THE ADVENT OF DEMOCRACY
The presidential election of 1800 was epoch-making in several meanings
of the term. It was a reaction against the bold and defiant attitude
of the party in power. It was a revolution of the people. Yet it was
neither a dissolution of all government, as it appeared to the defeated,
nor a permanent conversion of the people to democracy, as the victorious
element was inclined to consider it. Sixty years later, the people
would rise against the victorious party, grown to be a slave-truckling
organisation, overscrupulous of the individual when the world was
turning to aggregation, and would take the sceptre from them for a
quarter of a century at least. The masses punish arrogance in a party
as in an individual. Unlimited success is always fatal. No sooner has
the party passed the safety-line in one direction than the tide of
popular favour turns in the opposite way and leaves it stranded. Owing
to such reaction, the National Government has never approximated anarchy
on the individualistic side of Jeffersonianism, nor has it been in
danger of monarchy under Hamiltonian centralising principles at the
other extremity. To-day it is as far from the ideals of the one as the
other. Controlled constantly by centrifugal and centripetal forces,
the fixed orbit of the Union has been maintained.
The election of 1800 marked the first transfer of the national control
from one party to another. So accustomed has time made us to these
changes, that it is difficult to appreciate the anxiety with which the
people of that day awaited the transition. Well-known party issues,
announced in party platforms, now give a fair assurance of the policies
to be pursued. Yet no serious suggestion emanated from the Federalists
that they would not yield to the ballot. Fitness for self-government
was again demonstrated, especially when contrasted with some other
American nations, by the peaceful eviction of one party, yielding to
no more warlike weapon in the hands of its opponents than the suffrage
of citizens.
The anxiety of the hour was increased because the national machinery
had suddenly come to a standstill. The defect predicted by its enemies
and feared by its friends had suddenly appeared in the method of
electing a President. According to the Constitution, each elector wrote
two names upon his ballot. The man receiving the highest number, if
a majority, was declared President, and the next highest, Vice-President.
Every Republican elector chosen in 1800 had written upon his ballot the
names of Jefferson and Burr. Consequently neither was elected, because
neither had a majority. The superiority of Hamilton over Jefferson as a
party manager is manifest by the fact that Hamilton had feared a
Federalist tie in the election of 1789 and had taken steps to prevent it.
The Republicans were now in a quandary. John Adams had received only
sixty-five votes, cut off with one term, a vicarious sacrifice, as he
thought himself; yet neither Jefferson nor Burr was elected, each having
seventy-three votes. Various rumours disturbed the peace. It was said that
Congress would appoint a President for the interim; that Adams would hold
over; or that Hamilton, disappointed in not being made President, would
turn dictator. Governor Monroe promised Jefferson that he would
immediately re-convene the Virginia Assembly "should any plan of
usurpation be attempted at the federal town." Monroe's remedy was an
amendment which would correct the Constitution in this particular. The
fathers had not foreseen this precise accident, but, in their wisdom, had
provided a remedy for a defective election by casting a decision in the
House of Representatives, the most popular body next to the electors.
Jefferson had undoubtedly been the choice of the people, and his selection
had been the intention of the Republican electors. This was ultimately
accomplished in the House. An amendment to the Constitution was adopted
before the next election to prevent the recurrence of such an accident,
and the Union had by good fortune passed a crisis in a presidential
election second only to that of 1876.
The discomfited Federalists sought an explanation for their defeat in
everything save their own actions. After only twelve years, and twelve
years passed in creating an efficient from a deficient government, the
people had turned against them. "No party ever existed knew itself so
little," said John Adams, "or so vainly overrated its own influence
and popularity as ours. None ever understood so ill the causes of its
own power or so wantonly destroyed them." State debt assumption, the
bank, the excise, the increased debt, the war expenditures, the direct
taxes, and the Alien and Sedition laws would seem to furnish a
sufficient list of reasons for the downfall of a party, which came
into the Administration by only three votes. Yet, by common consent,
the blame for the defeat was placed on the aliens and their presses.
"A group of foreign liars," was the forceful way in which the defeated
President explained it, "encouraged by a few ambitious native gentlemen,
have discomfited the education, the talents, the virtues, and the
property of our country." Chagrined that Washington should have two
terms and he cut off with one, smarting under the treacherous letter
of Hamilton, to which he speedily framed a reply, the ex-President
"trotted the bogs" back to Massachusetts, as he termed it, without
paying his successor the courtesy of waiting to see him inaugurated.
