THOMAS JEFFERSON, 1800.
In 1800 Adams was a candidate for re-election, and fully expected to
be successful. But the Democratic-Republican party, as the opposition
was now called, defeated him, and elected to the Presidency its great
leader, Thomas Jefferson.
At a glance, it will be seen that the Republican of 1800 was the
father of the Democratic party, the canonized Thomas Jefferson. The
people, even thus early in the history of our nation, had begun to give
evidence of that discontent at the aristocratic tendencies that even
“The Father of his Country,” George Washington, and his successor, John
Adams, displayed.
It would be considered almost sacrilege were we to republish here the
many attacks that were made upon George Washington, when President of
the United States, on account of the odor of aristocracy with which
he had become so strongly impregnated before the Revolution, and
which clung to him like the scent of the roses to the shattered vase.
While there can be no doubt, of course, in the minds of us all, that
Washington was pre-eminently a patriot, with a firm and steadfast faith
in the doctrine of the rights of the people; still, he belonged to a
section, to a State, that had been settled by Cavaliers who believed
that they were somewhat better by birth than the Pilgrims of New
England. And, having been born and educated in that atmosphere, it is
small wonder that his character should have been somewhat attainted by
his surroundings.
Upon Washington’s elevation to the Presidential chair he surrounded
the executive mansion with more of the air of ceremony and evidences
of “caste” than were pleasant to the mass of the people. He was
attacked, during his first and second terms, by pamphleteers, who, in
most scurrilous articles, wrote of him as one designing to perpetuate
aristocracy and “caste” in our country. The debt of gratitude which
the new Republic and the people thereof owed Washington was too great
for any effect to be produced similar to the revolution in 1892.
However, an impression was made; reluctantly, John Adams, Washington’s
Vice-President, was elected as second President of the Union. This
reluctance became apparent by his failure to be re-elected four years
later.
A Minister from the United States to England always seems to become a
suspicious object in the minds of the people of America. No man ever
added to his popularity by being sent as Minister to the Court of St.
James. John Adams, who was our first Minister, was but the beginning of
a long list of unfortunates. In fact, the American people will heartily
endorse the opinion of that great statesman, James G. Blaine, which is
being so vigorously advocated by the New York _Herald_, that foreign
Ministers are expensive and useless appendages of this Republic. The
election of John Adams was occasioned more by the reflected glory of
Washington and the gratitude of the people, which, like the rays of
the declining sun, became diminished as it sunk behind the horizon of
time. In Thomas Jefferson, the people, even thus early in the history
of our nation, saw _their_ friend. His simplicity of life, purity of
character, and honesty of purpose, surrounded his name with the same
halo, in the sight of the people, as that with which the names of
Jackson, Lincoln and Cleveland have since been made luminous. Though
Jefferson was called a Republican, still, to the people, he was a
Democrat in the sense that democracy means equality.
Never was there a statesman more thoroughly imbued with the principles
of popular liberty than Jefferson. “Rebellion to tyrants is obedience
to God”--Oliver Cromwell’s saying--was the motto engraved on his seal.
He had taken a leading part in the colonies’ struggle for freedom.
He was a member of the Continental Congress, Governor of Virginia
during the war, and--a yet greater title to immortality--author of the
Declaration of Independence. After the war he had been sent as American
Minister to France, where he sympathized warmly with the revolution
against Bourbon tyranny.
Jefferson’s election to the Presidency was universally regarded as a
great popular triumph. He was hailed everywhere as “the Man of the
People,” and the day that saw him inaugurated was celebrated with such
rejoicings as had not been witnessed since the news of peace came, in
1783. No business, no labor was done on the 4th of March, 1801. It
was a day of powder and parades, of church services, of bell-ringing,
of speeches, and illuminations. The country’s satisfaction seemed
unanimous.
“The exit of aristocracy” was a toast drunk at one great banquet that
evening; and when it had been duly honored, the band appropriately
struck up the “Rogue’s March.”
