This Day in Presidential History (Jefferson Calms Tensions After Disputed Election)

Mar. 4, 1801—In the newly constructed capital of the nation he had helped bring into being, Thomas Jefferson was inaugurated as the third President of the United States—and, after a bitterly disputed election, the first to take office in a peaceful transfer of power between rival political parties.

In his own assumption of the Presidency in 1981, Ronald Reagan pointed out the remarkable nature of such an event: “In the eyes of many in the world, this every-4-year ceremony we accept as normal is nothing less than a miracle.”  

That “miracle” has continued without disruption except twice since Jefferson took the oath of office:  In 1861, when Southern states seceded rather than accept their recent electoral loss to a Republican Party committed to containing slavery, and this past January 6, at the Capitol riot that interrupted the formal acknowledgement of Electoral College results, leading to five deaths.

The author of the Declaration of Independence took the oath of office after an election that threatened to tear the United States asunder before it had barely begun. With a Constitution that did not envision party tickets or even political parties, the two Democratic-Republican candidates, Jefferson and Aaron Burr, ended up with the same number of electoral votes.

In spite of the fact that it was clearly understood that Jefferson headed the ticket, the election ended up, for the first of only two times in U.S. history, in the House of Representatives, where the rival Federalist Party seriously considered electing Burr rather than the candidate they abominated, according to historian Richard Hofstadter’s The Idea of a Party System, as “an atheist, a French fanatic, a libertine, a visionary, and a political incompetent.”

Tensions were at the breaking point, with some Federalists scheming to avoid ceding the election to the Republicans at all, while the Republican governors of Virginia and Pennsylvania prepared to mobilize the state militia in case of Federalist usurpation. In the end, with the Federalists accepting the conclusion of the informal party leader, Alexander Hamilton, that even the hated Jefferson was preferable to the unprincipled and dangerous Burr, the House voted to accept the Virginian as the winner.

In his landmark History of the United States of America During the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson, Henry Adams depicts, with wonderful irony, the men around whom controversy swirled that March 4:

*a “retiring President” (his great-grandfather, John Adams) too angry to show up at the inauguration of the former friend who had defeated him in this last general election (John’s son, son John Quincy Adams, reacted similarly in 1829 when an opponent he despised, Andrew Jackson, assumed office);

*a Chief Justice (John Marshall) only appointed six weeks before but already on record as despising Jefferson;

*a Vice-President (Burr) now regarded by Jefferson and his associates as “the certain centre of corruption” for his ambiguous responses to Federalist attempts to sound him out before the recent vote in the House; and

*Jefferson himself, who, unlike later occupants of the White House, arrived with minimal ceremony: on foot, in ordinary dress, accompanied only by militia from a neighboring state and a few close political associates.

In private correspondence, among trusted confidants, Jefferson fulminated against the recent “reign of witches,” or period of political intolerance among the Federalists, and nearly two decades later he remembered the “revolution of 1800.” But publicly, in 1801, he began what has been a tradition of newly inaugurated Presidents since then: a reminder of the unity that exists among Americans despite strongly held political opinions.

Jefferson’s first inaugural address is among the most famous of all his public documents. Indeed, in a 2017 blog post, James M. Lindsay of the Council of Foreign Relations included it on a list of the seven best inaugural addresses.

Similarly to England’s theorist of conservatism, Edmund Burke, Jefferson delivered the most memorable public utterances in a voice devoid of volume or even noticeable expression. So it was with this address. Though many in his small audience that day could barely make out what he had to say, it has reverberated in all the years since, including in this appeal to bipartisan harmony:

“Every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle. We have called by different names brethren of the same principle. We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists. If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.”

As with all later occupants of the White House, Jefferson would encounter storms of contention. But on this occasion, he succeeded in calming an anxious nation, including through his assurance—which has gained even greater relevance in light of recent events—to preserve “absolute acquiescence in the decisions of the majority, the vital principle of republics, from which is no appeal but to force, the vital principle and immediate parent of despotism.”

