THE REVOLUTION OF 1800
The greatest obstacle in the path of the people of the United States in
their struggle toward national life was the vastness of the territory
which they occupied. Even the region between the Alleghanies and the sea
was as yet imperfectly subdued. Great tracts of wilderness separated
communities beyond the fall-line of the rivers. Intercourse was
incredibly difficult even between the commercial ports of New England
and the Middle States. Stage-coaches plied between Boston and New York,
to be sure, and between New York and Philadelphia. By stage, too, a
traveler could reach Baltimore and Washington in the course of time. But
beyond the Potomac public conveyances were few and uncertain in their
routes. The only public stage in the Carolinas and Georgia plied between
Charleston and Savannah. Those whom either public or private business
forced to journey from these remote Southern States to Philadelphia took
passage in coasting vessels. It is difficult to say which were greater,
the perils by land or by sea. Writing from Philadelphia in 1790, William
Smith, of South Carolina, described the misfortunes of his fellow
Congressmen in trying to reach the seat of government, as follows:
"Burke was shipwrecked off the Capes; Jackson and Mathews with great
difficulty landed at Cape May and traveled one hundred and sixty miles
in a wagon to the city. Burke got here in the same way. Gerry and
Partridge were overset in the stage; the first had his head broke and
made his _entree_ with an enormous black patch; the other had his ribs
sadly bruised and was unable to stir for some days. Tucker had a
dreadful passage of sixteen days with perpetual storms. I wish these
little _contretemps_ may not sour their tempers and be inauspicious to
our proceedings."
Even in the North, where distances were not so great and where great
arms of the ocean did not penetrate so far inland, as in North Carolina,
for example, interposing so many barriers to communication, travel was
painfully slow and hazardous. Travelers who made the journey from Boston
to New York by stage-coach accounted themselves lucky if they reached
their destination in six days, for no bridges spanned any of the great
waterways and the crossing by ferryboats was uncertain and often
dangerous. Many travelers preferred to journey by water from port to
port, but coasting vessels, contending with the winds and the tides,
were often nine or ten days in sailing from Boston to New York.
The post traveled with somewhat greater speed; yet a letter sent from
Portland, Maine, could not be delivered in Savannah, Georgia, in less
than twenty days. From Philadelphia a post went to Lexington, Kentucky,
in sixteen days, and to Nashville, Tennessee, in twenty-two days. The
cost of these posts, like the cost of traveling, was in many cases
prohibitive. The rate for a letter of a single sheet was twenty-five
cents. News traveled slowly from State to State. The best news sheets
in New York printed intelligence from Virginia which was almost as
belated as that which the packets brought from Europe.
With such barriers in the way of intercourse, the masses, so far indeed
as they possessed the suffrage at all, were not politically
self-assertive. Devoted primarily to the pursuit of agriculture and
commerce, essentially rural in their distribution, the people had
neither the desire nor the means, nor yet the leisure, to engage in
active politics. Politics was the occupation of those who commanded
leisure and some accumulated wealth. The voters of the several States
touched each other only through their leaders. In these early years
national parties were hardly more than divisions of a governing class.
Party organization was visible only in its most rudimentary form--a
leader and a personal following. The machinery of a modern party
organization did not come into existence until the railroad and the
steamboat tightened the bonds of intercourse between State and State,
and between community and community.
In another respect political parties of the Federalist period differed
from later political organizations. Under stress of foreign
complications, Federalists and Republicans were forced into an
irreconcilable antagonism. The one group was thought to be British in
its sympathies, the other Gallic. In the eyes of his opponents, the
Republican was no better than a democrat, a Jacobin, a revolutionary
incendiary; and the Federalist no better than a monocrat and a Tory. The
effect was denationalizing. Each lost confidence in the other's
Americanism.