Gadsden, the old Revolutionary leader of South Carolina, now relegated
to the line of spectators, lamented the short-sightedness of early
days in not sufficiently guarding American citizenship from the
admission of foreign meddlers. "Our old-standers and independent men
of long, well-tried patriotism, sound understanding, and good property,"
said he, "have now in general very little influence in our public
matters." He wished the advice of John Rutledge had been taken. He
would have admitted only the sons of aliens to citizenship.
The new President was to the manor born, but he held theories
dangerously akin to those put forth by the foreign faction, against
which the Alien and Sedition laws had been aimed. Speculative
philosophy, however philanthropic in its intent, was heresy to the
practical Federalists. Hamilton, in the midst of the uncertain election,
was reported to have given in a toast his preference for "a dreamer
rather than a Catiline," as between Jefferson and Burr. During the
campaign, pamphlets appeared describing Jefferson as a wild philosopher,
one who believed the savage more independent and happy than the
civilised man; who preferred newspapers to government; who believed
that a little rebellion now and then was a good thing; who esteemed
property and obligations of so little value as to declare that the
actions of one generation were not binding on the next; who justified
the excesses of the French Revolution by saying that if only an Adam
and an Eve were left in every country and left free, it would be better
than it had been before. Memories of Tory confiscations and penalties
were sufficiently fresh to give credence to a rumour that the
President-elect contemplated such retributive measures toward his
political opponents. Memories of the disunion sentiments contained in
the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions were still fresher, although
Jefferson's close connection with the latter was not yet generally
known.
Thomas Jefferson was an exponent of the democracy of his day, and with
him democracy came into the National Administration. The "well-born"
were discomfited. Yet it was not the democracy of Andrew Jackson's
time. It was a democracy reflected from Europe like everything else
in America at the time. It was the democracy of Montesquieu and the
encyclopædists. It was a democracy which could be led by a college
graduate and lawyer, who was also a gentleman farmer and a large
landholder, bound to his party by a country residence, by being a
borrower, and by speculative theories. Only such aristocratic democracy
was possible on the Atlantic coast-plain. Pure American democracy would
be born only after advancing civilisation found a majority in the
mid-valley of the continent, with the barrier of the Alleghenies at
its back. It reached a crude form in Andrew Jackson, the Indian fighter,
and a slightly higher type in Abraham Lincoln, the prairie lawyer.
Jefferson's democracy in the abstract was a kind of political
millennium, in which the people collectively exhibited traits quite
different from their individual components. The people, to Jefferson's
mind, were unselfish, by nature good, and needing no restraining bonds.
They were their own censors. His democracy in the concrete took the
shape of a great uprising of the people in 1800, temporarily led astray
from the true principles of self-government by the undue influence of
Alexander Hamilton acting through the moneyed interests, but returning
joyously and regenerate to the path of constitutional rectitude. The
election of 1800 he pronounced as real a revolution in the principles
of government as was that of 1776 in its form; the material difference
being that one was effected by the sword and the other by the rational
and peaceable method of suffrage. Jefferson had no more conception of
a modern political party than had Washington,--the latter because he
saw in them only factions; the former because his party embraced the
entire people.
For several years, it is true, Jefferson had been directing the pens
of his lieutenants in the various States, circulating sound Republican
literature, patronising Republican newspapers, and tabulating Federalist
defeats as skilfully as a modern political manager. He encouraged the
people to mass-meetings or county conventions of delegates. This was
probably the beginning of the county political machinery. He lamented
that the South had no towns, such as New England had, which would make
smaller units for popular gatherings. The Federalists scorned this
political machinery as too trivial and feared it as too popular. It
would have a tendency to make the people less amenable to the control
of their leaders. They preferred to continue the Revolutionary custom
of committees of correspondence to manage party affairs.
All this herculean effort was felt by Jefferson to be necessary to win
popular attention and support from the centralisation of Hamilton,
which, to his myopic vision, was monarchism. Years after, he testified
that nothing on earth was more certain than that if he, placed by his
office of Vice-President at the head of the anti-monarchists, had given
way and had withdrawn from his post, the people would have given up
in despair and the cause of liberty have been lost. By his efforts,
and the aid of the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, the Constitution
and the Union had been saved when "at its last gasp."
