BY JOHN FERLING
WHEN GEORGE WASHINGTON ANNOUNCED
THAT HE WOULD RETIRE FROM OFFICE,
HE SET THE STAGE FOR THE NATION'S
FIRST TWO-PARTY PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN.

On the day in April 1789 that he took the oath of
office at Federal Hall in New York City as the first
president of the United States, George Washington
noted in his diary: "I bade adieu to Mount Vernon, to
private life, and to domestic felicity, and with a
mind oppressed with more anxious and painful
sensations than I have words to express."

Washington, who embodied the virtues exalted by his
generation, had been given the unanimous vote of the
new nation's electors. He had done nothing to promote
himself as a candidate for the presidency and had
agreed to undertake the mammoth task with the utmost
reluctance. Whatever his personal misgivings,
Washington's first term in office went smoothly. It
was so successful, in fact, that in 1792 he once again
received the electors' unanimous endorsement.

Such smooth sailing of the ship of state could not be
expected to last, however, and during President
Washington's second term, the United States--and thus
its chief executive--began to experience the kinds of
problems that plague any government. Relations with
the former "mother country" deteriorated until it
seemed that another war with Great Britain might be
inevitable. And on the domestic front, groups of
farmers, especially those in the westernmost counties
of Pennsylvania, protested and rebelled against the
Washington administration's excise tax on the whiskey
that they distilled from their grain, eventually
rioting in the summer of 1794.

The hero of America's revolution also suffered
personal attacks on his character. Rumors had it that
Washington was given to "gambling, reveling,
horseracing and horse whipping" and that he had even
taken British bribes while he was commanding American troops.

During the last weeks of 1795, reports spread through
Philadelphia--then the national capital--that
Washington planned to retire at the conclusion of his
second term. It was true that similar rumors had
circulated three years before, as the end of his first
term drew near, but this time it appeared that he was
determined to step down. Nearing his mid-sixties--a
normal life span for a man in the eighteenth century--
the president longed to retire to the tranquility of
Mount Vernon, his beloved home in Virginia.

Although Washington said nothing to John Adams
regarding his plans for retirement, his wife
Martha hinted to the vice president near Christmas
1795 that her husband would be leaving office. Ten
days later, Adams learned that the president had
informed his cabinet that he would step down in
March 1797.* "You know the Consequences of this,
to me and to yourself," Adams, aware that he might
become the second president of the United States,
wrote to his wife Abigail that same evening.

Adams's ascension to the presidency would be neither
automatic nor unanimous. Before achieving that high
office, he would have to emerge victorious from
America's first contested presidential election.

* The March 4 date for the beginning of new terms of
office went back to tradition begun under the Articles
of Confederation and codified by Congressional
legislation in 1792. The Twentieth Amendment to the
Constitution, ratified in 1933, specified that
henceforth Congressional terms would begin on January
3 and that an incoming president and vice president
would take their oaths of office at noon on January 20
of the year following their election.

Eight years earlier, in September 1787, the delegates
to the Constitutional Convention had considered
numerous plans for choosing a president. They had
rejected direct election by qualified voters because,
as Roger Sherman of Connecticut remarked, a scattered
population could never "be informed of the characters
of the leading candidates." The delegates also ruled
out election by Congress. Such a procedure, Gouverneur
Morris stated, would inevitably be "the work of
intrigue, cabal and of faction."

Finally, the convention agreed to an electoral college
scheme, whereby "Each state shall appoint in such
manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number
of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and
Representatives to which the State may be entitled in
the Congress." Presidential selection, therefore,
would be decided through a state-by-state, rather than
a national, referendum.

Each elector chosen by the voters or the legislature
of his state would cast votes for two candidates, one
of whom had to come from outside his state. The
electors' ballots would be opened in the presence of
both houses of Congress.

* Not since 1824 has the winner of a presidential
contest been decided by the House of Representatives.
In that year, John Quincy Adams gained the presidency
when one more than half of the members of the House
cast their ballots in his favor, giving him the
necessary majority.

If no one received a majority of the votes, or if two
or more individuals tied with a majority of the
electoral college votes, the members of the House of
Representatives would cast ballots to elect the
president.* Once the president had been decided upon,
the candidate from among those remaining who had
received the second largest number of electoral votes
became the vice president.

The framers of the Constitution believed that most
electors would judiciously cast their two ballots for
persons of "real merit," as Morris put it. Alexander
Hamilton argued in Federalist 68--one of a series of
essays penned by Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay
to encourage ratification of the Constitution in New
York State--that it was a "moral certainty" that the
electoral college scheme would result in the election
of the most qualified man. Someone skilled in the art
of intrigue might win a high state office, he wrote,
but only a man nationally known for his "ability and
virtue" could gain the support of electors from
throughout the United States.

