The American Vice Presidency
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In such manner did the matter rest. The U.S. Constitution was adopted by the convention in Philadelphia on September 17, 1787, and was presented to twelve of the thirteen original states for ratification, absent only Rhode Island. The document was signed by thirty-nine of the forty-two delegates present, with George Washington of Virginia presiding. Nine months later, on June 21, 1788, the Constitution became effective with the ratification of the ninth state, New Hampshire.
In September, the Congress under the expiring Articles of Confederation, which had called the Constitutional Convention, set late 1788 and early 1789 for the election of the first president and vice president of the United States and their inauguration on April 21, 1789. Of the thirteen original states, only ten chose electors under the newly adopted procedure; North Carolina and Rhode Island had not yet ratified the Constitution, and a factional split in the two houses of the New York State Assembly resulted in no electors selected. The choices were made in January by members of the legislature in four states, by popular vote in four others, and the rest by a combination thereof.
As noted, the first national election took place in the absence of political parties of the sort that later came to be an integral and divisive aspect of the system. Factions based on a rough combination of personal relations among the politically engaged and general philosophies held by region, social standing, and means of employment, however, soon emerged. Those who advocated a strong central government came to be known as Federalists; their critics bore no special name and were referred to at first simply as Anti-Federalists.
Some of the loyal followers of Washington also possessed strains of personal ambition that would in the future disturb the harmony of the new and expanding nation. Notably Hamilton, one of Washington’s principal lieutenants and allies, harbored these. He was given to political intrigue that in time was to plague another Federalist and arguably the second most highly regarded man in the newly formed union, the lawyer-farmer John Adams of Massachusetts. In this climate of intrigue the election of the first American president and vice president proceeded; the only question about the outcome concerned which worthy patriot would be chosen to stand in the wings when the icon George Washington was officially crowned as the young nation’s supreme leader.
JOHN ADAMS
OF MASSACHUSETTS
In the first presidential election in American history, neither George Washington, nor John Adams, nor any of the other candidates waged open campaigns. They all considered any overt effort to pursue the highest office demeaning, and in any event the outcome was a foregone conclusion. Washington expressed little interest, to the point that Alexander Hamilton felt compelled to write to him: “On your acceptance of the office of President, the success of the new government may materially depend.”1
Adams readily recognized that the presidency should and would go to Washington as the young country’s unchallenged leader in peace as well as war. At the same time, he allowed himself to believe, in light of his own record during and after the Revolution, that he was entitled to be vice president and that the vote would clearly indicate so. Neither in appearance nor demeanor did Adams command great approval or warmth; he was short, portly, and balding and often given to irascibility. But his intelligence, loyalty, and persistence were unchallenged, except by bitter political foes, among whom Hamilton was in the forefront.
In advance of the actual presidential balloting, Hamilton, as a man of ambition and cunning, saw Adams as a challenge to him in the Federalist ranks and took steps to reduce the New Englander’s vote. He urged electors in several northern states to deny their second ballots to Adams, lest he somehow edge out Washington for the presidency or at least see himself as the successor to Washington, a role Hamilton himself coveted.
In New York, a serious effort for the vice presidency was made in behalf of Governor George Clinton, a brigadier general in the revolutionary army, charged with defending the state’s Hudson Highlands, and a close friend of Washington. From Virginia, the revolutionary hero Patrick Henry was said to be behind it.
James Madison, regarding the prospects of a New York–Virginia coalition in behalf of Clinton, turned to Hamilton for clarification. “I cannot … believe that the plan will succeed,” Hamilton replied. “Nor indeed do I think that Clinton would be disposed to exchange his present appointment [as governor of New York] for that office [of the vice presidency] or to risk his popularity by holding both.” Nevertheless, he wrote, the notion “merits attention and ought not to be neglected as chimerical or impracticable.”2
In fact, in late 1788 an Anti-Federalist committee that had formed in New York wrote a circular to like-minded political figures elsewhere advocating “a person who will be zealously engaged in promoting such amendments to the new constitution as will render the Liberties of the Country secure under it” for election as the vice president. The committee expected that all of the New York electors would vote for Clinton as well. If the recipients of the circular would join Virginia and New York, it would be “highly probable … that Governor Clinton would be elected.” Such an election would be of monumental importance because of “the influence that the Vice President will have in the administration of the new Government.”3
But the circular aroused the Federalist Gazette in Philadelphia to write that Clinton’s candidacy constituted a “last shift of the opposers of the constitution, to destroy it in embryo,” warning that the farmer–turned–military man possessed “neither dignity nor understanding fit for that important station,” another premature assessment of the office’s importance. “After inflaming the state of New York by false jealousies, he now calls for a new convention, to quiet the minds of the people.”4
Madison, alarmed over the perceived threat to the Constitution, of which he was a principal architect, wrote to Thomas Jefferson, “The enemies to the Government, at the head & the most inveterate of whom is Mr. [Patrick] Henry, are laying a train for the election of Governour Clinton.” If so, the Gazette promised, “Clinton’s chance of being appointed vice-president will be as bad as Paddy Henry’s prospect of being chosen president.”5
Hamilton was said also to have urged General Henry Knox of Massachusetts to persuade Adams that he was too august an American himself to serve under Washington,6 another early indication of the low esteem the vice presidency was to have. Ultimately satisfied that Washington’s election as president was secure, however, Hamilton finally backed Adams for vice president as a supporter of the new constitution who preferred to delay amending it until experience could provide more wisdom in approaching the effort.