As the time of Jefferson's inauguration approached, rumours of
revolutionary action grew into a general alarm lest all the union-making
of twelve years should be annihilated and the Federation days be brought
back again. Jefferson's well-known antipathy to taxation and a national
debt caused a rumour that he planned repudiation of the national
obligation, perhaps an agrarian law, and even the distribution of all
property. The vested interests were as much alarmed as ever they were
in subsequent elections. "We have seen," cried one holder of national
certificates and a subscriber to the bank, "the French clergy stripped
in a night. One vote of Congress would put our federal debt into the
family tomb with the paper money of Revolutionary days." Among the
measures supposed to be contemplated by the victorious "mobocrats,"
as the Federalists called them, were the abolition of the United States
Senate, destruction of foreign commerce and public schools, the
abolition of internal taxes, the annihilation of the bank, and the
Europeanising of the country by French immigrants. "God is punishing
the manifold sins of this nation by delivering it over to projectors
and philosophists," said a New England clergyman. Governor Strong, of
Massachusetts, appointed a day of fasting and prayer, that the first
magistrate and other rulers of the nation might rise superior to private
interests and the prejudice of party. The lower branch of Congress had
gone over to the Jeffersonians, and the upper House would be lost after
the next session. No check was possible upon the reformers.
Although neither partisans nor people were in such dangers as imagined
by the Federalists, the National Government might have been seriously
impaired by Jefferson and his followers, if necessity had not been
most fortunately on the other side. The contest was very unequal, as
well for Jefferson as for his successors who struggled conscientiously
but vainly against natural laws. Jefferson was misjudged by those who
pronounced him opposed to all union. He was always in favour of a
limited union--an impossible union as it proved--with the unexpressed
powers retained by the States. "The states," said he, "can best govern
our home concerns and the general government our foreign ones." In
later years he could remember but one instance of control vested in
the Federal over the State authorities in a matter purely domestic,
and that was the metallic tenders. Nor could he be said to be opposed
to the Federalists as a whole, since he never recognised the party,
but simply a few of its leaders. The latter were for the moment
misleading the people. He expected in time to win all back except "the
Coryphæi," or leaders, whom he pronounced incurables. One of the first
unpleasant revelations to Jefferson as President was the fact that a
sufficient number of the people to constitute a party would persist
in remaining under the influence of Hamilton and his fellows in several
of the States.
The man who depends thus upon the people and appeals to them as his
monitor must risk the charge of demagogism. Every action differing
from custom will be considered a bid for popular applause. "Jeffersonian
simplicity" has been ridiculed as a masquerade for a purpose. Yet it
was a protest against Old World imitation. Never was a salutation made
or an address presented to Washington or Adams at an opening of Congress
that Jefferson did not see in it a warning of imminent monarchy. He
applauded the democratic firmness, called "stubbornness" by the
Federalists, of Matthew Lyon, the only member of the House of
Representatives who steadfastly refused to march in procession to the
residence of President Adams in order to present to him the accustomed
complimentary address and to partake of his refreshments. Clearly it
was the duty of a President of the people to abolish these borrowed
forms of royalty. When elected Vice-President, Jefferson requested
that he might be notified by mail instead of by a messenger. No
notification of his election to the Presidency was necessary since he
was presiding over the Senate when elected by the House.
The embryonic city of Washington, surrounded by dense woods, was the
scene of Jefferson's inauguration, and it afforded little for the
ceremonies except democratic simplicity. It was announced in advance
that no "white wands" would be carried, in the British style, at this
inauguration. Republican papers had predicted that
"Philosoph's reign the world will bless,
Join'd with religion's simpler dress.
Truth in homely garb shall shine,
On every state, in every clime."
The inauguration plans provided only a salute from the company of
Alexandria riflemen who paraded before the lodgings of the
President-elect, an escort of citizens and members of Congress to the
Senate wing of the unfinished Capitol, and an inconsiderable
illumination at night. At a later time, in an effort to magnify
Jeffersonian simplicity, the story was invented that the President-elect
rode unattended to Capitol hill and tied his horse to a tree near the
spring.
