Most of Burr’s surviving correspondence deals either with patronage and influence or with speculative money-making schemes. Many of his letters were the hastily scribbled notes of a busy man who did not have the time or the desire to put much on paper. They were for the moment and, unlike the letters of the other Founders, were rarely written with a future audience in mind. Indeed, he once warned his law clerks, “Things written remain.”13 He was always worried that his letters might “miscarry,” and thus he tried to avoid saying anything in them too implicating. “If it were discreet to write plainly,” he said at one point, but in his conspiratorial world it was rarely possible to write plainly. He repeatedly appended warnings to his letters: “Say nothing of this to any other person,” or “Let no suspicion arise that you have any knowledge of these matters,” or “The recommendation must not appear to have been influenced by me,” or “You & I should not appear to act in concert.”14
But the peculiar character of Burr’s correspondence goes beyond his preoccupation with haste and secrecy. Burr never developed any ideas about constitutionalism or governmental policy in the way the other Revolutionary statesmen did, because, in truth, he was not much concerned about such matters. If he had an idea about the new federal Constitution of 1787, he left no record of it. Nor did he have much to say about the Federalists’ great financial program of the early 1790 s. Although he mentioned Hamilton’s plan for a national bank at one point in 1791—the year he was elected to the U.S. Senate—he confessed he had not read Hamilton’s arguments.15 Burr had “no theory,” it was said; he was “a mere matter of fact man.” He seems not to have cared much what posterity thought of him. Burr, said Hamilton, in his most damning indictment, “never appeared solicitous for fame.”16
Burr never pretended to be public-spirited in the fulsome way that Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Madison, Hamilton, and other Founders did. There was nothing self-righteous and hypocritical about him. Perhaps because he was so sure of his aristocratic lineage, he did not have the same emotional need the other Revolutionary statesmen had to justify a gentlemanly status by continually expressing an abhorrence of corruption and a love of virtue.
In the early 1790s Burr could have gone in several different directions; only a series of accidents and his own trimming temperament had thrown him into the Republican party. He opposed Jay’s Treaty and championed the Democratic-Republican Societies against Washington’s criticism. When his efforts to become vice-president in 1796 did not pan out, he lost interest in his Senate seat; he stopped attending the sessions and devoted his attention to making money through speculation. Because there were more opportunities for money-making in the state legislature than in the Congress, he entered the New York assembly in the hope of aiding his business associates and restoring his personal fortune. He pushed for tax exemptions, bridge and road charters, land bounties, alien rights to own land—any scheme in which he and his friends had an interest. His manipulation of the Manhattan Company in 1798–1799, where he used a state charter to provide water for the city of New York as a cover for the creation of a bank, was only the most notorious of his self-interested shenanigans.
Burr’s political skills were extraordinary. He developed remarkably modern hands-on techniques for organizing the Republican party and getting out the vote. Eventually he built such a strong political machine in New York that he was able to carry the state assembly for the Republicans in the spring elections of 1800. Artisans and other workers in New York City were especially angry at Hamilton and the Federalists’ general neglect of their interests, and in the election to the assembly they supported the Republicans by a two-to-one margin.
Since the New York legislature chose the presidential electors, the Republican presidential candidates would be assured of all twelve of New York’s electoral votes later that year. The frightening prospect that Jefferson might become president led a desperate Hamilton to urge Governor John Jay to change retroactively the state’s electoral rules and reverse the results, telling Jay that “in times like these in which we live, it will not do to be overly scrupulous.” It was imperative, he said, “to prevent an Atheist in Religion and a Fanatic in politics from gaining possession of the helm of the State.” Jay never replied, writing on the back of Hamilton’s letter, “Proposing a measure for party purposes which it would not become me to adopt.”17
SINCE THE REPUBLICANS had known that New York would make all the difference in the presidential election of 1800, they had made Burr their candidate for vice-president. No Republican, however, expected him to get the same number of electoral votes as Jefferson.