The Federalists, in control of the Executive,--and thus, in the common
phrase, "in power,"--were disposed to view the opposition as factious,
if not treasonable. Washington deprecated the spirit of party and
thought it ought not to be tolerated in a popular government. Fisher
Ames expressed a common Federalist conviction when he wrote in 1796: "It
is a childish comfort that many enjoy, who say the minority aim at place
only, not at the overthrow of government. They aim at setting mobs above
law, not at the filling places which have known legal responsibility.
The struggle against them is therefore _pro aris et focis_; it is for
our rights and liberties." Such a state of mind can be understood only
by a diligent reading of the newspapers and political tracts of the
time. Republican journalists, many of whom were of alien origin, still
gloried in the ideals and achievements of the French Revolution. But
liberty and democracy, as preached by a Tom Paine and glorified by a
Callender and exemplified by the Reign of Terror in France, had caused
an ominous reaction in the minds of upholders of the established order
in the United States.
Under these circumstances, when, in the minds of those in authority,
party was identified with faction, and faction was held to be synonymous
with treason, the position of the Republicans was precarious. War with
France they bitterly opposed, but were powerless to prevent. The path of
opposition was made all the more difficult by the well-known attitude of
conspicuous Federalist leaders who favored war as an opportunity for
discrediting their political opponents, or, as Higginson expressed it,
for closing the "avenues of French poison and intrigue."
Laboring under the conviction that they had to deal not only with an
enemy without but with an insidious foe within, the Federalists carried
through Congress in June and July, 1798, a series of measures which are
usually cited as the Alien and Sedition Acts. The first in the series
was the Naturalization Act, which lengthened the period of residence
required of aliens who desired citizenship, from five to fourteen years.
The Alien Act authorized the President, for a period of two years, to
order out of the country all such aliens as he deemed dangerous to
public safety or guilty of treasonable designs against the Government.
Failure to leave the country after due warning was made punishable by
imprisonment for a term not exceeding three years and by exclusion from
citizenship for all time. A third act conferred upon the President the
further discretionary power to remove alien enemies in time of war or of
threatened war. Finally, the Sedition Act added to the crimes punishable
by the federal courts unlawful conspiracy and the publication of "any
false, scandalous, and malicious writings" against the Government,
President, or Congress, with the intent to defame them or to bring them
into contempt or disrepute. For conspiracy the penalty was a fine not
exceeding five thousand dollars and imprisonment not exceeding five
years; for seditious libel, a fine not exceeding two thousand dollars
and imprisonment not exceeding two years.
The debates in Congress left little doubt that the Sedition Act was a
weapon forged for partisan purposes. The Federalists were convinced that
France maintained a party in America which by means of corrupt hirelings
and subsidized presses was paralyzing the efforts of the Administration
to defend national rights. That there was great provocation for the act
cannot be denied. The tone of the press generally was low; but between
the scurrilous assaults of Cobbett in _Porcupine's Gazette_ upon
Republican leaders, and the atrocious libels of Bache upon President
Washington, there is not much to choose.
What the opposition had to fear from the Sedition Act, appeared with
startling suddenness in October, 1798, when Representative Matthew Lyon,
of Vermont, an eccentric character who had become the butt of all
Federalists, was indicted for publishing a letter in which he maintained
that under President Adams "every consideration of the public welfare
was swallowed up in a continual grasp for power, in an unbounded thirst
for ridiculous pomp, foolish adulation, and selfish avarice." The
unlucky Lyon was found guilty, sentenced to imprisonment for four
months, and fined one thousand dollars.
Alarmed by this attack on what he termed the freedom of speech and of
the press, Jefferson cast about for some effective form of protest.
Collaborating with John Breckenridge, a member of the Kentucky
Legislature, he prepared a series of resolutions which were adopted by
that body, while Madison, then a member of the Virginia House of
Burgesses, secured the adoption of a set of resolutions of similar
purport which he had drafted. Both sets of resolutions condemned the
Alien and Sedition Acts as unwarranted by the letter of the Constitution
and opposed to its spirit. Both reiterated the current theory of the
Union as a compact to which the States were parties; and both intimated
that, as in all other cases of compact among parties having no common
judge, each party had an equal right to judge for itself, as well of
infractions as of the mode of redress.
