A Magnificent Catastrophe

by Edward J. Larson

  Federalists also equated Republicans with self-interested partisanship and themselves with disinterested public service. A natural aristocracy of virtuous and wise leaders should rule on the call of the people in elections devoid of partisanship, Federalists maintained, and the people should follow. To them, Washington’s tenure as President exemplified the ideal: personality over party. In contrast, “the Jacobins appear to be completely organized throughout the United States,” one prominent Federalist complained about the Republicans in 1800. “The whole body act with a union to be expected only from men in whom no moral principles exist.” For their part, Federalists tended to shun party discipline as inappropriate for public servants, leading one Federalist congressman to observe in 1800, “The Federalists hardly deserve the name of party. Their association is a loose one.”

  Similar themes to those heard in Philadelphia were sounded in the eulogy for Washington delivered in New York City by the state’s incoming Federalist senator, Gouverneur Morris. The 1800 census would show that New York had finally surpassed Philadelphia as the nation’s largest city—and both sides viewed New York State’s electoral votes as critical to winning the presidency. New York Federalists organized a massive public commemoration of Washington’s death for December 31, 1799. Hamilton, who had become like a son to Washington, assumed a central position in the funerary procession, riding after the military contingents and before representatives of various civic associations.

  Morris’s eulogy cursed the rise of a partisan “faction” in American politics and praised leaders, like Washington, “of decided temper who, devoted to the people, overlooked prudential considerations,” as opposed to “cautious men with whom popularity was an object.” As Washington’s former proroyalist ambassador to Paris, Morris even included a bizarre reference to King Louis XVI as the “protector of the rights of mankind,” an apparent slap at Jefferson and the Republicans who defended the revolutionaries who first toppled and then guillotined the French monarch. “Let us raise a standard to which the wise and the honest can repair,” Morris proclaimed. Privately, the New Yorker attributed Jefferson’s appeal to the people’s irresponsible intoxication with popular rule. “When the people have been drunk long enough, they will get sober,” he assured a fellow Federalist, “but while the frolic lasts, to reason with them is useless.”

  Some Republicans resisted efforts to transform memorial ceremonies for Washington into thinly veiled Federalist campaign rallies. “The whole United States mourn for him as a father,” observed Benjamin Rush, a renowned physician with Republican ties who attended the ceremony in Philadelphia and afterward critiqued Lee’s partisan eulogy as “moderate but deficient in elocution.” Philadelphia’s leading Republican newspaper, the Aurora, reported on various “republican” contingents joining the funerary procession for Washington. “Many will join in ye form that car’d little about him,” complained Philadelphia diarist Elizabeth Drinker, a candid and insightful Federalist sympathizer.

  Republicans also took part in the ceremony in New York, where all manner of partisan groups accepted the organizers’ open invitation for public bodies to join the grand procession honoring the former President. Hamilton must have watched his back as his mounted suite paraded directly in front of partisans from the working-class Tammany Society—the very heart of republicanism in New York City—who held aloft a liberty cap veiled in crape. We mourn Washington too, the Tammanyites seemed to say, and to us, he stood simply for liberty. The contest over the meaning of Washington’s life began that last day of 1799—if not before.

  One of the points of fiercest contention was the Additional Army. In many major cities, the new troops featured prominently in ceremonies honoring their fallen commander. This seemed appropriate given Washington’s military credentials and his role as its head, but it also invited a polarizing partisan response from both Federalists and Republicans. Congress had largely disbanded the nation’s military forces following the Revolutionary War, relying instead on state militias for military purposes. When, following the XYZ Affair, Congress prepared the nation for war by creating a navy and greatly expanding the Army, many people had viewed the Additional Army as peculiarly a High Federalist force. Indeed, Adams, believing that the true danger to American interests lay at sea, had not requested any added troops and Republicans had generally opposed the idea. “There is no more prospect of seeing a French army here as there is in heaven,” Adams once cautioned his hawkish, High Federalist Secretary of War, Oliver Wolcott.

  Privately, Washington agreed with Adams’s assessment of the military situation but nevertheless accepted the commission as the Army’s leader. He insisted on appointing his own officers corps and, over Adams’s strenuous objections, named Hamilton as his Inspector General, the second in command. Two other Federalist politicians with wartime experience, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney and Henry Lee, became major generals, but Hamilton largely organized and led the troops while Washington remained at home.

  Republicans had vehemently criticized the domestic military buildup—fearing with some justification that Hamilton might turn the new Army against them. Jefferson in particular worried about a military coup to maintain Federalist hegemony. Even Adams became concerned about Hamilton’s intentions when shown private letters from the Inspector General suggesting that he might use the Army to suppress antigovernment “resistance” in Virginia and “take possession” of Florida and Louisiana from France’s ally, Spain. “This man is stark mad or I am,” Adams later claimed to have said about Hamilton upon reading these and other confidential letters outlining his plans.