Indeed, the "electoral college" plan worked well
during the first two presidential elections in 1788
and 1792, when every elector had cast one of his
ballots for Washington. But by 1796, something
unforeseen by the delegates to the Constitutional
Convention had occurred; men of different points of
view had begun to form themselves into political parties.

The first signs of such factionalism appeared early in
Washington's presidency. On one side were the
Federalists who yearned for an American society and
national government established on the British model.
Skeptical of the growing democratization of the new
nation, the Federalists desired a centralized national
government that would have the strength both to aid
merchants and manufacturers and to safeguard America's
traditional hierarchical society.

By 1792, Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson and
Congressman James Madison--both, like Washington, from
Virginia--had taken steps to fashion an opposition
party. Jefferson became the acknowledged leader of the
new Anti-Federalists, a group soon known as the
Democratic-Republican Party because of its empathy for
the struggling republic that had emerged from the
French Revolution of 1789. This party looked
irreverently upon the past, was devoted to republican
institutions, sought to give property-owning citizens
greater control over their lives, and dreamt of an
agrarian nation in which government would be small and weak.

Members of both parties ran candidates in
congressional and state races in 1792, but they did
not challenge President Washington. Partisanship,
however, did surface that year in the contest for the
vice presidency. Some Republicans acted behind the
scenes in "support . . . of removing Mr. A," as the
clerk of the House noted, mainly because Adams's
writings on government included positive statements
about the British monarchy. The movement came to
naught because it did not have the support of
Jefferson, who had known and liked Adams for nearly
twenty years. Other Republicans rallied behind George
Clinton, the newly elected governor of New York.

The activity of the Republicans threw a scare into the
Federalists. Secretary of the Treasury Alexander
Hamilton, the acknowledged leader of the Federalists,
was so worried that he urged Adams to cut short a
vacation and campaign openly against those who were--
as he said--"ill disposed" toward him. Adams, who
regarded electioneering with contempt, refused to do
so and remained on his farm in Quincy, Massachusetts,
until after the electors had cast their ballots.

By March 1796, when Washington finally told his vice
president that he would not seek reelection, Adams had
decided to run for the office of president. His
decision was "no light thing," he said, since he knew
that as president he would be subjected to "obloquy,
contempt, and insult." He even told Abigail that he
believed every chief executive was "almost sure of
disgrace and ruin." While she had mixed emotions about
his decision, she did not discourage him from running.
In fact, she told him that the presidency would be
a "flattering and Glorious Reward" for his long years
of service. Ultimately, Adams decided to seek the
office because, he asserted, "I love my country too
well to shrink from danger in her service."
,br> As he began his quest, Adams expected formidable
opposition, especially from Jefferson. He foresaw
three possible outcomes to the election: he might
garner the most votes, with Jefferson running second;
Jefferson might win and John Jay of New York, long a
congressman and diplomat, could finish second; or
Jefferson might be elected president, while he was
himself reelected vice president. That last scenario
was not one Adams was prepared to accept. He decided
that he would not serve another term as vice
president; if he finished second again, he declared,
he would either retire or seek election to the House
of Representatives.

Adams considered himself the "heir apparent" to
President Washington, having languished in the vice
presidency--which he described as "the most
insignificant office that ever the invention of man
contrived or his imagination conceived"--for eight
years, awaiting his turn. Furthermore, he believed
that no man had made greater sacrifices for the nation
during the American Revolution than he. In addition to
risking his legal career to protest British policies,
he sat as a member of the First Continental Congress
for three years and served abroad from 1778-88, making
two perilous Atlantic crossings to carry out his
diplomatic assignments. During that ten years, his
public service had forced him to live apart from his
wife and five children nearly ninety percent of the time.

Jefferson often proclaimed his disdain for politics,
even though he held political office almost
continuously for forty years. As 1796 unfolded, he
neither made an effort to gain the presidency nor
rebuffed the Republican maneuvers to elect him to that
office. When he resigned as secretary of state in
1793, Jefferson had said that he did not plan to hold
public office again and would happily remain at
Monticello, his Virginia estate. But, while he did not
seek office in 1796, neither did he say that he would
not accept the presidential nomination. Adams --and
most Republicans--interpreted Jefferson's behavior as
indicating that he wanted to be president.

The Constitution said nothing about how to select
presidential nominees. In 1800, the Republican Party
would choose its candidates in a congressional
nominating caucus; in 1812, the first nominating
conventions were held in several states; and the first
national nominating convention took place in 1832. But
in 1796, the nominees seemed to materialize out of
thin air, as if by magic. In actuality, the party
leaders decided on the candidates and attempted to
herd their followers into line.