The real purport of these Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions has been
much misunderstood. The emphasis should fall not upon the compact
theory, for that was commonly accepted at this time; nor yet upon the
vague remedies suggested by the phrases "nullification" and
"interposition." With these remedies Jefferson and Madison were not
greatly concerned. Protest rather than action was uppermost in their
minds. As Jefferson said to Madison, they proposed to "leave the matter
in such a train as that we may not be committed absolutely to
extremities, and yet may be free to push as far as events will render
prudent." What they desired was such an affirmation of principles as
should rally their followers and arrest the usurpation of power by their
opponents. The fundamental position assumed is that the Federal
Government is one of limited powers and that citizens must look to their
State Governments as bulwarks of their civil liberties, whenever the
express terms of the federal compact are violated. The Federal
Government was not to be allowed to become the judge of its own powers.
By recalling the party to its original position of opposition to the
consolidating tendencies of the Federalists, the resolutions of 1798
served much the same purpose as a modern party platform. In this light,
their ambiguities are not greater nor their political theories more
vague than those of later platforms.
In the early months of 1799, petitions for the repeal of the Alien and
Sedition Acts began to pour in upon Congress from the Middle States; but
the Federalists felt secure enough in popular favor to ignore these
protests. With a keener ear for the voice of the people, Jefferson
summoned his Republican friends to seize the moment to effect an entire
"revolution of the public mind to its republican soundness." "This
summer is the season for systematic energies and sacrifices," he wrote
to Madison. "The engine is the press. Every man must lay his purse and
pen under contribution." The response was immediate and hearty. Not only
were political pamphlets printed and distributed from Cape Cod to the
Blue Ridge, but an astonishing number of newspapers were founded to
disseminate Republican doctrine. The three or four years before the
presidential election of 1800 are marked by an unprecedented
journalistic revival. Instead of being mere purveyors of facts, these
newspapers became, as a contemporary observes, "Vehicles of discussion,
in which the principles of government, the interests of nations, the
spirit and tendency of public measures, and the public and private
characters of individuals, are all arraigned, tried, and decided." Such
a systematic attempt to direct public opinion had not been made since
the early days of the Revolution.
[Map: Vote on the Repeal of the Alien and Sedition Acts House
of Representatives February 25, 1799]
The Federalists watched this Republican revival with grave misgivings.
What Jefferson called "the awakening of the spirit of 1776" was to
Fisher Ames an ominous sign of impending "revolutionary Robespierrism."
Federalists of the Hamiltonian brand unhesitatingly held the Republicans
responsible for the Fries Rebellion, which occurred in Pennsylvania. The
immediate occasion for these disturbances, to be sure, was the federal
house tax, but the rioting occurred in those eastern counties which were
ardently Republican; hence the outbreak could be denounced plausibly
enough as the result of Jacobin teachings. In some alarm the
Administration dispatched troops to quell the riots, and prosecuted the
leaders with relentless vigor. Fries was condemned to death, and the
President's advisers would have carried out the decree of the court, "to
inspire the malevolent and factious with terror"; but President Adams
persisted in pardoning Fries, holding wisely that there was grave danger
in so construing treason as to apply it to "every sudden, ignorant,
inconsiderable heat, among a part of the people, wrought up by political
disputes, and personal and party animosities." Such motives were not
appreciated by the circle of Hamilton's admirers. Why were the renegade
aliens who were running the incendiary presses not sent out of the
country, Hamilton asked Pickering. "Are laws of this kind passed merely
to excite odium and remain a dead letter?"
