The Campaign and Election of 1800

Jefferson approached the 1800 presidential election well organized for victory and determined to win. One factor that elevated Jefferson's chances of becoming President was the general mood of the country. During the Adams presidency, public discontent had risen due to the Alien and Sedition Acts, a direct tax in 1798, Federalist military preparations, and the use of federal troops to crush a minor tax rebellion led by John Fries in Pennsylvania. Consequently, Jefferson enjoyed quite a lot of popular support for his opposition to Adams's policies.

The Federalist candidate, the incumbent John Adams, led a split party. Many of his party's members opposed his candidacy because of his refusal to declare war on France—when a naval war did occur, Adams used diplomacy to end it when many Federalists would have preferred the war to continue. Jefferson understood that to win he would have to carry New York, thus his running mate, Aaron Burr of New York, was brought onto the ticket. When the New York legislature turned out its Federalist majority in 1799, prospects looked good for Jefferson.

Given the intense rivalry and conflict involved, it is not surprising that the 1800 election reached a level of personal animosity seldom equaled in American politics. The Federalists attacked the fifty-seven-year-old Jefferson as a godless Jacobin who would unleash the forces of bloody terror upon the land. With Jefferson as President, so warned one newspaper, "Murder, robbery, rape, adultery, and incest will be openly taught and practiced, the air will be rent with the cries of the distressed, the soil will be soaked with blood, and the nation black with crimes." Others attacked Jefferson's deist beliefs as the views of an infidel who "writes aghast the truths of God's words; who makes not even a profession of Christianity; who is without Sabbaths; without the sanctuary, and without so much as a decent external respect for the faith and worship of Christians."

The luckless Adams was ridiculed from two directions: by the Hamiltonians within his own party and by the Jeffersonian-Republicans from the outside. For example, a private letter in which Hamilton depicted Adams as having "great and intrinsic defects in his character" was obtained by Aaron Burr and leaked to the national press. It fueled the Republican attack on Adams as a hypocritical fool and tyrant. His opponents also spread the story that Adams had planned to create an American dynasty by the marriage of one of his sons to a daughter of King George III. According to this unsubstantiated story, only the intervention of George Washington, dressed in his Revolutionary military uniform, and the threat by Washington to use his sword against his former vice president had stopped Adams's scheme.

When the electoral votes came in, Jefferson and Burr had won 73 votes each. Adams and his running mate, Charles C. Pinckney, the brother of Thomas Pinckney who ran in 1796, won 65 and 64 votes respectively. No one had expected these results, although the possibility was perfectly plausible—if all Republican electors cast their votes in unison for the two Republican candidates, which they did in this case, the result would be a tie. In those days, the U.S. Constitution contained no means for electors to differentiate between their choices for President and vice president, yet in 1804, the nation ratified the Twelfth Amendment, which required electors to vote separately for President and vice president.

With no clear majority, the vote was thrown into the Federalist-controlled U.S. Congress. After much intrigue and arguing, and thirty-five ballots, Alexander Hamilton, who despised Burr as an unprincipled scoundrel, convinced a few Federalists who had supported Burr in the balloting to turn in blank ballots rather than vote for either Republican candidate. This move on Hamilton's part gave the victory to Jefferson. Hamilton's support for Jefferson, his old enemy, enraged Burr. Several years later, Burr killed Hamilton with a shot to the chest during a duel over mutual insults.

The Campaign and Election of 1804

In his first inaugural address in March 1801, Jefferson pleaded for national unity, insisting that differences of opinion were not differences of principle. Then he said, with much hope, "We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists." His landslide 1804 reelection suggested that his words were more prophetic than wishful. Largely due to a relatively peaceful first term on both the domestic and foreign scenes, along with prosperity, lower taxes, and a reduction in the national debt, it appeared to most astute observers on the eve of the election that Jefferson was unbeatable.

In February 1804, more than 100 Republican congressmen met in Washington and nominated Jefferson and George Clinton of New York by acclamation. It was the first official nominating caucus in the nation's history. The Federalists, demoralized and too disorganized to hold a caucus, agreed informally to back Charles C. Pinckney, the vice-presidential candidate in 1800, and Rufus King, the Federalist senator from New York.