The Federalists' support centered on Adams and Thomas
Pinckney of South Carolina. Pinckney, who had recently
negotiated a successful treaty with Spain that
established territorial and traffic rights for the
United States on the Mississippi River, was chosen for
the second slot on the ticket by the party moguls--
without consulting Adams--in part because as a
Southerner, he might siphon Southern votes from Jefferson.

On the Republican side, Madison confided to James
Monroe in February that "Jefferson alone can be
started with hope of success, [and we] mean to push him."
The Republicans also endorsed Senator Aaron Burr of New York.

All this transpired quietly, for Washington did not
publicly announce his intention of retiring until the
very end of the summer. Not that the parties' plans
were a mystery. Before Washington finally informed the
nation of his decision on September 19, 1796, in
his "Farewell Address"--which was not delivered orally
but was printed in Philadelphia's American Daily
Advertiser--the keenly partisan Philadelphia Aurora
declared that it "requires no talent at divination to
decide who will be candidates. . . . Thomas Jefferson
& John Adams will be the men."

But Washington's address, said congressman Fisher Ames
of Massachusetts, was "a signal, like dropping a hat,
for the party racers to start." During the next ten
weeks, the presidential campaign of 1796 was waged, as
Federalists and Republicans--with the exception, for
the most part, of the candidates themselves--worked
feverishly for victory.

Adams, Jefferson, and Pinckney never left home. While
their parties took stands on the major issues of the
day, these men embraced the classical model of
politics, refusing to campaign. They believed that a
man should not pursue an office; rather, the office
should seek out the man. They agreed that the most
talented men--what some called an aristocracy of merit-
-should govern, but also that ultimate power rested
with the people. The qualified voters, or the elected
representatives of the people, were capable of
selecting the best men from among the candidates on
the basis of what Adams called the "pure Principles of
Merit, Virtue, and public Spirit."

Burr alone actively campaigned. Although he did not
make any speeches, he visited every New England state
and spoke with several presidential electors. Many
Federalist and Republican officeholders and supporters
spoke at rallies, but most of the electioneering took
place through handbills, pamphlets, and newspapers.

The campaign was a rough and tumble affair. The
Republicans sought to convince the electorate that
their opponents longed to establish a titled nobility
in America and that Adams--whom they caricatured
as "His Rotundity" because of his small, portly
stature--was a pro-British monarchist. President
Washington was assailed for supporting Hamilton's
aggressive economic program, as well as for the Jay
Treaty of 1795, which had settled outstanding
differences between the United States and Britain. The
Philadelphia Aurora went so far as to insist that the
president was the "source of all the misfortunes of our country."

The Federalists responded by portraying Jefferson as
an atheist and French puppet who would plunge the
United States into another war with Great Britain.
They also charged that he was indecisive and a
visionary. A "philosopher makes the worst politician,"
one Federalist advised, while another counseled that
Jefferson was "fit to be a professor in a
college . . . but certainly not the first magistrate
of a great nation." Newspapers such as the Gazette of
the United States and Porcupine's Gazette asserted that
Jefferson's election would result in domestic disorder.

Behind-the-scenes maneuvering included a plan by
Hamilton, who felt that Pinckney could be more easily
manipulated than Adams, to have one or two Federalist
electors withhold their votes for Adams. Hearing
rumors of the ploy, several New England electors
conferred and agreed not to cast a ballot for Pinckney.

Even the French minister to the United States, Pierre
Adet, became involved in the election by seeking to
convey the impression that a victory for Jefferson
would result in improved relations with France. As one
historian has noted: "Never before or since has a
foreign power acted so openly in an American election."

Sixteen states took part in the balloting. The 138
electors were chosen by popular vote in six states and
by the state legislatures of the remaining ten.
Seventy votes were required to win a majority.

Adams expected to receive all of New England's 39
votes, but he also had to win all 12 of New York's
votes and 19 from the other middle and southern states
to win. He concluded that was impossible, especially
after learning of Hamilton's machinations. On the eve
of the electoral college vote, Adams remarked
privately that Hamilton had "outgeneraled" all the
other politicians and stolen the election for Pinckney.

The electors voted in their respective state capitals
on the first Wednesday in December, but the law
stipulated that the ballots could not be opened and
counted until the second Wednesday in February. And so
for nearly seventy days, every conceivable rumor
circulated regarding the outcome of the election. By
the third week in December, however, one thing was
clear, Jefferson could not get seventy votes. Although
63 electors were Southerners, the South was a two-
party region, and it was known that Jefferson had not
received a vote from every Southern elector. In
addition, because the Federalists controlled the
legislatures in New York, New Jersey, and Delaware, it
was presumed that Jefferson would be shut out in those states.