If the Administration made only a half-hearted effort to arrest and
deport aliens, it could at least not be accused of letting the Sedition
Act remain a dead letter. Some unnecessary and thoroughly unwise
prosecutions in the year 1799 were followed by a series of trials for
seditious libel in the spring term of the federal courts. All the
individuals indicted were either editors or printers of Republican
newspapers. The impression created by these prosecutions was, therefore,
that the Administration had determined to crush the opposition. What
deepened this impression was the obvious bias of the federal judges and
the partisanship of the juries, which it was alleged were packed by the
prosecution.
With one accord Republican editors lifted up their voices in defense of
freedom of speech, never losing from view, however, the political
possibilities of the situation. The more prosecutions the better, wrote
one editor significantly to a fellow victim: "You know the old
ecclesiastical observation that the blood of the martyrs was the seed of
the church." From the Federalist point of view these editors were "lying
Jacobins," incendiaries, anarchists. "Should Jacobinism gain the
ascendency," an orator at Deerfield, Massachusetts, warned his auditors,
in the midst of the elections of 1800, "let every man arm himself, not
only to defend his property, his wife, and children, but to secure his
life from the dagger of his Jacobin neighbor." In vain Republicans
protested that they had a right to form a party to oppose measures which
they deemed destructive to public liberty. They were not opposing the
Constitution but the Administration; not government in general, but the
existing Government, of men who were employing despotic methods.
In the presidential election of 1800 only four of the sixteen States
provided for a choice of the electors directly by the people. The
outcome depended upon the action of the legislatures in a comparatively
few States. New England was so steadfast in the Federalist faith that
the Republicans gave up all hope of contesting the control of the
legislatures. After an electioneering tour through Connecticut, Aaron
Burr is said to have remarked that they might as well attempt to
revolutionize the Kingdom of Heaven. On the other hand, Jeffersonian
Republicanism was deeply rooted in Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, and
Georgia. The contestable area lay in the Middle States and in the
Carolinas.
In the early spring, both parties began to burnish their armor for the
first encounter in New York. It was generally believed that the May
elections to the Assembly would determine the vote of the presidential
electors, and that the vote of the city of New York would settle the
control of the Assembly. The task of carrying the legislative districts
of the city for the Republicans fell to Aaron Burr, past-master of the
art of political management and first of the long line of political
bosses of the great metropolis. How he concentrated the party vote upon
a ticket which bore such names as those of George Clinton, Horatio
Gates, and Henry Rutgers; how he wooed and won voters in the doubtful
seventh ward among the laboring classes,--these are matters which elude
the most painstaking researches of the historian. The outcome was a
Republican Assembly which beyond a peradventure would give the
electoral vote of the State to the Republican candidates.
In another respect Burr's victory in New York was important. It made him
the logical and most available candidate for the vice-presidential
nomination. By general consent Jefferson became for the second time the
candidate of his party for the Presidency. On May 11, the Republican
members of Congress met in caucus and unanimously agreed to support Burr
for the Vice-Presidency. Already wiseacres were figuring out the
probabilities of a Republican victory.
It was a chastened group of Federalist Congressmen who met in caucus on
May 3, after the disheartening tidings from New York. Though their
hearts misgave them, they still supported John Adams. To carry South
Carolina, they agreed to support Charles C. Pinckney for the
Vice-Presidency; but rumor had it that many Federalists would be glad to
see Pinckney outstrip Adams,--a hope which in the course of the summer
was frankly avowed by Hamilton. In a letter which he had privately
printed for circulation among the Federalists, Hamilton declared without
disguise his hostility to Adams. The imprudence of this act was apparent
when Burr seized upon a copy of the letter and scattered reprints far
and wide as good campaign material.