Jefferson called the Federalists a prigarchy, a play on the words "prig" and "aristocracy," because of their unwillingness to open the party to populist elements. The Federalists denounced Jefferson's immensely popular Louisiana Purchase (see Foreign Affairs section) as unconstitutional. They also desperately exposed the President's alleged relations with his slave, Sally Hemings, as a national scandal. Jefferson kept a public silence on his relationship with Hemings.

The avalanche of presidential electors voting for Jefferson returned him to the White House with 162 votes to Pinckney's 14. Only Connecticut, Delaware, and two Maryland electors stood firm against the wave of republicanism. Jefferson was overjoyed. He wished only that George Washington had lived to see the day when the divisive factions of party had become a new unity of mind and politics for the nation.

Domestic Affairs

In Thomas Jefferson's mind, the first order of business for him as President was the establishment of a "wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another" but which would otherwise leave them alone to regulate their own affairs. He wanted a government that would respect the authority of individual states, operate with a smaller bureaucracy, and cut its debts. Jefferson also felt that the country should eliminate Hamilton's standing army by relying on a "disciplined militia" for national defense against invasion. Most importantly, he believed that good government would promote "the encouragement of agriculture." Commerce, in his mind, should be the "handmaiden" of agriculture rather than its driving force.

Accordingly, he reduced, though not substantially, the 316 employees subject to presidential appointment while leaving intact most of the nation's 700 clerks and 3,000 postal workers. The Army was cut to two regiments, one infantry and one artillery (3,500 total), with similar reductions in the Navy. He pressured Congress to abolish the direct tax of 1798 and to repeal the Alien and Sedition Acts, which were still in operation. To emphasize his opposition to the acts, Jefferson personally pardoned the ten victims of those laws who were still in prison. Even after paying $15 million in cash for the Louisiana Purchase (see Foreign Affairs section), the national debt fell from $80 million to $57 million during his two years of service.

War on the Judiciary: Federalists v. Republicans

Although Jefferson was no "blood-soaking" radical, as many of his Federalist opponents had charged, and no reign of terror occurred when he took office, a number of more radical Republicans pressured Jefferson and the Republican-dominated Congress to make war on the Federalist judiciary. Briefly told, the Federalist-controlled Congress under Washington and Adams had created a system of circuit courts that was presided over by the individual justices of the Supreme Court, all of whom were Federalists in 1800. Most of the lower judges on the circuit were also Federalists who had actively enforced the Alien and Sedition Acts, mainly against Jeffersonian-Republicans—by 1800, the terms "Democratic-Republican" and "Jeffersonian-Republican" had become interchangeable.

To make matters worse, just before Jefferson's inauguration, the lame-duck Federalist Congress passed the Judiciary Act of 1801. This piece of legislation reduced the number of Supreme Court justices from six to five, thus limiting Jefferson's ability to make Republican appointments. To further hinder the incoming Republican administration, the act created a new system of circuit courts with sixteen new judges and many more federal attorneys, clerks, federal marshals, and justices of the peace. On his last day in office, Adams worked until late in the night signing commissions for these judicial officers, all of whom were strong Federalists. However, the commissions remained in the government offices when Jefferson became President and Madison became secretary of state, and Madison refused to deliver the commissions, keeping some of the new Federalist judges off the bench.

Jefferson was powerless at first to dismiss the federal judges because they were appointed for life, but he did replace most of the marshals and other court officers with Republicans. Then, in 1802, the Republican-controlled Congress simply repealed the Judiciary Act of 1801, thus doing away with Adams's "midnight appointees." Still, the Federalist-dominated Supreme Court, with justices who were appointed for life and were led by the recently appointed Chief Justice John Marshall, greatly irritated most Jeffersonians.

