center of activity, “seven or eight boarding houses, one tailor, one shoemaker, one printer, a washing woman, a grocery shop, a pamphlets and stationery shop, a small dry-goods shop, and an oyster house,” being in the immediate vicinity.17

  On Saturday, November 22, President Adams rode a carriage to the Capitol and addressed a joint session of Congress in the Senate chamber. He began by congratulating himself and the country. “May this territory be the residence of virtue and happiness!” he trumpeted. “In this city may that piety and virtue, that wisdom and magnanimity, that constancy and self-government which adorned the great character whose name it bears, be forever held in veneration! Here, and throughout our country, may simple manners, pure morals, and true religion, flourish forever!”18

  The Capitol building as depicted by William Russell Birch in 1800

  Aware that the nation might have to flourish under a Republican president after March 4, Adams then called once more for reform of the judiciary. “It is, in every point of view, of such primary importance to carry the laws into prompt and faithful execution, and to render that part of the administration of justice which the constitution and laws devolve on the federal courts, as convenient to the people as may consist with their present circumstances, that I cannot omit once more to recommend to your serious consideration the judiciary system of the United States. No subject is more interesting than this to the public happiness, and to none can those improvements which may have been suggested by experience be more beneficially applied.”19 Despite his entreaties, by December 3, the day the electoral votes were to be cast in secret in the state capitals, the courts bill had not been reintroduced in the House.