Posted on 12/30/2003 9:51:37 AM PST by Publius
On February 11, 1801, the House of Representatives was called upon to break a tie in the Electoral College in which Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr had each received 73 votes, besting the incumbent, John Adams, who got only 65. Seven days and 36 ballots later, the House elected Jefferson to the presidency.
Before the week was out, Adams wrote to him: "I shall leave in the stables of the United States seven Horses and two Carriages with Harness. These may not be suitable for you: but they will certainly save you a considerable Expense." With this gesture of federal economy, Adams handed Jefferson the reins of government.
The election of 1800 is one of the most important in American history. Jefferson argued that it would fix the national character and determine whether republicanism or aristocracy would prevail. If historians have not always agreed that the nation's political destiny was at stake, they have invariably acknowledged the election as a turning point, not least because it led in 1804 to the passage of the 12th Amendment, separating the election of the president and vice president.
Moreover, Jefferson's inauguration, on March 4, 1801, the first held in the new capital city, marked the first transfer of power from one American political party to another.
Making the event more memorable still, the new president's eloquent, olive-branch-offering inaugural address, stating "We are all republicans, we are all federalists," is one of the most commonly cited documents in the American archive.
In ”Negro President”: Jefferson and the Slave Power, Garry Wills crashes the party celebrating Jefferson's election as a triumph for political pluralism with this sobering reminder: "If real votes alone had been counted, Adams would have been returned to office."
Jefferson's victory depended on the constitutional calculus that counted an enslaved human being as three-fifths of a person for the purpose of establishing a state's representation in the House and consequently in the Electoral College. "Though Jefferson, admittedly, received eight more votes than Adams in the Electoral College," Wills writes, "at least 12 of his votes were not based on the citizenry that could express its will but on the blacks owned by Southern masters."
Jefferson's reliance on the slave count did not go unobserved by the party he ousted. In New England, the Federalist Timothy Pickering labeled Jefferson a Negro president, elected by Negro electors and Negro Congresses. Or as one Boston newspaper put it in 1801, the sage of Monticello, famous for humbly walking through Washington's muddy streets to his own inauguration, had ridden "into the temple of Liberty on the shoulders of slaves."
How could the Constitution set the apportionment of delegates to the national legislature, Wills asks, so as to allow a man to gain 300 extra votes in Congress by owning 500 human beings? His answer recovers for modern readers the intensity of the debate over the three-fifths clause, as when Gouverneur Morris declared at the Constitutional Convention, "The admission of slaves into the representation, when fairly explained, comes to this: that the inhabitant of Georgia and South Carolina who goes to the coast of Africa and, in defiance of the most sacred laws of humanity, tears away his fellow creatures from their dearest connections and damns them to the most cruel bondage, shall have more votes in a government instituted for protection of the rights of mankind than the citizen of Pennsylvania or New Jersey who views with a laudable horror so nefarious a practice."
Wills' subject leads him inevitably to criticize Jefferson, a man he admires deeply. "My Jefferson is a giant," Wills writes, "but a giant trammeled in a net and obliged (he thought) to keep repairing and strengthening the coils of that net."
The consequence of Wills' aching ambivalence is that ”Negro President” is not really a book about Jefferson. It is a book instead that seeks to raise the reputations of two of Jefferson's adversaries: Burr, remembered largely as a traitor and a killer, and Pickering, derided by more than a few contemporaries as a fanatic.
Wills argues that Burr has been wrongly painted as the villain of the 1800 election, working behind the scenes to manipulate the process. Instead, he suggests, Burr was more like Al Gore "when faced with the Bush team's legal blitzkrieg" after the 2000 election. The real crime of Burr, Wills says, was that he "tried to endanger the slave power."
Pickering, who was quartermaster general of the Continental Army, secretary of war, secretary of state, senator and congressman, argued forcefully against the "Negro president," and passionately opposed Jefferson's two most important projects -- the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 and the Embargo Act of 1807 -- on the ground that they amounted to an extension of the economic power of slave states. More than once Pickering advocated New England's secession from the union. Pickering's crime was the same as Burr's, but his punishment was more severe: His country has forgotten him.