Since Jefferson had been deprived of his wife by death many years
before, the social problem was greatly simplified. Hospitable to
extravagance in his home, as President he must reduce his entertainment
to the simplicity becoming a republic. He soon formulated as part of
his social program: "Levees are done away with. The first communication
to the next Congress will be, like all subsequent ones, by message,
to which no answer will be expected." In thus trimming away the useless
ceremonials which had so far attended the beginning of each session
of Congress, obviously copied, as previously said, from the opening
of a session of Parliament, Jefferson was contributing to American
individuality and common sense.
The task of restoring the Union to the form the fathers had meant for
it and revoking the prerogatives unconstitutionally given to it was
uppermost in Jefferson's mind. The bank had been chartered for twenty
years and was beyond reach at present. The Sedition law and the Alien
Friends act had expired by limitation before Jefferson came in. The
Alien Enemies act was harmless because it rested entirely with the
President for execution and was valid only during a foreign war; since
it might be useful later it was allowed to remain on the statute book.
But the odious excise, the stamp taxes, and carriage licenses could
be repealed, the probationary period for naturalisation could be reduced
to the former limit, work on the great war-ships could be stopped,
the provisional army allowed to disband, and Hamilton and other generals
cut off from the public treasury. The vast appropriations for the army
and navy and the coast defences could be reduced, and the expense of
the ornamental consular service cut down. As rapidly as possible,
Congress carried out these reform suggestions of the new President.
The Federalists deplored his penny-wise economy, especially when fifteen
ships, which had cost the Government nearly a million dollars, were
sold for one-fourth that amount.
The work of reform did not stop here. Two branches of the National
Government had been brought back to democratic principles by the will
of the people. But the third branch, the Judiciary, remained in the
control of the "monarchists." Jefferson first did justice, as he
conceived it, to Lyon, the only prisoner remaining convicted under the
Sedition law. No doubt some of the Federal judges had been overzealous
in securing the conviction of offenders under this law. Holding life
tenure under the Constitution, they could be reached only by
impeachment. This remedy was attempted in order to punish Judge Chase,
an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, who had shown partiality,
it was claimed, in the trial of Fries and Callender five years before.
The requisite two-thirds of the Senate did not vote him guilty, and
this method of curbing the Judiciary failed. "Impeachment is not even
a scarecrow," admitted the disappointed President. The enemy had retired
into the stronghold of the Judiciary, as he said, to be fed from the
treasury, and from thence to beat down Republicanism. "By a fraudulent
use of the Constitution," he explained, "which has made judges
irremovable, they have multiplied useless judges merely to strengthen
their phalanx."
In this indictment, Jefferson referred to the act of the closing days
of the Federalists, whereby the number of Federal courts had been
increased to twenty-seven. It had been done by creating six circuit
courts, with judges, marshals, and attorneys, instead of requiring the
district judges and Supreme Court justices to make up these courts as
had been done under the Judiciary Act of 1789. The excuse for the
creation of these medium courts was that too much labour had been
imposed upon the judges and justices by the old method. But the
Republicans believed it had been done to make places for a large number
of irremovable Federalist office-holders. By another act, a circuit
court, with three judges, was created for the District of Columbia,
with an elaborate system of justices' courts and justices of the peace.
To fill the large number of places thus created, the pen of John Adams
had been kept busy up to the last hour of his administration. Hence
the "midnight appointments," as they were commonly known. Some of the
district judges were advanced to the new circuit judgeships, and their
places filled by the district attorneys. These were "nominated for
promotion," as the message to the Senate termed it.
Not only would this presumably hostile force be in Jefferson's camp,
but their salaries would seriously interfere with his plans for
retrenchment. The Constitution distinctly provided that "judges both
of the supreme and inferior courts shall hold offices during good
behavior." But before the first session of Congress under his
administration was ended, Jefferson wrote that they had "lopped off
a parasite limb, planted by our predecessors on the judiciary body for
party purposes." How had it been done? By passing a new judiciary act,
which abolished the whole system of circuit courts, with their judges
and minor officials, and substituted the old practice of requiring the
Supreme and district judges to perform the labours of the circuit
courts. No life tenure would hold for an office which did not exist.
The anathemas of the "promoted" officials, thus fallen between stools,
added to the pleasure of the Jeffersonians. The names of twenty-two
unfortunates, whom the Senate failed to find time to ratify in the
closing hours, were recalled by Jefferson, under the caption, "Nominated
but not appointed."
