1800: The First REAL Presidential Election

Hello everyone! Sorry for being absent so long. Christmas break and moving to a new apartment have kept me very busy.

As I was watching the Iowa Caucus last night (yes, I have no life and no boyfriend, so I was relegated to watching the Iowa Caucus of all things) I started wondering about presidential elections during the colonial period. As we all know, George Washington was the unanimous choice for president in both of his terms. There was simply nobody that could match his credentials. In 1796, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were the candidates. For the most part, the election was very timid. Neither candidate really got involved (which was common of 18th century politics).

In 1800, however, Jefferson and Adams clashed on virtually every issue and fiercely sought the office of the presidency. For Jefferson, the presidency was a quest to get America on the "right" track. In his mind, the Federalists had taken too much control from the people. In many ways, Jefferson's rhetoric sounds very familiar to one Barack Obama.

Adams, on the other hand, believed that the Federalists were indeed on the right track, and that he had led the nation adequately in his first term. the passage of the Alien & Sedition Acts (which many have compared to our current Patriot Act), earned Adams a negative reputation from the Democratic-Republicans.

After a very lengthy campaign, Jefferson emerged victorious. Federalists screamed foul, since Jefferson had only won the election thanks to the 3/5 Compromise. In fact, several northern leaders demanded a reelection. Jefferson himself faced a difficult challenge of surpassing Burr for the presidency (who had received just as many votes in the 1800 election since elections were done very differently in those days). Here is how the voting broke down by state:

In the end, Jefferson emerged as the candidate for change, and the election of 1800 went down as the first REAL election in American history.

Presidential Elections and the 3/5 Compromise

During the Constitutional Convention, James Madison noted an important observation he had made. He claimed that of all the difficulties that separated Northern and Southern states, slavery was by far the biggest. As we all know, the founders of the American Republic sanctioned a 3/5 compromise to the Constitution. This compromise guaranteed the Southern states greater representation in Congress by counting slaves as 3/5 of a person. Essentially, this meant that the South would have a larger say in government at the expense of its slave population (which of course was not allowed to vote).

Northerners saw this as misrepresentation. Their feelings were that since slaves could not vote, they should not be counted amongst the general population of the South. In essence, the North felt cheated by the hypocrisy of the South's demand for greater representation, especially since the representation came at the expense of slaves.

The effects of the 3/5 Compromise became evident at election time. In the election of 1800, Thomas Jefferson defeated John Adams by only 7 electoral votes. The election was clearly divided by the slavery issue. The north had predominantly gone with Adams, while the South sided with Jefferson. As the votes were counted, Northern politicians quickly realized that without the 3/5 Compromise, Jefferson would have defeated. The fact that slaves had been counted as part of the South's representation had given Jefferson the victory. Later elections would have the same results. The election of James Madison and Martin Van Buren would all be influenced by the 3/5 Compromise.

It is worth noting that the South owed a tremendous political debt to a large chunk of the population they chose to keep in bondage.