Quote of the Day (Abraham Lincoln, on the ‘Virtue and Vigilance’ of the American People)

“By the frame of the Government under which we live this same people have wisely given their public servants but little power for mischief, and have with equal wisdom provided for the return of that little to their own hands at very short intervals. While the people retain their virtue and vigilance no Administration by any extreme of wickedness or folly can very seriously injure the Government in the short space of four years.”—President Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865), First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1861

Like many people who have read this relentlessly logical address by Abraham Lincoln, I much prefer his ringing, eloquent conclusion:

“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

This spirit of generosity and reconciliation will surely be much on the mind of Joe Biden today as he attempts to close the divisions open for all the world to see in the storming of the Capitol two weeks ago. Let’s hope that some of his countrymen take to heart his Lincolnesque message of unity and a common patriotism.

If not, you can bet that what Gerald Ford called, at his own swearing-in, “our long national nightmare” will be far from over.

I worry about whether Biden’s expected appeal for bipartisanship will be enough at this unusually fearful inauguration. After all, Lincoln’s strenuous forswearing of any attempt to interfere with slavery in the states where it was already established was not enough to prevent southern extremists from pushing secession, instigating calamitous civil war.

Moreover, Lincoln’s confidence that no President could seriously harm the government in a single short term now seems, following the last four years, overly serene.

True, that time limit may be the optimum possible, given the need to allow Presidents the opportunity to look beyond short-term electoral considerations. But an office with so much potential for good possesses equal potential for evil, a negative capability demonstrated most dramatically by the latest outgoing occupant of the White House.

In the 20^th century, historians used a short phrase, often picked up from inaugural addresses, to identify a President’s agenda: the Square Deal, the New Freedom, the New Deal, the Fair Deal, the New Frontier.

Given the lives lost in the COVID-19 pandemic and on January 6, historians might appropriately borrow a phrase from Donald Trump’s single inaugural address to characterization his administration: the American Carnage.

It feels like meager recompense to the nation he devastated that, through his own cupidity and madness, the outgoing President laid waste to "the Trump brand." He left divisions surpassed only by the one confronting Lincoln.

An “extreme of wickedness or folly” occurred over the past two months through patently false but endlessly propagated accusations of electoral fraud—charges now acknowledged to be untrue by the two leading Republicans on Capitol Hill, Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy.

In the two-month interval between the election and the start of a new administration, Trump did nothing to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 across the United States, choosing instead to transmit the virus of falsehood to nearly half of the American electorate.

That recklessness spurred the most serious insurrection on U.S. soil since the Confederacy that Lincoln had to destroy. That riot undercut America as an exemplar of democracy abroad, as the embodiment of what Lincoln called, nearly two years after he took the oath of office, “the last best hope of earth.” 

For whatever reason, far too many ordinary Americans were insufficiently vigilant four years ago in voting for a leader without the slightest electoral or national security experience. In the process, they also elected a man without the virtue that Lincoln mistakenly believed would be possessed by all of his successors.

Because of the vacuum of "virtue and vigilance" in the past four years, I am forced to agree with Garrett Epps’ contention in The Washington Monthly: “Until the nation receives a full accounting, and until criminality pays a suitable price, our institutions will lie open, undefended against those who openly aspire to break them up by force.”

Bonus Quote of the Day (Christopher Buckley, Imagining President Trump on His First Lady)

“So what do you think of your new first lady? I picked Moronia— what's your name, honey? Melania, right. Great name. I just picked Melania here from a very wide selection of possibilities—not just because the sex is incredible but because this nation wants and deserves a trophy first lady.  When everyone sees our first lady standing next to some other first lady of another country, the wife of a premier or whatever, they’ll want to go to bed with our first lady, not the other one. So the American people no longer have to worry on that score. And if they get tired of her, not a problem, because chances are I’ll be tired of her before they are. And we’ll get a new first lady. Trying to keep North Korea from getting the bomb, maybe that’s a problem. Finding a new first lady? Trust me, not a problem.”—Christopher Buckley, “Trump: The Inaugural," originally published in The Wall Street Journal, reprinted in Buckley’s But Enough About You: Essays (2014)

Quote of the Day (Henry Highland Garnet, on Slavery as the ‘Sin of Unrighteous Gain’)

“Great sacrifices have been made by the people; yet, greater still are demanded ere atonement can be made for our national sins. Eternal justice holds heavy mortgages against us and will require the payment of the last farthing. We have involved ourselves in the sin of unrighteous gain, stimulated by luxury and pride and the love of power and oppression; and prosperity and peace can be purchased only by blood and with tears of repentance. We have paid some of the fearful installments, but there are other heavy obligations to be met.