[Map: Presidential Election of 1800 Popular Vote by Counties]
The effect of Hamilton's indiscretion was probably slight. Adams carried
all the electoral votes in the New England States, leading Pinckney by a
single vote. The Federalists were completely successful also in New
Jersey and Delaware. Through the tactics of thirteen Federalists in
the Senate of Pennsylvania, they won seven of the fifteen electoral
votes of that State. In Maryland they divided the electoral vote evenly
with their opponents. In North Carolina, they secured four of the twelve
votes; but in South Carolina they were completely discomfited. Instead
of carrying his own State for the ticket, Pinckney was outgeneraled by
the strategy of his cousin Charles Pinckney, who effected an
irresistible combination of the Piedmont farmers and the artisans of
Charleston. The loss of South Carolina was irretrievable and decisive.
The Federalists had to concede the defeat of their ticket.
The exultation of the Republicans was at first unbounded. "The election
of a Republican President," wrote the editor of the Schenectady
_Cabinet_ triumphantly, "is a new Declaration of Independence, as
important in its consequences as that of '76, and of much more difficult
achievement." But the elation of the Jeffersonians was somewhat tempered
by the information that Jefferson and Burr had an equal number of votes
in the electoral college. Adams was defeated, to be sure, but was Thomas
Jefferson elected? Neither Jefferson nor Burr had "the highest number of
votes" which the Constitution required for an election. The House of
Representatives, therefore, must choose between them. But the House was
Federalist! Coincidently with these tidings came rumors that the
Federalists would prevent an election by the House until the 4th of
March passed, when the Presidency and Vice-Presidency would fall vacant,
necessitating a new election. Scarcely less ominous was the report that
the Federalists would endeavor to seat Burr in the presidential chair.
When balloting began in the House on February 11, 1801, enough
Federalists had been involved in an intrigue to defeat Jefferson to give
the vote of six States to Burr. Jefferson received the vote of eight
States, but not the majority which was needed to elect, inasmuch as the
delegations of two States were evenly divided. The result was the same
on thirty-five successive ballots. On the thirty-sixth, February 17,
Jefferson received the votes of ten States and Burr of four. The votes
of Delaware and South Carolina were blank, the Federalists having agreed
to produce a tie by not voting. A similar abstention from voting on the
part of Federalists from Vermont and Maryland gave the votes of those
States to Jefferson.
More than any other man, Bayard, of Delaware, was responsible for the
election of Jefferson. Finding that Burr would not "commit himself,"
Bayard announced that he would cast the single vote of his State for
Jefferson. "You cannot well imagine the clamor and vehement invective to
which I was subjected for some days," he wrote to Hamilton. "We had
several caucuses. All acknowledged that nothing but desperate measures
remained, which several were disposed to adopt, and but few were willing
openly to disapprove. We broke up each time in confusion and discord,
and the manner of the last ballot was arranged but a few minutes before
the ballot was taken." How narrowly the Federalists escaped the folly of
electing Burr may be inferred from the further statement of Bayard,
that "the means existed of electing Burr, but this required his
cooperation. By deceiving one man (a great blockhead), and tempting two
(not incorruptible), he might have secured a majority of the States."
In after years Jefferson was wont to speak of his election as "the
Revolution of 1800." To his mind, it was "as real a revolution in the
principles of our government as that of 1776 was in its form; not
effected, indeed, by the sword, as that, but by the rational and
peaceable instrument of reform, the suffrage of the people." In one
sense, at least, Jefferson was right. Taken collectively, the events of
1800 do constitute a revolution--the first party revolution in American
history. For a season it seemed as though the Republican party was to be
denied the right to exist as a legal opposition, entitled to attain
power by persuasion. At the risk of incurring the suspicion of
disloyalty, if not of treason, the Republicans clung tenaciously to
their rights as a minority. By persistent use of the press, by
unremitting personal efforts, and by adroit electioneering, the leaders
succeeded in arousing the apathetic masses and converted their minority
into an actual majority. They won, therefore, for all time that
recognition of the right of legal opposition which is the primary
condition of successful popular government.