  As it became increasingly apparent that France would not invade the United States, the Additional Army lost much of its public support. “That army,” Adams later commented, “was as unpopular as if it had been a wild beast let loose upon the nation to devour it. In newspapers, in pamphlets, and in common conversation, they [sic] were called cannibals.” Cost was one consideration, of course, but the thought of armed young men from various regions encamped in bases scattered across the eastern seaboard worried many Americans who lived quiet lives in insular communities. Feeding those sentiments, Republican newspapers had spread stories of looting and rapes committed by idle soldiers who had no real worry of ever facing French invaders. By 1799, the Army had, on balance, become a decided political liability for Federalists.

  Therefore, the prominent role of the Additional Army in so many of the ceremonies marking Washington’s death made it a visible symbol of both the partisan gulf separating Federalists and Republicans and the intraparty rift between so-called Adamsites and Hamiltonians. It had always been Hamilton’s Army and strictly a High Federalist force, and so it still appeared at the memorial services for Washington. With the need for the Army disputed from the start and negotiations now under way with France, military recruiting, always slow, ground to a halt with the force never reaching even half of its authorized size. A festooned officers’ corps comprised largely of aging High Federalist politicians commanded just enough troops to make for impressive dress parades at Washington’s many funerary processions.

  Though many Republicans participated in the national outpouring of grief, not all of them joined in extravagantly mourning Washington’s death. Republican essayist, poet, and newspaper editor Philip Freneau ridiculed the “blasphemous panegyrics” that praised Washington as a god. Emphasizing simple republican virtues, Freneau now wrote of Washington, “He was the upright, Honest Man. This was his glory.” For their part, Jefferson and Madison kept a low profile. Even though Jefferson, as the sitting Vice President, was listed on the official program for Washington’s funerary procession in Philadelphia, he did not attend. Although he surely knew about the ceremony, Jefferson did not return to Philadelphia for the winter session of Congress until two days afterward. Indeed, Dumas Malone, Jefferson’s most comprehensive biographer, determined that the man who had once served as Washington’s Secretary of State “said nothing in public and appears to have said not
hing in private” about Washington’s death. His silence spoke for him, and his conspicuous absence from the funerary procession provoked widespread criticism by Federalists, but he probably preferred that to their possible charges of hypocrisy for marching in it, Dumas observed. Only much later, after the election of 1800, did Jefferson make a private courtesy call on Washington’s widow at Mount Vernon.

  Jefferson was not the only prominent Republican leader to miss the Philadelphia memorial ceremony for Washington. The recently elected Republican governor of Pennsylvania, Thomas McKean, also skipped the event. Two weeks later, he pointedly refused to attend a similar funerary procession for Washington organized by Federalists in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Tongues wagged throughout the state as partisans debated the political significance of McKean’s actions in light of the coming presidential election. “Had this party magistrate possessed one spark of American patriotism,” the Federalist Gazette of the United States fumed, other considerations “would not have prevented him from joining in the general sorrow and affliction of the occasion.”

  Overwrought partisan opponents could plausibly criticize the impulsive and temperamental McKean as a “dark and foul-minded champion of disorganization,” as the Gazette article did, but hardly for a lack of patriotism. In the mold of Samuel Adams and Patrick Henry, McKean was an early and ardent patriot. As a Delaware colonial legislator, he boldly condemned the Stamp Act in 1765 and the Townshend Duties in 1768. Elected to the First and Second Continental Congresses, McKean joined Adams in advocating American independence before doing so was either prudent or popular, and he proudly signed the Declaration of Independence. He later co-authored both the Delaware and Pennsylvania state constitutions and simultaneously served as member of Congress from Delaware and Chief Justice of Pennsylvania. His estate straddled the state line.

  Originally a Federalist, McKean so hated Britain from his days as a patriot leader that he gradually broke with Washington over Jay’s Treaty and Hamilton’s Anglophile policies. Adams’s naval war with France clinched McKean’s switch to the Republican Party and, with the enthusiasm of a late convert, he had agreed at age sixty-five to stand as its candidate for Pennsylvania governor in October 1799. At the time, partisans on both sides viewed that state’s legislative and gubernatorial elections that autumn as virtually the opening round of the 1800 presidential contest.

  Already known as the Keystone State for its geographic and political centrality, Pennsylvania certainly appeared key to the election of 1800. The North would go for Adams, most political observers forecast, while Jefferson would carry the South, except perhaps for South Carolina, where there were still Federalist bastions loyal to Thomas and Charles Cotesworth Pinckney. The middle states from New York to Maryland held the balance of power. In 1796, the votes from these states had split between the two leading candidates, with all twenty-two electors from New York, New Jersey, and Delaware voting for Adams, fourteen of Pennsylvania’s fifteen electors voting for Jefferson, and Maryland’s ten electors casting seven votes for Adams and four for Jefferson. Adams’s slender margin of victory had come from the votes of two rogue Southern electors, one from Virginia and one from North Carolina. If either candidate could secure more electoral votes from the middle states this time, he would almost surely win.

  Pennsylvania, with its fifteen electoral votes, stood out as the most populous of these middle states. It was also amid a transformation from leaning Federalist to Republican. Looking ahead to the 1800 presidential election in light of the 1799 governor’s race, America’s flagship Federalist newspaper, Gazette of the United States, predicted, “The effects then of the election of governor will be incalculable.”