“The great day of the nation's judgment has come, and who shall be able to stand?”— Rev. Henry Highland Garnet, “Let the Monster Perish” (address in the House of Representatives, Feb. 12, 1865), from Lift Every Voice: African American Oratory, 1787-1900, edited by Philip S. Foner and Robert J. Branham (1998)

The circumstances surrounding this address by Rev. Henry Highland Garnet, pastor of the Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church in Washington, D.C., were extraordinary in and of themselves: Not only had the 13^th Amendment abolishing slavery in the U.S. just passed less than two weeks before, but now an ex-slave had become the first African-American to address the U.S. House of Representatives.

But I was interested in this speech for additional reasons, all involving Abraham Lincoln. The address to the crowded House chamber was delivered on the President’s 56^th birthday; the President himself had asked that Garnet speak, at the behest of the Republican-controlled Congress; and, most of all, I think, the two men shared a belief in the Civil War as atonement for cross-sectional complicity in the sin of slavery.

Consider, for instance, Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, given less than a month after Garnet’s fiery sermon. In a prior post, I discussed how this profoundly moving speech directly identified slavery as the cause of the Civil War. But one passage I did not cite—but which certainly harks back to Garnet’s vision of divine repayment for a foul national crime against humanity (and, the preacher said, perhaps even more shockingly to his listeners, slaveholders "fastened upon Christianity a crime and stain at the sight of which it shudders and shrieks”)—came when the President spoke these sorrowful words:

“If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."

After Lincoln’s assassination two months later, Mary Todd Lincoln presented to Garnet, as a token of the President’s high regard for him, one of Lincoln’s walking sticks.

Flashback, March 1829: Jackson Takes Oath, Followers Make Mess

In a scene likened by appalled observers to the worst excesses of the French Revolution, supporters of Andrew Jackson celebrated his inauguration in such numbers and such a rambunctious fashion that the White House suffered damage and the new President had to be spirited away from the premises. It’s a safe bet to say that nothing like it was seen before—and, thankfully, nothing like it since.

Well, almost. A college professor of mine, in his American Presidency seminar, noted that Ronald Reagan was the first White House occupant since Jackson who had been elected to reverse the course of history. In many ways, the analogy is imperfect: Jackson represented democratizing forces in his growing nation, and he invoked Presidential powers in ways his predecessors never dreamed of.

But Reagan and the broad new coalition that swept him into office, like Jackson and his, annoyed, even unnerved, observers who belonged to the opposite political party. The flaunting of conspicuous wealth by a number of Reagan supporters led humorist Calvin Trillin to term the 1981 inaugural ball “the Night of the Minks.”

“Old Hickory” had the opposite problem. There had never been so many people gathered into the capital since the seat of government had moved there nearly 30 years before. Most were well-behaved, but they had been kept a long time outside on that cold day. Once inside the unexpectedly crowded and stuffy interior, they congregated in such numbers that the wooden floor threatened to give way.

Margaret Bayard Smith, an author and fixture of Washington society for the past three decades, typified the general reaction when she wrote:

“But what a scene did we witness! The Majesty of the People had disappeared, and a rabble, a mob, of boys, negros [sic], women, children, scrambling fighting, romping. What a pity what a pity! No arrangements had been made no police officers placed on duty and the whole house had been inundated by the rabble mob.”

There is some question whether the criticism was fully deserved. Most contemporary witnesses and newspapers reported only minimal damage, and one common anecdote—about cheese ground into the White House carpets by visitors’ boots—appears to be a distortion of an event that occurred at the end of Jackson’s second term, according to a blog post by Scott Bomboy of the National Constitution Center.

But there was at least some truth to it. In the oval drawing room, the general-turned-politician was so hard-pressed by admirers that he began to gasp for air. His closest advisers managed to get him away before he got hurt. (Even washtubs full of punch, placed outside the house to lure people away, weren’t completely successful in that regard.)

