Making the Presidency

Many of the rituals we associate with the American presidency – how presidents act, what they say, how they dress, and who they meet with – are not enshrined in any formal document but are instead informed by almost 250 years of precedents. It’s sometimes hard to imagine a time when Americans had to invent what it meant to be president. In Making the Presidency: John Adams and the Precedents That Forged the Republic, historian Lindsay M. Chervinsky transports readers back to a time when Americans were watching every move of the country’s second president. One of the greatest challenges that confronted John Adams when he was elected in 1796 was how to sculpt an American presidency that had only ever be held by one man, George Washington. How would Adams confront new challenges, when would he break with Washington’s precedents, and what would people think of those choices in the years to come?

In this excerpt, read more about the 1800 election when political parties were brand new, and Federalists were backing sitting President John Adams for reelection, while Republicans were backing sitting Vice President Thomas Jefferson to replace Adams. The dramatic political events led to what some people would call the “Revolution of 1800.”

On October 1, voters began traveling to their local court houses, taverns, and city squares to cast their ballots in the presidential election. They would continue to do so for the next thirty-four days. The process was much more complicated than twenty-first century presidential elections and gave ample room for political maneuvering and intrigue.

Article II, Section I of the Constitution grants each state the right to determine how their electors will be chosen. In the twenty-first century, most states have an automatic “winner take all” system, meaning the candidate who receives a bare majority of the vote, wins all the state’s Electoral College votes. A few states have carved exceptions into their laws, giving certain districts a single Electoral College vote

In the Early Republic, this process was constantly evolving. In the 1796 presidential election, eight states empowered their legislature to pick the electors, six states held special elections for the electors, and two states divided their electors between legislature selections and special elections. By 1800, many of the states had passed new laws that reflected the increasing partisan ferocity of elections. Eleven states granted their legislatures the right to name electors, while only five remained committed to special elections. Just a few months earlier, both Federalists and Republicans had viciously campaigned to win seats in the New York state legislature and control the state's vote in the coming presidential election. In the remaining ten states whose legislatures determined the electors, therefore, elections for the state legislatures took on extra significance.

As a result, the presidential election was actually a series of elections, first at the state level to control legislatures, then in states with direct elections for electors, and finally at the electoral college level. And all these elections occurred in an overlapping, interwoven patchwork of events from mid-summer to December 3, when the Constitution mandated that all states submit their electoral college votes. There was no election day or a few weeks of early voting, but rather months of voting, guesswork about the results, and uncertainty about when the result would be determined.

Republican leadership in Virginia crafted their party's national strategy, beginning with guaranteeing a victory in their home state. Madison and Jefferson were determined that Virginias electoral votes would go for both Jefferson and Burr, rather than splitting between candidates from two parties like they had in 1796. They adopted a three-part plan to achieve this goal.

First, Republicans altered the state election process to cultivate the best possible conditions for success. Republican allies in the state legislature passed a bill changing the method of elector selection from district elections to statewide elections. Instead of the twenty-one districts independently voting for their one elector, citizens voted for a general ticket with the top twenty-one candidates qualifying as electors. This system prevented local pockets of Federalists, like those who lived near Mount Vernon or John Marshall’s home in Richmond, from picking off votes.

Next, Republicans crafted a sophisticated statewide campaign. They named a slate of electors on the “Republican Ticket,” filled with big names, including James Madison, George Wyche, General Joseph Jones, and Edmund Pendleton.

Republicans then tapped the county committee system, founded earlier in the year, to turn out all eligible citizens (which was mostly property-owning white men) and ensure voter cohesion. In 1800, Virginia required each voter to hand write the names of his preferred candidates on a ballot, sign it, and deposit the paper into a ballot box. However, the state did not require the handwriting of the names and the signature to match. Over the summer, the Republican committees borrowed from the strategy implemented by John Beckley in Pennsylvania four years earlier. They hand-wrote thousands of ballots with their candidates' names and distributed them across the state.

Republicans understood that it might be difficult for voters to remember the names of twenty-one candidates, especially if they did not know them personally. They also knew that some eligible voters did not know how to write and would struggle to fill out a ballot. On election day, voters simply had to sign their name and deposit their ballot.

Federalists in the state watched this process in horror and did their best to muddy the waters. They ran on the “American Republican Ticket” hoping to confuse voters but lacked the statewide infrastructure to match Republican efforts. As the Republican committees distributed ballots across the state, most observers assumed they would sweep the election in the fall.

Leadership on both sides relied on word-of-mouth reporting, newspapers, and letter networks. Although Federalists and Republicans used different sources, by September they had reach similar conclusions: Republicans would win all the votes in New York, Georgia, Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee. New York was already decided, Virginia appeared to be a blow out, and the other southern states were notoriously hostile to Federalists! They also guessed that Federalists would carry Delaware, New Jersey, and all the New England states (Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Connecticut), while Rhode Island would probably be divided. If this speculation was accurate, Federalists entered the fall with roughly forty-eight votes to forty-four Republican votes. Whichever side reached seventy votes would win.

These calculations focused public attention on Pennsylvania, Maryland, and both Carolinas, which carried forty-five votes in the Electoral College. All four states held back-to-back elections in the coming weeks. None had received news from the envoys in Paris.

Maryland was up first, and the stakes of the general assembly elections were front of mind for all voters. Maryland had a tradition of permitting the voters to directly choose their electors, but Federalists knew that direct election would likely split the vote between Adams and Jefferson. In response, Federalist candidates for the assembly promised, if they were elected, to change the law and give the legislature the power to select the electors. For years, Republicans had warned that Federalists wanted to seize power from the people and now Maryland Federalists had said the quiet part of their strategy out loud.

The “Electioneering warfare,” from August to October, was carried on with “much warmth & some acrimony,” Thomas Boylston Adams reported to his father from Philadelphia, where he was building his law practice. “In Anapolis—Elk Ridge, & elsewhere, candidates took their campaigning directly to the people.” They “assemble with their partizans—they mount the Rostrum, made out of an empty barrel or hogshead ... praise & recommend themselves at the expence of their adversary's character & pretentions,” he described for family at home in Massachusetts.

While delivering fiery speeches, candidates referenced national issues and tied themselves to Jefferson or Adams. Republicans pointed to the Federalist electoral strategy as a power grab befitting a monarchy, which echoed the criticisms they made of Adams and the Arch Federalists at the national level. On October 6, Maryland voters overwhelmingly cast ballots for Republican candidates. Federalist maintained a majority in the state senate, but Republicans seized the majority in the lower house. As a result of the divided legislature, Maryland continued to select its electors through direct elections.

Maryland Federalists consoled themselves that their position on electors had prompted the loss and would not affect the direct elections for electors a few weeks later. But “the astonishing increase of Republicans” in the legislature convinced many partisans that the upcoming elections would produce more Republican electoral votes than they had anticipated that summer. “I congratulate you most sincerely on the Change in Maryland,” one politician from South Carolina wrote to Jefferson, revealing how carefully observers from outside the state monitored news of the state's election. How far that change would carry, however, no one could say. Both sides would have to wait until November for the next round of balloting to determine how Maryland would affect the election.

Lindsay M. Chervinsky, Making the Presidency: John Adams and the Precedents That Forged the Republic (Oxford University Press, 2024).