If Adams was inactive in the election process, he was not indifferent to it. He recognized that for all the shortcomings of the vice presidency, being elected to it would confirm his stature as second only to Washington in the ranks of the revolutionary patriots. At the same time, he wrote to his daughter Abigail, called Nabby: “I am willing to serve the public on manly conditions, but not on childish ones.” Adams’s wife, Abigail, conveyed her view that any office less than the vice presidency would be “beneath him,” though certainly a cabinet post in the Washington administration would have been more demanding of his experience and intellect,7 considering the sparse duties carved out for the vice president.
Voting for the electors was generally light, and in early February those chosen met in the separate states, cast their ballots, and forwarded the results to the capital in New York in accordance with the procedures laid out in Article II at the Constitutional Convention. In early March the votes of the ten participating states were tallied, and to no one’s surprise Washington was overwhelmingly elected president, with sixty-nine votes, receiving one of the two cast by each elector. As the commander-in-chief of the army of the Revolution and then president of the Constitutional Convention, he had achieved iconic status and undisputed acclaim throughout the states.
The electors’ second votes were scattered among a host of candidates, and although Adams did receive the second-highest t
otal and was thereby was elected vice president, his thirty-four votes were fewer than half of Washington’s. Adams was disappointed at his own total, especially when he learned of Hamilton’s mischief. He said later that the election was, “in the scurvy manner in which it was done, a curse rather than a blessing.”8 The experience did little to assuage Adams’s reservations about popular elections and his musings that the president should be appointed for life, which fueled the allegations that he was a “monarchist” opposed to popular will.
Inasmuch as Washington as president would have all executive power under the new constitution, and Adams as vice president none at all, Adams’s influence would be conditioned solely on Washington’s health and survival. It was in this context that Adams memorably observed his situation as vice president: “Gentlemen, I feel a great difficulty how to act,” he said. “I am Vice President. In this I am nothing, but I may be everything.”9 Later, in a letter to Abigail, he also wrote, “My country in its wisdom has contrived for me the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived.”10
In the eight years that followed, Adams found ample reason for that judgment. Yet he remained in the public eye and loyal to Washington while the American Republic struggled to survive as the most intriguing experiment yet undertaken in the exercise of self-government anywhere in the world. He could console himself in the thought that even if destiny had not elevated him to the presidency, he could still seek the highest office by election upon Washington’s retirement and, if successful, go finally from nothing to everything.
The election of John Adams as the first American vice president came only nine months after his return from Europe, where he had spent most of the previous decade as his country’s minister to Great Britain. Born in Braintree, Massachusetts, in 1735, as a youth Adams often attended New England’s famed town meetings, graduated from Harvard in 1755, and taught school while studying nights for the law. Admitted to the Boston bar in 1758, he played a critical role in the repeal of the despised Stamp Act and emerged as one of the colonists’ most prominent legal defenders against British oppression. In 1761, upon the death of his father, the elder John Adams, he inherited the family farm and looked forward to the agricultural life, while as a Braintree freeholder he also engaged himself in the local politics.
In 1774, he was elected to the Continental Congress and was part of the committee that helped Thomas Jefferson draft the Declaration of Independence. At the outbreak of the American Revolution, he chaired the board charged with recruitment, provisioning, and dispatch of the Continental army. In 1777 the Congress sent him to represent it at the Court of Paris, where he developed a close and strong friendship with Jefferson, also in diplomatic service there.
Upon return, Adams drafted the Massachusetts State Constitution, adopted in 1780, calling for three branches of government with a strong executive. The Congress next appointed him minister to London, and in 1782 he negotiated a treaty with the Netherlands recognizing American independence. By the time he returned home in 1788, speculation was rife that with Washington certain to be elected the first president under the new constitution, Adams, as the most celebrated New Englander, was most likely to run second to him and become vice president.