The reaction to the events among Washington’s reigning establishment reflected lingering ill-feelings about Jackson’s character and intellect, an extraordinarily nasty Presidential campaign, and a sea-change in the electorate that would transform the nation’s political culture over the next three decades. Much the same thing happened with Reagan in 1981:

*A powerful personality but faulty intellect. Jackson, hardly a scholar, couldn’t spell. In fact, according to legend, he didn’t even see the need for it (“It is a damn poor mind who can't think of at least two ways to spell any word”.) Reagan was excoriated for a lack of curiosity and an attachment to odd “facts” that dissolved when scrutinized (e.g., that trees cause most pollution).

*Aftereffects of bitter campaigns. If the 1824 election, which ended up in the House of Representatives, didn’t end James Monroe’s “Era of Good Feelings,” the next Presidential campaign did. Jackson’s followers, when they weren’t flaying John Quincy Adams for a “corrupt bargain” that secured him the Presidency and made Clay his Secretary of State, charged the incumbent with “pimping” for the Czar of Russia during one of his many diplomatic posts. Adams’ supporters called Jackson an ignoramus, a murderer (for killing a man in a duel), and—in the charge with the most collateral damage—an adulterer. He and wife Rachel found out after the fact that her abusive first husband had not filed for divorce, as expected, but only permission to get one, and that thus—at least initially invalid--she was still technically married to her first husband, and the first husband spitefully charged her with adultery before the divorce decree was granted. Jackson blamed her death just after the 1828 election on the stress caused by the mudslinging, and, holding Adams personally responsible, he refused to meet with him in the pre-inaugural transition. Though the 1980 election didn’t approach 1828 in bitterness, Jimmy Carter saw Reagan, in the words of historian Douglas Brinkley, as “an unprincipled but telegenic B-grade Hollywood cowboy who had ridden into the White House on such ‘patriotic’ themes as abhorrence of government, xenophobia, and massive tax cuts.” For his part, Reagan resented Carter’s charge that his opponent would divide the nation by pitting whites against blacks and the rich against the poor.

 *Disgruntled, depressed predecessors. Jackson and Reagan succeeded men of intelligence and industry (Adams and Carter) whose stiff-necked ways hobbled them when they sought to advance their legislative program in Congress. Both Adams and Carter found it difficult to accept that their own failings as politicians contributed to their massive defeats. Adams, like his father, didn’t stick around to watch the new President inaugurated. Once out of office, Carter criticized his successor repeatedly.

*New presidents who broke with the past. Jackson, the first trans-Allegheny President, broke the line of men who held the nation’s highest office who had hailed from Virginia and Massachusetts. Reagan, a former actor who made his home in California, represented a new breed in politics: someone who had gained fame without being a lawyer, politician, or professional soldier.

*Agents of change. With his stiff delivery, Jackson didn’t express himself memorably, but he didn’t have anything memorable to express anyway. (See the inaugural address here.) Reagan had a different problem: a pre-political career as sports radio announcer, actor, TV anthology host and corporate (GE) representative made him adept at wringing nuance from every single sentence, but a glittering delivery that led him to be nicknamed “The Great Communicator” couldn’t disguise the fact that his speeches often couldn’t get past banalities. (See his address here.) But it didn’t matter, because their image overrode everything. Both Jackson and Reagan came from the West, vowing to Change Washington. Jackson heralded an age of “reform” (his word) now at hand; Reagan proclaimed that big government wasn’t the solution, but part of the problem.

*Changing economic directions. The Reaganauts chafed under the label given to their program by Democrats: “trickle-down economics.” Had any of them been so inclined, I suspect they would have been much more comfortable with a phrase from Richard Hofstadter’s classic The American Political Tradition about the Jacksonian economic program: “a phase in the expansion of liberated capitalism.” It sounds fine indeed, wrenched out of Hofstadter’s trenchant analysis. Another historian, Bray Hammond, spelled out what followed in the 1830s. The same trends held true in the 1980s: “Liberty became transformed into laisser faire. A violent, aggressive economic individualism became established. The democracy became greedy, intolerant, imperialistic, and lawless. It opened economic advantages to those who had not previously had them. . . . Wealth was won and lost, lost and won. Patient accumulation was condemned.” Yes, “impatient capitalism” might be a better description of what came to pass in both eras.