In the House of Representatives nine states were needed for election. Although the Federalists had a majority of congressmen in this lame-duck Congress, they controlled only six state delegations; the Republicans controlled eight. The congressional delegations of two states, Vermont and Maryland, were evenly divided between the two parties. The prospect loomed that no president might be elected in time for the inauguration on March 4, 1801. All sorts of plans flew about—ranging from Federalist ideas of the Federalist-dominated Congress selecting an interim president to Republican ideas of holding a new election. Symptomatic of their contrasting situations, the Federalists relied on legalistic and constitutional manipulations, while the Republicans generally relied on their faith in the people, creating what one scholar has called the “plebiscitarian principle” of the presidency—the notion that the presidency rightfully belongs to the candidate whose party has won an electoral mandate from the voters. Jefferson himself came to describe the presidency in these terms: It was the “Duty of the Chief magistrate . . .,” he said, “to unite in himself the confidence of the whole people” in order to “produce an union of the powers of the whole, and point them in a single direction, as if all constituted but one body & one mind.”18
Federalists thought they might be able to convince some congressmen to throw the election to Burr. Indeed, so great was the Federalists’ fear of Jefferson that many of them thought that simply electing Burr was the best way of keeping Jefferson out of the presidency. Burr, said Federalist Theodore Sedgwick of Massachusetts, was a much safer choice than Jefferson. Burr was no democrat, he was not attached to any foreign nation, and he was not an enthusiast for any sort of theory. He was just an ordinary selfish, interested politician who would promote whatever would benefit him. Burr’s “very selfishness,” said Sedgwick, was his saving grace. Burr had personally benefited so much from the Federalists’ national and commercial systems, said Sedgwick, that he would do nothing to dismantle them.19
Hamilton, for one, disagreed violently. To him (and to Jefferson too), Burr’s reputation for “selfishness” was precisely the problem. Burr may have represented what most American politicians would eventually become—pragmatic, get-along men—but to Hamilton and Jefferson he violated everything they had thought the American Revolution had been about. There was “no doubt” in Hamilton’s mind that “upon every virtuous and prudent calculation” Jefferson was to be preferred to Burr. It was a matter of character, he said: Burr had none, and Jefferson at least had “pretensions to character.”20
When it seemed likely that the election would end in a tie, Hamilton spared no energy in trying to convince his fellow Federalists to support Jefferson over Burr. Over five or six weeks in December 1800 and January 1801, he wrote letter after letter in a frantic campaign to prevent Burr from becoming president. “For heaven’s sake,” he pleaded with Sedgwick, “let not the Federal party be responsible for the elevation of this Man.” “Burr,” he told his correspondents over and over, “is sanguine enough to hope every thing—daring enough to attempt every thing—wicked enough to scruple nothing.”21 Hamilton preferred Jefferson even though they were personal enemies; indeed, he said, “if there be a man in the world I ought to hate, it is Jefferson.” And he knew too that the opposite was true with Burr: he had always gotten along well with him personally. But, said Hamilton, his personal relations should not count in this
matter. The country’s survival was at stake, and “the public good,” he insisted, “must be paramount to every private consideration.”22
Burr did little during the crisis to disabuse people of his reputation for selfishness. Although he did not campaign for the presidency and never approached the Federalists, neither did he announce that he would refuse the presidency and resign the office if he should be elected. Many Republicans would never forgive him for his unwillingness to sacrifice himself for the cause; they assumed that he had intrigued against Jefferson. That he had not done, but he was certainly angry with many of the Republicans, especially those from Virginia who had deceived him in 1792 and 1796 .