  The governor’s role in the presidential election might be substantial because Pennsylvania did not at this time have a set method of picking its electors fixed in law, and the governor could therefore have a significant role in designing that process. Depending how events played out, he might even be the kingmaker.

  The Constitution had left each state free to decide how it would select its electors. Most states initially opted to have state legislators appoint electors. As party lines hardened, these legislative choices became ever more partisan. Typically, each party’s caucus in the state legislature would put forward a full slate of elector candidates who, if appointed, would support the party ticket. The party with the most legislators would get all the state’s electors.

  From the outset, a few states allowed voters to choose electors in direct popular elections. Some of these states employed district elections, with voters in each electoral district typically choosing one elector from between two partisan candidates. This approach tended to split a state’s electors between the parties, as some districts leaned toward the Federalists and some leaned toward the Republicans. Other states used a general ballot, so that all of the state’s electors were chosen by voters from across the state, often from candidates running on two partisan slates. That approach favored all of the state’s electors supporting whichever party, and voting for whichever presidential candidate, attracted the most voters statewide.

  Further, to identify their candidates for President and Vice President, party members increasingly looked toward the caucus of its representatives in Congress, which was the only venue where politicians from around the nation assembled. Though the Framers had designed the Electoral College to isolate the presidential election process from partisanship, the parties had virtually commandeered the system.

  Going into the 1799 Pennsylvania state elections, the Federalists controlled both houses of the Pennsylvania legislature, and though the Republicans hoped to pick up some seats in both, they were not expected to take control of them. The new legislature would decide how the state’s electors would be chosen in 1800, and lawmakers from each party would surely try to impose a method that favored their party. The governor would have veto power over whatever they passed.

  Pennsylvania Federalists were especially intent to stack the system in their party’s favor this time because of an ironic turn of events in the state’s last election for presidential electors. Hoping to secure all of Pennsylvania’s electoral votes for Adams in 1796, they had opted for a statewide general election for electors. The plan backfired, however, when Jefferson’s supporters won a narrow majority in the balloting. Hence, all but one of Pennsylvania’s electors had voted for Jefferson—the only votes received by the Virginian from any state north of the Mason-Dixon Line. Those votes, combined with ones from his Southern base, would have given him the presidency except for those two rogue electoral votes for Adams from Virginia and North Carolina.

  To win in 1800, both Federalists and Republicans calculated that Jefferson would probably need to sweep Pennsylvania’s electoral votes again. His doing so would require the state to reenact its statewide general-ticket method for selecting electors, and so, of course, Pennsylvania’s Federalists now favored either district elections or legislative appointment for the state’s electors. Either system would ensure that at least some of the electors were Federalists. If McKean were elected governor as a Republican, however, he could thwart their plans with a veto.

  For their candidate for governor, Federalists countered with another well-known politician: U.S. Senator James Ross, a leading High Federalist supporter of the Alien and Sedition Acts who hated France as much as McKean hated England. The race had become a clash of titans centered on Philadelphia, the nation’s capital. As early as July 1799, a prominent Pennsylvania Federalist wrote nervously to Washington, “This state is greatly agitated by the approaching election of Governor. There is good reason to believe that Mr. Ross will be chosen, but the whole spirit of party will be extended against him.”

  As the campaign played out, the race turned on national issues, not state ones. McKean supporters tied his opponent to the locally unpopular policies of the Adams administration and the High Federalists in Congress. One Republican broadside denounced Ross as “a British partisan; a monarchist; an advocate of war
[with France]; a litigious attorney;…[and] a patron of the Alien and Sedition Acts.” In contrast, it praised McKean as “a steady patriot of 1776” who supports “peace” and “freedom of press.” Another Republican appeal declared, To “the Federalists…and their candidate, Mr. Ross, we owe the Sedition Laws.…To them we are indebted for the British Treaty, that parent of our present dispute with France…. To them we owe the Alien Law, which has set aside trial by jury…. Of this party, James Ross is the favorite candidate.”

  In state and congressional elections held in 1797 and 1798, during the rush toward war with France and amid widespread concerns about domestic security, these same issues had tended to cut in favor of the Federalists. On the eve of the 1799 election, however, the Republican Aurora proclaimed, “This national infatuation is broken…and the free American countenance once more wears the softened lineaments of the independent and benevolent Republican.”

  Pennsylvania Federalists countered in kind but with less effect. “Mr. McKean is a friend to France,” a Federalist pamphlet charged, and “desirous of provoking a war with Great Britain.” He favored unlimited Irish immigration, it added, and would countenance domestic discord. Repeating a common Federalist accusation against Republicans, the pamphlet charged, “They have made liberty and equality the pretext, whilst plunder and dominion has been their object.” Another Federalist broadside presented the choice as between “happiness and independence” with Ross or “anarchy and insurrection” with McKean. The Federalist Gazette of the United States starkly warned that McKean’s election would see “the whole state turned into a filthy kennel of Jacobinical depravity.”