Two impeachment proceedings were initiated to test the waters for removal of the Federalist justices by trial. According to the U.S. Constitution, a federal judge can be removed from office only for "high crimes and misdemeanors." In the first test, Justice John Pickering, a highly partisan Federalist who was also an alcoholic and undoubtedly insane, was tried by the Senate, based upon articles of impeachment drawn up by the House. Pickering was removed from office by a strict party vote. The other target for impeachment was Justice Samuel Chase, an able but nearly fanatic anti-Jeffersonian who frequently delivered streams of abuse from the bench. Fortunately for Chase, he had defenders among moderate Republicans in the Senate who feared overreaching their congressional authority. In the latter case, the Senate vote failed to carry the two-thirds majority in favor of conviction.

Chief Justice John Marshall was a loyal Federalist who demonstrated his commitment to a strong national government in the case of Marbury v. Madison in 1803. Jefferson's secretary of state, James Madison, had refused to deliver a last-minute justice of the peace commission to William Marbury, a wealthy land speculator in Washington, D.C., who was appointed in the final hours of the Adams administration. Marbury, claiming that his appointment could not be denied him, petitioned for a writ of mandamus, or a formal order of delivery, compelling delivery of the commission.

After hearing the case, the Supreme Court—without dissent—denied the writ although it agreed that the petitioners were entitled to their commissions. Chief Justice Marshall held that the Constitution did not give the Supreme Court the authority to issue writs of mandamus. In making this ruling, the Court declared unconstitutional that portion of the Judiciary Act of 1789 which gave the Court the power to issue such writs. This ruling established for the first time the principle that the Supreme Court can declare an act of Congress void if it is inconsistent with the Constitution. A landmark case, Marbury v. Madison established the basis for judicial review of congressional and executive actions on the grounds of their constitutionality. The Republican Congress repealed the Judiciary Act of 1801 rather than challenge Marshall head on. Jefferson, who admired Marshall's intelligence, agreed with those moderate Republicans who believed that Marshall's support of an independent judiciary posed no threat to republican liberties.

Foreign Affairs

Although Thomas Jefferson came to power determined to limit the reach of the federal government, foreign affairs dominated his presidency and pushed him toward Federalist policies that greatly contrasted with his political philosophy. The first foreign episode involved Jefferson's war with the Barbary pirates. For the previous century or so, Western nations had paid bribes to the Barbary states, which would later become Morocco, Algeria, Tunis, and Tripolitania, to keep them from harassing American and merchant ships. When the Pasha of Tripoli raised his demands in 1801, Jefferson refused to pay the increase, sent warships to the Mediterranean, blockaded the small nation, and tried unsuccessfully to promote a palace coup in Tripoli. This was one of the first covert operations in American history. The war ended with agreements that involved one last payment of tribute, at least to Tripoli. Jefferson's action on this matter caused him to rethink the need for a well-equipped navy and halted his move to reduce the force to a mere token size.

When Jefferson learned that Spain had secretly ceded Louisiana to France in 1800, he instructed his ministers to negotiate the purchase of the port of New Orleans and possibly West Florida. Jefferson strategically made this move in order to insure that American farmers in the Ohio River Valley had access to the Gulf of Mexico via the Mississippi River—the river was a key to the farmers' economic well-being, as they needed a vent for their surplus grain and meat. Even before the French took over Louisiana, the Spaniards had closed the Mississippi River in 1802. While Jefferson was known to be partial to the French, having the Emperor Napoleon's driving interests for world domination next door was not an attractive prospect; thus, Jefferson acted swiftly.

To his surprise, Napoleon, needing funds to finance a new European war with England, offered to sell Jefferson most of the land from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains. His price of $15 million amounted to approximately four cents per acre for 828,000 square miles, doubling the size of the nation. Although Jefferson understood that the U.S. Constitution said nothing about the purchase of foreign territory, he set aside his strict constructionist ideals to make the deal—Congress approved the purchase five months after the fact. Jefferson then outfitted a twenty-five man expedition to explore the new lands. Led by his secretary, Meriwether Lewis, and Army Captain William Clark, these adventurers took two and one-half years to cover 8,000 miles. They traveled up the Missouri River, across the Continental Divide, and down the Columbia River to the Pacific before retracing their steps to St. Louis. The expedition is considered one of the great exploratory quests in human history.