Over the course of several days in mid-February 1801 the House voted thirty-five times with no majority. Inauguration day, March 4, drew ever closer. Republican newspapers talked of military intervention. The governors of Virginia and Pennsylvania began preparing their state militias for action. Mobs gathered in the capital and threatened to prevent any president from being appointed by statute. On February 15 Jefferson wrote Governor James Monroe of Virginia that the Republicans had warned the Federalists that any statutory naming of a president would lead to the arming of the Middle States and the prevention of any “such usurpation.” Moreover, the Republicans threatened to call a new constitutional convention, which, said Jefferson, gave the Federalists “horrors; as in the present democratical spirit of America, they fear they should lose some of the favourite morsels of the constitution.”23
Finally Senator James Bayard, a moderate Federalist from Delaware, received from General Samuel Smith, a Republican from Maryland, what Bayard took to be firm assurances from Jefferson that he would preserve the Federalist financial program, maintain the navy, and refrain from dismissing subordinate Federalist officeholders except for cause. Although Jefferson declared that he would not go into the presidency “with my hands tied,” and Smith later said that these assurances were his opinion only, Federalists in Congress thought they had a deal with Jefferson.24 On February 17, 1801, some Federalist delegations abstained from voting, and on the thirty-sixth ballot Jefferson was finally elected president, receiving the vote of ten states to four for Burr, with two states blank.
To avoid a repetition of this electoral impasse, the country adopted the Twelfth Amendment to the Constitution, which allowed the electors to designate their presidential and vice-presidential choices separately in their ballots. This amendment turned the Electoral College from a decision-making body to a device for apportioning votes. It also signaled that presidential politics had become popular in a way the Founders in 1787 had not anticipated.25
Although the Republican Aurora declared that Jefferson’s election meant that “the Revolution of 1776, is now, and for the first time arrived at its completion,” the confused electoral maneuvering makes it difficult to see the bold and revolutionary character of the event.26 It was one of the first popular elections in modern history that resulted in the peaceful transfer of power from one “party” to another. Jefferson’s inauguration, as one sympathetic observer noted, was “one of the most interesting scenes, a free people could ever witness. The changes of administration, which in every government and in every age have most generally been epochs of confusion, villainy and bloodshed, in this our happy country take place without any species of distraction, or disorder.”27
At the outset Jefferson himself struck a note of conciliation: “We are all republicans—we are all federalists,” he declared in his inaugural address—an expression of his traditional desire, shared by some other Republicans, to get rid of unnecessary party designations. The chasm that the Federalists had created between the federal government and the people was now closed, and there was no real need any longer for the Republican party. Because the Republicans believed that they were “the people,” they were willing to absorb many Federalists into their cause, thus reinforcing the sense of continuity with the 1790 s.
Consequently, the Jeffersonian “Revolution of 1800” has blended nearly imperceptibly into the main democratic currents of American history. Jefferson himself was sensible of his inability to accomplish “all the reformation which reason would suggest and experience approve.” He was not free to do whatever he thought best, he said; he realized how difficult it was “to advance the notions of a whole people suddenly to ideal right,” and he concluded “that no more good must be attempted than the people will bear.”28 Still, when compared to the consolidated heroic European-like state that the Federalists tried to build in the 1790s, what Jefferson and the Republicans did after 1800 proved that a real revolution—as real as Jefferson said it was—had taken place.29
IN HIS INAUGURAL ADDRESS the fifty-seven-year-old Thomas Jefferson contemplated “a rising nation, spread over a wide and fruitful land, traversing all the seas with the rich productions of their industry, engaged in commerce with nations that feel power and forget right, advancing rapidly to destinies beyond the reach of mortal eye.” America, he said, was “the world’s best hope,” and it possessed “the strongest Government on earth.” It was “a chosen country, with room enough for our descendents to the thousandth and thousandth generation.” He believed that the spirit of 1776 had finally been fulfilled and that the United States could at last become a beacon of liberty for the world. “A just and solid republican government” of the kind he sought to build, he said, “will be a standing monument & example for the aim & imitation of the people of other countries.” The American Revolution was a world-historical event, something “new under the sun,” he told the radical scientist Joseph Priestley. It had excited the minds of “the mass of mankind,” he said, and its “consequences will ameliorate the condition of man over a great portion of the globe.” No wonder Jefferson became the fount of American democracy, for he set forth at the outset of his presidency a body of American ideas and ideals that have persisted to this day.30