Beyond that, nothing was certain. Many believed that
Pinckney would win, either because of Hamilton's
supposed chicanery or because all "the Jeffs," as Ames
called the Southern Republican electors, supposedly
had cast their second ballot for the South Carolinian
in order to ensure that a Southerner succeed
Washington. A good number of Americans fully expected
that no candidate would get a majority of the votes,
thus sending the election to the House of Representatives.

By the end of December, better information arrived in
Philadelphia when Ames informed Adams that he had at
least 71 electoral votes. On December 28, Jefferson
wrote Adams a congratulatory letter and at
Washington's final levee in 1796, the First Lady told
the vice president of her husband's delight at his
victory. Persuaded that he was indeed the victor, an
ebullient Adams wrote his wife at year's end that he
had "never felt more serene" in his life.

Finally, on February 8, 1797, the sealed ballots were
opened and counted before a joint session of Congress.
Ironically, it was Vice President Adams, in his
capacity as president of the Senate, who read aloud
the results. The tabulation showed that Adams had
indeed garnered 71 votes. Every New England and New
York elector had voted for him. The tales about
Hamilton's treachery had been untrue; ultimately, the
former treasury secretary found the prospect of a
Jefferson administration too distasteful to risk the
subterfuge necessary to defeat Adams, who also got, as
expected, all ten votes from New Jersey and Delaware.
And in a sense, Adams won the election in the South,
having secured nine votes in Maryland, North Carolina,
and Virginia.

Jefferson, who finished second with 68 votes,
automatically became the new vice president.* One
Federalist elector in Virginia, the representative of
a western district that long had exhibited hostility
toward the planter aristocracy, voted for Adams and
Pinckney, as did four electors from commercial,
Federalist enclaves in Maryland and North Carolina.
Whereas Adams secured enough votes in the South to
push him over the top, Jefferson did not receive a
single electoral vote in New England or in New York,
New Jersey, or Delaware.

Pinckney, not Adams, was the real victim of Hamilton's
rumored duplicity. To ensure that the South Carolinian
did not obtain more votes than Adams, 18 Federalist
electors in New England refused to give him their vote.

* This first contested presidential election
demonstrated a flaw in the Constitution's electoral
college scheme since the country now had a Federalist
president and a Republican vice president. Four years
later, the two republican candidates, Jefferson and
Burr, each received 73 electoral votes. Although it
was clear during the election campaign that Jefferson
was the presidential candidate and Burr the vice
presidential, Burr refused to concede, forcing a vote
in the House of Representatives that brought Jefferson
into office. To correct these defects the Twelfth
Amendment, which provided for separate balloting for
president and vice president, was adopted in 1804.

Had Pinckney received 12 of those votes, the election
would have been thrown into the House of Representatives.
Instead, he finished third with 59 electoral votes.

Burr polled only thirty votes. Southern Republicans--
perhaps sharing the sentiment of the Virginia elector
who remarked that there were "traits of character" in
Burr which "sooner or later will give us much trouble"-
-rejected him.

Even among the enfranchised citizens, few bothered to
cast ballots in this election. In Pennsylvania, a
state in which the electors were popularly chosen,
only about one-quarter of the eligible voters went to
the polls. But the contest in Pennsylvania was an
augury of the political changes soon to come. The
Republicans swept 14 of the state's 15 electoral
votes, winning in part because they "outpoliticked"
their opponents by running better-known candidates for
the electoral college and because Minister Adet's
intrusive comments helped Jefferson among Quakers and
Philadelphia merchants who longed for peace. Many
voters had rejected the Federalist Party because they
thought of it as a pro-British, pro-aristocratic party
committed to an economic program designed to benefit
primarily the wealthiest citizens.

And what occurred in Pennsylvania was not unique.
Jefferson won more than eighty percent of the
electoral college votes in states outside New England
that chose their electors by popular vote. In an
increasingly democratic United States, the election of 1796
represented the last great hurrah for the Federalist Party.

On March 4, 1797, America's first orderly transferal
of power occurred in Philadelphia when George
Washington stepped down and John Adams took the oath
as the second president of the United States. Many
spectators were moved to tears during this emotional
affair, not only because Washington's departure
brought an era to a close, but because the ceremony
represented a triumph for the republic. Adams remarked
that this peaceful event was "the sublimist thing ever
exhibited in America." He also noted Washington's joy
at surrendering the burdens of the presidency. In
fact, Adams believed that Washington's countenance
seemed to say: "Ay! I am fairly out and you fairly in!
See which of us will be the happiest." *