Navigating Trade and Impressment Disputes

Several weeks after buying Louisiana, Napoleon declared war on Great Britain. At first, the European fighting benefited the United States since Americans functioned as the merchants carrying supplies to the warring powers. Consequently, between 1803 and 1807, total U.S. exports jumped from $66.5 million to $102.2 million. This service provided by American ships often involved reexporting, meaning European and colonial goods were picked up by American ships for transport to U.S. ports where they were reloaded onto other U.S. ships for export to Europe. During the same four-year period, reexports quadrupled, rising from $13.5 million to $58.4 million. Then, the bottom fell out of the trade industry as England and France each independently outlawed virtually all American commerce with their opponent.

The British navy also began seizing American ships with cargoes bound for Europe and impressing American sailors into the Royal Navy. The problem partly stemmed from the practice of British sailors jumping ship to join U.S. merchant vessels. Thousands of such deserters were considered fair prey by the British navy, which also routinely impressed American citizens on the pretext that they were British deserters, many of whom were in fact just that. Tensions mounted, and in the summer of 1807, the British warship Leopard fired on the American naval frigate Chesapeake, killing three Americans, when the ship refused boarding orders. Cries for war erupted throughout the nation.

Jefferson banned all British ships from U.S. ports, ordered state governors to prepare to call up 100,000 militiamen, and suspended trade with all of Europe. He reasoned that U.S. farm products were crucial to France and England and that a complete embargo would bring them to respect U.S. neutrality. By spring 1808, however, the Embargo Act that was passed by Congress in December 1807 had devastated the American economy. American exports plummeted from $108 million to $22 million. Economic desperation settled upon the mercantile Northeast. Finally, Jefferson backed off in the last months of his administration, and Congress replaced the Embargo Act with the Non-Intercourse Act, which banned trade with England and France but allowed it with all other countries. Eventually, the trade war would propel America into a fighting war with England during the administration of Jefferson's successor, James Madison.

With the inauguration of his handpicked successor, James Madison, Thomas Jefferson retired to his Virginia plantation home, Monticello. The former President was happy to be free from executive duties and eager to satisfy his boundless curiosity for life. In retirement, Jefferson pursued science and natural history through research, experimentation, and invention. He continued in his post as the elected president of the American Philosophical Society until 1815. He tackled Plato's Republic in the original Greek as well as Greek versions of the Bible. All the while, he kept up an extensive private correspondence with friends and acquaintances all over the world. Nothing, however, attracted Jefferson's attention more than his pet project, the University of Virginia. Jefferson designed all of its campus buildings, set up its curriculum, selected its faculty, and joyfully nurtured it into existence. He proudly thought his work on the university a fitting conclusion to his life of public service.

Even as he struggled to make ends meet, Jefferson enjoyed his popularity until becoming ill in early 1826. He had sold much of his private library to the federal government to replace the books burned by the British when they occupied Washington, D.C., during the War of 1812, but his expenses were large. The onetime master of over 150 slaves still owned many of them although most had been used as collateral for borrowed money. Indeed, at his death, Jefferson freed no slaves partly because he worried about what would happen to them as free people but mostly because they had been mortgaged to his creditors. Jefferson's debts reflected his often conspicuous lifestyle. He loved to entertain his guests with fine wine and foods. Monticello frequently overflowed with guests; sometimes as many as fifty people stayed the night.

Racked with pain from rheumatism and an enlarged prostate, Jefferson could barely move when invited to attend the celebration of the 1826 Fourth of July festivities in Washington, D.C. He and John Adams, who was also alive but too ill to attend, were to be the honored guests on the fiftieth anniversary of the presentation of the Declaration of Independence by the revolutionary Continental Congress. Barely conscious, Jefferson lapsed into a coma and died, perhaps willfully, after hearing from his doctor the whispered words that he had lived until the Fourth. Adams died the same day.