The change in political weather was foreshadowed during the summer of
1800 by the removal of the seat of government to the banks of the
Potomac. For ten years Philadelphia had been the center of the
political and the social worlds, which for the only time in American
history were then identical. Even those who knew the court life of
Europe marveled at the display of wealth and fashion at this republican
court. Of this social world, the "President and his Lady" were not
merely the titular and official leaders, but the real leaders. Between
the Virginia aristocracy and the wealthy families of Philadelphia there
were natural affinities. And if the second Federalist President and his
consort did not become leaders in quite the same sense, it was because
John and Abigail Adams belonged temperamentally to a more restrained
society.
Those who had enjoyed the hospitalities of the Morrises, the Binghams,
and the Willings, and the bodily comforts of Philadelphia hotels and
inns, were not likely to find any compensations in the unkempt,
straggling village which the Government and private speculators were
trying to convert into a fitting abode for the National Government.
There were few comfortable private dwellings. Most of the houses were
mere huts occupied by laborers. Great tracts were left unfenced and
uncultivated, in the firm expectation that an extraordinary rise in land
value was about to take place. That craze for speculation in land which
had possessed those with any idle capital afflicted every landowner in
or near the new city.
When Mrs. Adams finally reached the city, after a difficult journey
through the forest between Baltimore and Washington, she met with
anything but a cheering welcome. The President's house was not yet
finished: the plaster was not even dry on the walls. It was built on a
grand and superb scale, but the thrifty New England spirit of the
President's wife was appalled at the prospect of having to employ thirty
servants to keep the apartments in order and to tend the fires which had
everywhere to be kept up to drive away the ague. The ordinary
conveniences were wanting. For lack of a yard, Mrs. Adams made a
drying-room out of the great unfinished audience room. And the only
society which she might enjoy was in Georgetown, two miles away. "We
have, indeed," she wrote, "come into _a new country_." But with true
pioneer spirit, she added, "It is a beautiful spot, capable of every
improvement, and, the more I view it, the more I am delighted with it."
The gloom which enveloped the Federalists after the elections of the
year deepened as they straggled into the new capital in November. They
approached their labors as men who would save what they could of a
falling world. For some time there had been an urgent demand for the
reorganization of the federal judiciary. The justices of the Supreme
Court objected to circuit duty and urged the erection of a circuit court
with a permanent bench of judges. Such a reform was inevitable, it was
said; therefore let the Federalists find what consolation they might
from the possession of these new judgeships. Patriotism, too, suggested
the wisdom of filling the judiciary with men who would uphold the
established order. "In the future administration of our country,"
President Adams wrote to Jay, "the firmest security we can have against
the effects of visionary schemes or fluctuating theories will be in a
solid judiciary."
The Judiciary Act of February 13, 1801, which embodied these aims, added
five new districts to those which had been established in 1789, and
grouped the twenty-two districts into six circuits. The amount of
patronage which thus fell into the President's hands was very
considerable, though it was grossly exaggerated by Republicans. The
partisan press pictured President John Adams signing the commissions of
these new judgeships to the very stroke of twelve on the night of March
3, and then entering his coach and driving in haste from the city.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
On the organization of parties at the close of the century there
are two works of importance: G. D. Luetscher, _Early Political
Machinery in the United States_ (1903), and M. Ostrogorski,
_Democracy and the Organization of Political Parties_ (2 vols.,
1902. Vol. II deals with parties in the United States).
Prosecutions under the Sedition Act are reported in F. Wharton,
_State Trials of the United States during the Administrations of
Washington and Adams_ (2 vols., 1846). F. T. Hill, _Decisive
Battles of the Law_ (1907), gives an interesting account of the
trial of Callender. Two special studies should be mentioned: E. D.
Warfield, _The Kentucky Resolutions of 1798_ (1887), and F. M.
Anderson, "Contemporary Opinion of the Virginia and Kentucky
Resolutions," in the _American Historical Review_, vol. v. The
spirit of American politics at this time can be best appreciated
by perusing _Porcupine's Works_, the writings of Callender and Tom
Paine, and the letters of Fisher Ames, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas
Jefferson, and Timothy Pickering.