The inauguration itself was a simple affair enough. It has, indeed,
been asserted that Jefferson rode up Capitol Hill without a single
attendant, tied his horse to a picket fence, and walked alone into
the Senate chamber to take the oath of office. Professor McMaster
offers evidence to prove this story inaccurate. Jefferson was not
surrounded, on his induction into the Presidency, by such throngs as
attended the inaugurations of Washington and Adams in New York and
Philadelphia. But he went to the Capitol in the midst of a gathering of
citizens, with the accompaniment of drums, flags, cannon, and a troop
of militia. His dress was, as usual, that of a plain citizen, without
any distinctive badge of office. On taking the oath of office he said,
in a brief speech to the Senate: “I know that some honest men fear that
a republican government cannot be strong--that this government is not
strong enough. I believe this, on the contrary, to be the strongest
government on earth.”
Jefferson’s administration--so economical, business-like, and
democratic as to have made “Jeffersonian simplicity” a proverb--met
with such approval that when he was re-elected in 1804 only fourteen
votes were recorded against him. Only in one State--Massachusetts--was
there any excitement in the campaign.
The supremacy of the Democratic-Republican party lasted practically
unchallenged until John Quincy Adams was elected, under peculiar
circumstances, in 1824. There were in that year three leading
candidates for the Presidency--Adams, Clay, and Jackson. As neither
of them commanded a majority of the Electoral College, the question
was referred to the House of Representatives, which selected Adams as
being, in a measure, a compromise candidate.
John Quincy Adams was at that time acting with the Democratic party,
but he was, as James Parton points out in his “Life of Jackson,” “a
Federalist by birth, by disposition, by early association, by confirmed
habit.” And it soon became clear that Federalism, long supposed to
be dead, was “living, rampant, and sitting in the seat of power.”
Federalists were appointed to office--notably Rufus King, the most
conspicuous survivor of the original Federalists--who was sent as
minister to England. Adams was for stretching the Constitution, as the
old Federalists were. In his first message to Congress he advocated
government roads and canals, a government university and observatory,
government exploring expeditions, and the like.
His personality and manners revived the aristocratic traditions of his
father. In the state he maintained at Washington he was said to go
beyond the first President Adams. He refurnished the White House on
a grand scale, and shocked the frugal taste of the day by placing a
billiard table in it. The East Room, in which his excellent mother had
hung clothes to dry, was now a luxuriously fitted apartment.
“John II.” was the name that John Randolph of Roanoke bestowed upon
the son and heir of the “Duke of Braintree.” Randolph had hated the
Adams family since an incident that occurred on the day of Washington’s
inauguration, which he recalled long afterwards in one of his speeches.
“I remember,” he said, “the manner in which my brother was spurned by
the coachman of the Vice-President--John Adams--for coming too near the
vice-regal carriage.”
Even Mr. Blaine, who in his “Twenty Years of Congress” shows himself a
kindly critic of the Federalist ideas and Federalist leaders, admits
the “general unpopularity attached to the name of Adams.”
During John Quincy Adams’ administration the mutterings of a coming
political upheaval began to be heard. It began to be said that the
Presidency was growing too much like an hereditary monarchy. It was
becoming too settled a practice for each incumbent, after eight years
in office, to make his Secretary of State his political heir. It gave
the President what was almost equivalent to the power of appointing his
successor. John Quincy Adams, it was said, counted confidently on the
usual double term, and upon seeing his friend Clay, to whom he had
given the chief post in his Cabinet, elected to succeed him.
“The issue is fairly made out: Shall the government or the people
rule?” asked Andrew Jackson, and on that issue he appealed to the
country in his memorable electoral campaign against Adams, in 1828.
That was the bitterest Presidential contest that had ever been fought.
Jackson was attacked with unexampled ferocity. One day at his Tennessee
home, the Hermitage, his wife found him in tears. “Myself I can
defend,” he said, pointing to a newspaper which he had been reading;
“you I can defend; but now they have assailed even the memory of my
mother.” And it was, in great part, her distress at the invective that
was heaped upon her husband that caused the death of Mrs. Jackson just
after the election.
It was a pitched battle between the “classes” and the “masses.” As
James Parton says, in his biography of Jackson: “Nearly all the talent,
nearly all the learning, nearly all the ancient wealth, nearly all the
business activity, nearly all the book-nourished intelligence, nearly
all the silver-forked civilization of the country, united in opposition
to General Jackson, who represented the country’s untutored instincts.”