The simplicity of Thomas Jefferson's first inauguration set the social tone of his administration. He thereafter reduced the number of presidential balls, state dinners, and formal parties while greatly expanding private dinners, evening discussions, and gatherings of guests for readings in philosophy and science, which he hosted with great enthusiasm. His wine bill upon leaving the presidency exceeded $10,000. A longtime widower, Jefferson cared little for formal dress and presided over state meals without wearing a "Federalist wig;" he would often greet his dinner guests in old homespun clothes and a pair of worn bedroom slippers. Jefferson frequently dined with members of Congress at the Washington boardinghouses where most of them lived. Sitting at their tables, he could exercise effective policy leadership in an informal setting.

Something of a solitary person and embarrassed by his tendency to mumble—which was the reason he stopped delivering his annual address to Congress in person—Jefferson hated appearing in public. He gave only two public speeches during his entire presidency, but he spent up to ten hours each day at his writing desk. A typical day had him up by dawn, doing official business in the morning, followed by his cabinet meetings during the noon hour. In the afternoon, Jefferson liked to exercise by horseback riding for two or three hours. He then dined at around 3:30 in the afternoon with invited guests. He seldom accepted evening invitations and liked to work three or four hours before bed, which came at about 10:00 in the evening.

For his official hostess, Jefferson relied on the wife of his secretary of state, the enthusiastic Dolley Madison. Few women were as accomplished as Mrs. Madison in the art of combining a serious political agenda with wonderfully entertaining social affairs. She regularly attended Senate debates, led a drive to provide supplies for the Lewis and Clark Expedition, and publicly defended Jefferson when given the opportunity. Jefferson liked having her around and felt so comfortable with her decisions on proper presidential behavior that he usually deferred to her good sense, but her role was necessarily limited by Jefferson's dislike for grandeur and ceremony.

Jefferson's two daughters had married political figures, and they sometimes lived with their husbands at the White House. When they were in residence, one or the other served as official hostess. In 1804, the youngest daughter, Mary, died at age twenty-five after giving birth to her second child. It was on the occasion of her death that Abigail Adams, who had cared for the young girl in England while Jefferson served as U.S. minister to France, ended the Adams family's long hostility by extending her written condolences.

Impact and Legacy

Thomas Jefferson's presidency initiated the quarter-century rule of the "Virginia Dynasty" (1801-1825), including the presidencies of loyal Jeffersonians James Madison (1809-1817) and James Monroe (1817-1825). As the center of political gravity shifted southward with the Republican ascendancy, the party gained new strength to the north, progressively marginalizing Federalists as an effective national opposition party. But the founders' fantasy of faction-free politics was not to be fulfilled. Emerging splits among Republicans themselves pitted orthodox, strict constructionist "Old Republicans" against "National Republicans" who favored a more positive and activist (according to critics, Hamiltonian) conception of federal power. Quarrels among Jeffersonian-Republicans foreshadowed the division between Jacksonian Democrats, self-proclaimed legatees of Jeffersonian orthodoxy, and Whigs who promoted a neo-Federalist, National Republican policy agenda while warning against "King Andrew's" dangerous consolidation of authority.

Jefferson's performance as President justified divergent conceptions of executive power. Known for his hostility to strong central government and the judicial overreach of the Supreme Court under John Marshall, Jefferson nonetheless jettisoned strict construction when the nation's vital interests were threatened. Self-preservation—the first law of nature and nations—took precedence over the constitutional limitations that he scrupulously observed in peacetime. Andrew Jackson embraced this robust conception of his presidential power, even as Whig opponents drew inspiration from Jefferson's anti-monarchical precepts.

Jefferson has been a great democratic icon precisely because he so eloquently articulated fundamental tensions in Americans' understanding of the people's power. The United States had "the strongest Government on earth," Jefferson told his fellow Americans in his first Inaugural Address on March 4, 1801. Yet the people's great and irresistible power was a function of their devotion to a free government that guaranteed their rights: this was the only government "where every man, at the call of the law, would fly to the standard of the law, and would meet invasions of the public order as his own personal concern." Where an enlightened people determined their own destiny, Jefferson promised, there was no necessary or inevitable conflict between private rights and public good.