*Consolidation of coalitions and dawn of new political eras. By 1828, with property requirements and other restrictions increasingly eliminated, universal male suffrage had become the norm in virtually all the states. The age of deference, which had benefited the aristocratic Virginia and Adams dynasties, was over. A rough-hewn man, as one might expect from someone that Hofstadter termed a “one-generation aristocrat,” Jackson benefited from these tendencies, then gave it a decided push forward. Martin Van Buren, the “Little Magician” of Jackson’s Cabinet, welded Jackson's base in the Southwest, the slaveholding states of the Southeast and Northeast urban strongholds such as New York into the modern Democratic Party. Similarly, the Reagan coalition put in the driver’s seat disaffected blue-collar conservative Democrats, neo-conservatives, traditional Main Street conservatives and a “New Right” of evangelical Christians motivated by social issues.

Quote of the Day (Abraham Lincoln, on Those Who “Have Borne the Battle”)

“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”—Abraham Lincoln, Second Inaugural Address, March 4, 1865

Abraham Lincoln was dead three years before the first Memorial Day was proclaimed by General John Logan, national commander of the Grand Army of the Republic, in May 1868, but had he lived he would have found something memorable to say upon the occasion.

After all, we have not only this brief, poignant reference to the fallen soldiers and their survivors in the Civil War, but also the magnificent Gettysburg Address, and this ringing closing sentence from his First Inaugural Address, on the binding ties between the living and the dead who made it possible for us here in the United States to celebrate our freedoms this weekend:

“The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

Quote of the Day (William Henry Harrison, on States With “Financial Concerns”)

“In consequence of the embarrassed state of business and the currency, some of the States may meet with difficulty in their financial concerns. However deeply we may regret anything imprudent or excessive in the engagements into which States have entered for purposes of their own, it does not become us to disparage the States governments, nor to discourage them from making proper efforts for their own relief. On the contrary, it is our duty to encourage them to the extent of our constitutional authority to apply their best means and cheerfully to make all necessary sacrifices and submit to all necessary burdens to fulfill their engagements and maintain their credit, for the character and credit of the several States form a part of the character and credit of the whole country. The resources of the country are abundant, the enterprise and activity of our people proverbial, and we may well hope that wise legislation and prudent administration by the respective governments, each acting within its own sphere, will restore former prosperity.”—William Henry Harrison, Presidential Inaugural Address, March 4, 1841

Here I was, ready to hold up to scorn the ninth President, William Henry Harrison, for insisting on delivering his entire inaugural address—the longest ever, more than 8,000 words, taking one hour and 45 minutes to read—in the midst of a snowstorm. (For his sins, Harrison died one month later of pneumonia he’d contracted as a result.)

I was about to contrast, in the nastiest possible way, Harrison’s long-winded lack of eloquence with other, far more memorable addresses given by our country’s chief executives on the same late-winter day: Thomas Jefferson’s first (“We are all Federalists, we are all Republicans”), delivered after the first peaceful transfer of power in the nation's history, and Abraham Lincoln’s first, given as America stood on the brink of civil war (“The mystic chords of memory,

stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”)

But search hard enough and you’re bound to find something of surprising import, and that’s the case even with Harrison, who’s fascinating to aficionados of American history (the shortest-serving President in the republic) but the bane of high-school students of the subject (how do you recall someone who never did anything remotely interesting—at least as presented in textbooks?).

Here, the new President discusses something we all recognize far too readily today: the hard-pressed condition of state governors as they figure out what to do with their budgets after a massive financial upheaval. Today’s governors are dealing with the aftermath of the 2007-09 recession (and the current anemic recovery), while those of Harrison’s era grappled with the consequences of the Panic of 1837 (a financial setback so severe that it won the Presidency for Harrison in his second contest against Martin Van Buren).

How else did the two situations resemble each other? How did they differ? It’s not a bad way for high-school teachers to show how a subject filled with mounds of dates that kids dread also has continuing relevance to their current circumstances.