Midnight of the 3rd of March had caught forty-one of the proposed
Federal justices of the peace for the District of Columbia without
their appointment having been fully made. Jefferson arbitrarily cut
down their number to twenty-five, "having been thought too many," as
he said. Among those dropped were four whose commissions had been made
out and sealed by the acting Secretary of State, but had not been
delivered. Madison, who became Secretary of State under Jefferson,
refused to deliver the commissions, and the men, headed by one William
Marbury, made a motion in the Federal court to obtain them. They had
no recourse in the State courts. From this trivial circumstance,
involving the least national judiciary office, came the case of Marbury
vs. Madison, involving the right of the judiciary branch of the Federal
Government to give an order to the executive.
One phase of the relation of these two branches had been established
nearly ten years before, when President Washington attempted to get
an interpretation from the Supreme Court upon the binding clauses of
the vexatious treaty with France. He was told that the court was not
an advisory body, but a tribunal established to adjudge specific cases
brought before it. For this advisory service, the Executive must depend
upon his Attorney-General. About the same time, the United States
circuit courts protested against an act of Congress which made them
recipients of pension applications subject to the final decision of
the War Department. Evidently the Judiciary intended to remain
independent of both the other branches of the National Government.
One feature of the relationship between the Federal courts and the
Congress had been presumed to exist by Hamilton and other commentators
on the Constitution, viz., the power to adjudge of the rights of
individuals under an act of Congress. This principle of passing on the
constitutionality of a legislative act by the courts had been
established in at least five States before the adoption of the
Constitution. It had been exercised in several cases by the Federal
courts before the case of Marbury _vs._ Madison arose. A new contention
was involved by asking whether the request made to the Supreme Court
to issue a mandamus would hold against the provisions of the
Constitution, which did not include mandamus in the powers specifically
given to the court.
It chanced that the case came before John Marshall, who had recently
assumed the station of Chief Justice, to which John Adams appointed
him in the closing months of his administration. The previous history
of the court, with the exception of two or three cases, had been
insignificant. Its decisions during the first ten years do not fill
as many pages as do those for a single year at the present time. Jay
had resigned its headship to undertake the mission to England, impressed
with the belief, as he afterward said, that the court could never
obtain the energy, weight, and dignity essential to affording due
support to the National Government. He refused to return to the bench,
and Marshall was appointed, with whom the second era of the court
begins. Marshall was a Virginian, a school-fellow of Monroe, and
co-worker with Madison in the Virginia Constitutional Convention. But
the war acquaintance which he formed with Washington and Hamilton,
added to his personal views, turned him toward Federalism. As a
Virginian, he was cultivated by members of that party, office after
office being placed at his option. Accepting the Chief-Justiceship
under a life tenure, he was "saddled" on the Republicans, as they said.
The decision in the case of Marbury _vs._ Madison was one of many which
emanated from Marshall, silently shoring up the fabric of the Union
as it was erected by the hand of necessity. "The theory that an act
of legislature repugnant to the Constitution is void," said the Chief
Justice, in granting Marbury and others the withheld commissions,
through the district court, "is essential to a written constitution,
and is consequently to be considered by this court as one of the
fundamental principles of our society." We speak so easily now of
declaring a law unconstitutional, thereby rendering it null and void,
and we acquiesce so readily in these decisions that it is difficult
to imagine the small beginnings of this great power exercised by one
branch of the Federal Government over another. By holding that the
mandamus must issue from the District and not the Supreme Court, the
case might have been dismissed briefly. The Republicans thought the
long disquisition on the powers of the court and its relation to the
executive branch a kind of defiance and entirely unwarranted. It was
the beginning of a long list of similar offences by Marshall.
Meanwhile the new Administration had continued its reform activities,
"to restore the government to its principles, amend its defects, reform
abuses, and introduce order and economy in the administration," as
Monroe outlined it to President Jefferson. The latter summed up the
reform work of the Republicans at the end of the first session:
"They have reduced the army and navy to what is barely necessary. They
are disarming executive patronage and preponderances by putting down
one-half the offices of the United States which are no longer necessary.
These economies have enabled them to suppress all the internal taxes and
still to make such provision for the payment of their public debt as to
discharge that in eighteen years. They are opening the doors of
hospitality to fugitives from the oppressions of other countries; and we
have suppressed all those public forms and ceremonies which tended to
familiarize the public eye to the harbingers of another form of
government."
Thus had democracy, in Jefferson's opinion, at last come into its own.