Believing that most of the evils afflicting human beings in the past had flowed from the abuses of inflated political establishments, Jefferson and the Republicans in 1800 deliberately set about to carry out what they rightly believed was the original aim of the Revolution: to reduce the overweening and dangerous power of government. Both Jefferson and his fellow Republicans wanted to form a national republic based on the eighteenth-century country-Whig opposition ideology that held that the smaller the government, the better. Jefferson had not initially much liked the Constitution. He thought the president was “a bad edition of a Polish king.” In fact, he thought that three or four new articles added “to the good, old, and venerable fabrick” of the Articles of Confederation would have sufficed.31 In 1801 he and his fellow Republicans were in a position to ensure that the United States would continue to be spoken of in the plural, as a union of separate sovereign states, which remained the case through the entire antebellum period. In short, they aimed to make the central government’s authority resemble that of the old Articles of Confederation rather than that of the European-type state that the Federalists had sought to build. To do so, Jefferson and his colleagues had to create a general government that could rule without the traditional attributes of power.
From the outset Jefferson was determined that the new government would spurn even the usual rituals of power. At the very beginning he set a new tone of republican simplicity that was in sharp contrast to the stiff formality and regal ceremony with which the Federalists had surrounded the presidency. No elaborately ornamented coach drawn by four or six horses for Jefferson: the president-elect walked from his boardinghouse on New Jersey Avenue to his inauguration without any fanfare whatsoever. He immediately sold the coaches, horses, and silver harnesses that President Adams had used and kept only a one-horse market cart.
That day in March 1801 on which he became president, he said, “buried levees, birthdays, royal parades, and the arrogation of precedence in society by certain self-stiled friends of order, but truly stiled friends of privileged orders.”32 Since the Federalist presidents Washin
gton and Adams, like the English monarchs, had delivered their addresses to the Congress “from the throne,” Jefferson chose to deliver his message in writing to which no formal answer from the Congress would be expected; this set a precedent that was not broken until the presidency of Woodrow Wilson. Unlike Washington and Adams, Jefferson (“his Democratic majesty,” as one person called him) made himself easily accessible to visitors, all of whom, no matter how distinguished, he received, as the British chargé reported, “with a most perfect disregard to ceremony both in his dress and manner.” His dress was often informal, he sometimes greeted guests in carpet slippers, and he wore his hair, said one observer, “in negligent disorder, though not ungracefully.”33
At American state occasions President Jefferson, to the shock of foreign dignitaries, replaced the protocol and the distinctions of European court life with the egalitarian rules of what he called “pell-mell” or “next the door,” which essentially meant, sit wherever one wanted. His treatment of the new pompous minister from Great Britain, Anthony Merry, became notorious. Not only did Jefferson greet Merry in his usual casual manner, but he added to the minister’s astonishment at a dinner by paying no attention to Merry and his wife’s rank in seating and by inviting the French minister to the same dinner, even though the two countries were at war. After this experience, Merry never accepted another invitation to dine with the president.
While Jefferson’s gentlemanly tastes scarcely allowed for any actual leveling in social gatherings, his symbolic transformation of manners at the capital reflected changes that were taking place in American society. For the Republican revolution brought to the national government men who, unlike Jefferson, did not have the outward manners of gentlemen, who did not know one another, and who were decidedly not at home in polite society. Over half the members of the Republican-dominated Seventh Congress that convened in December 1801, for example, were new.34 The British envoy in Washington wondered how long such a system of ordinary men with humble occupations promoting the “low arts of popularity” could last. “The excess of the democratic ferment in this people is continuously evinced by the dregs having got to the top.”35
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