Prior to the balloting, many fellows-in-arms from the Revolution and the Constitutional Convention flocked to urge Adams’s availability. Although he remained aloof to the entreaties, he indicated to Abigail that he believed that, after Washington, no other leader of the Revolution deserved to stand next in line. Accordingly, as she wrote to their daughter Nabby, he was open only to the vice presidency of the new government, but he also offered evidence that he did not warm to the very limited duties that would fall to him in the second office.11
Pondering the role of presiding officer of the Senate and its mandate to vote only to break a tie, he wondered as he made the slow trek from Braintree to New York how he would fit in. “Not wholly without experience in public assemblies,” he wrote, “I have been more accustomed to take a share in their debates than to preside in their deliberations.”12 Some months later, after one of the most unfortunate passages in a long public life, he acknowledged succinctly to John Quincy that, in truth, the office he held was “not quite adapted to my character,” that it was too “mechanical,” and that mistakenly he was inclined to think he must “throw a little light on the subject when need be.”13
But in his initial observations to the Senate as vice president, Adams addressed a major concern to him. “But I am President also of the Senate. When the President [Washington] comes into the Senate,” he asked the body, “what shall I be?” The question launched the first debate in the chamber, one in which the new vice president’s ability to hold his tongue would immediately be tested and found wanting. Senator Oliver Ellsworth of Connecticut, a constitutional expert, rose and assured Adams, “Whenever the Senate are to be there, sir, you must be at the head of them.” Ellsworth, however, added, “But further, sir, I shall not pretend to say.”14
Ensuing debate only deepened Adams’s dilemma as presiding officer of the Senate with that limited mandate. When the House voted that the chief executive be known simply as “George Washington, President of the United States,” the Senate took up the argument, with Adams weighing in more than some senators appreciated.15 When Senator Ralph Izard of South Carolina proposed that Washington be addressed as “Excellency,” Senator Ellsworth commented that “President” was surely too bland, and Adams agreed, noting fire company and cricket club leaders were so described.16
When a Senate committee was named to consider the matter further, it came up with “His Highness the President of the United States of America and Protector of the Rights of the Same.” Adams jumped in to offer others, and the debate went on for nearly a month. Adams insisted he was merely responding to senators’ call for advice. He later wrote in response to being asked, “Whether I should say, ‘Mr. Washington,’ ‘Mr. President,’ ‘Sir,’ ‘May it please your Excellency,’ or what else? I observed that it had been common while Washington commanded the army to call him ‘His Excellency,’ but I was free to own it would appear to me better to give him no title but ‘Sir’ or ‘Mr. President,’ than to put him on a level with a governor of Bermuda.”17
Yet at the same time, Adams suggested that the elected leader of the nation warranted special esteem and recognition for the great sacrifices and burdens the office imposed and as a lure to the country’s best and brightest to seek the highest public office. While he himself insisted that he wasn’t interested in any lofty title, he indicated at one point that something like “His Majesty the President” might be fitting. One who clearly disagreed was James Madison, who told the House, “The more simple, the more republican we are in our manners, the more dignity we shall acquire.”18
Adams, for all his trouble in joining the debate despite the formal stricture against doing so, invited sharp verbal abuse from the Anti-Federalist senator William Maclay of Pennsylvania, who fueled criticism of the first vice president as a “monarchist” at heart. Maclay urged the Senate to amend the Constitution to read, “No title of nobility shall be granted by the United States.”
Maclay’s views of Adams were clearly colored by personal animosity, as when he wrote mockingly of him presiding over the Senate: “I cannot help thinking of a monkey put into breeches.”19 Others joined in the ridicule over the fuss Adams made over Washington’s title. Senator Izard offered that the portly vice president himself be called “His Rotundity,” and in the end the Senate agreed with the House decision that the first officer be called simply “the President of the United States.”
The new vice president was particularly disturbed by the talk that he favored hereditary leadership by a king of some sort. However, in correspondence with his friend Benjamin Rush of Philadelphia he did indicate it was conceivable that the young country might some future day have to turn to a monarchy as “an asylum against discord, seditions and civil war�
� to keep the peace. Subsequently, in reassurance to Rush of his fealty to revolutionary objectives, he wrote, “I am a mortal and irreconcilable enemy to monarchy. I am no friend to hereditary limited monarchy in America. Do not, therefore, my friend, misunderstand me and misrepresent me to posterity.”20
Adams as vice president was also plagued by heavy pressures from friends and other job seekers urging his sponsorship for positions in the new government temporarily headquartered in New York. He took refuge in saying, correctly, that his own job gave him no patronage to dispense and that power was in the hands of the president alone. These and other frustrations were compounded during in his first days in office by his separation from his closest confidante, wife Abigail, who did not arrive in New York until the start of summer, with their son Charles, now a student at Harvard.
Adams’s first serious engagement despite the constitutional limitations on him occurred that first summer when his old Senate antagonist, the Anti-Federalist Maclay, offered a proposal to give the Senate a voice in the removal of officers of the cabinet. Federalists saw the bill as a raid on presidential power in their hands, saying only the chief executive could so decide. Adams lobbied energetically against the bill, and a tie vote resulted, which he dutifully broke in the Federalists’ favor—his first substantive action as vice president. Before he left the office, he cast twenty-nine such votes, never surpassed by any subsequent presidential standby.
In September, the new administration and the country at large were jolted by the news of revolution in France. No one rejoiced more than Maclay, who not only proclaimed France’s delivery from “royalty, nobility and vile pageantry, by which a few of the human race lord it over and tread on the necks of their fellow mortals,” but also took advantage of it to vilify Adams as a monarchist. “Ye Gods,” he wrote, “with what indignation do I review the late attempt of some creatures among us to revive the vile machinery. Oh Adams, Adams, what a wretch thou art!”21