Why resurrect Pickering? Because Pickering, like Burr, provides Wills with a mouthpiece for his attack on Jefferson's many concessions to slavery. The usefulness of Pickering for the purposes of this book lies in the unblinking way he stated, over and over, that "nothing the South did could make slavery tolerable." Given Wills' talent for writing a morally engaged history, it is difficult not to wonder if ”Negro President” would have been more powerful if he had wrestled the giant himself.
Jill Lepore teaches history at Harvard, and her most recent book is "A Is for American: Letters and Other Characters in the Newly United States."
Ironic from a 21st c. perspective...it seems Wills' point is blacks should have had no vote! Although I suppose the underlying point is, they had no "freedom" in their voting or they would have voted for Adams, rather than Jefferson, who apparently continued to promulgate slavery?
This excerpt "from the time" is also interesting:
How could the Constitution set the apportionment of delegates to the national legislature, Wills asks, so as to allow a man to gain 300 extra votes in Congress by owning 500 human beings? His answer recovers for modern readers the intensity of the debate over the three-fifths clause, as when Gouverneur Morris declared at the Constitutional Convention, "The admission of slaves into the representation, when fairly explained, comes to this: that the inhabitant of Georgia and South Carolina who goes to the coast of Africa and, in defiance of the most sacred laws of humanity, tears away his fellow creatures from their dearest connections and damns them to the most cruel bondage, shall have more votes in a government instituted for protection of the rights of mankind than the citizen of Pennsylvania or New Jersey who views with a laudable horror so nefarious a practice."
While hastening to say that "nefarious" is not a strong enough word to describe slavery, I might also say this powerful statement of the time doesn't reflect the complete historical reality as we know it today, does it? It sure is inflammatory, though!
This sentence is a half-truth. The statement omits the complicity that "his fellow creatures" had in the handing over of the prisoners that resulted from tribal wars by black natives to white slavers. Without the complicity of Africans the slave trade could not have flourished.
It's time to eliminate the myth that slavery was a totaly white enterprise. It wasn't. Fellow blacks sold their own race into slavery. When this issue is looked at as a human crime, rather than a racial crime, the bitterness of blacks and the guilt of whites should give way to resolving legacy of slavery that continues 140+ years after it was ended.
(you may be interested in this, so FYI)
No, it's a bit more complicated than that.
At the Constitutional Convention of 1787, the northern states did not want slaves counted at all in the calculation of how many House seats a state would get. It was not just that slaves could not vote, but that they could not gain the franchise (the right to vote) by paying the property tax. Slaves were not citizens.
The southern states wanted each slave counted as one full person so as to maximize the state's representation in the House.
The three-fifth's compromise was floated by the northern states as a possible solution. Without some compromise on this issue, the convention would have broken up in acrimony, and there would have been no Constitution.
Wills' point is that slaves -- who lacked the right to pay taxes, the right to vote, and the basic rights of humanity itself -- were counted in such a way as to permit the slave states to have an inordinate amount of say into how the country was run, and to elect Jefferson over Adams.
Either count them as Zero (as in "Indians, untaxed"), since they have no vote, or count them as full citizens and give them the vote.
The point is relevant today. There are entire districts in California, Arizona and Texas that have their electoral balance skewed because of the large numbers of illegal aliens included in the count. Why do you think the Clintons pushed so hard to a) count the illegals and b) get them to check "hispanic" on the form? It's an electoral double-play: You get more people counted in an area that is almost sure to vote Democratic, and you can even guarantee it by lawsuits that end up mandating "hispanic majority" districts.
Because of this abuse, Loretta Sanchez, Linda Sanchez and Raul Grijalva sit in the Congress of the United States as alleged "Americans". At least one Federal Circuit Court judge - Richard Posner - has ruled the practice un-Constitutional (it is, without a doubt).
So looking back at the famous 3/5ths compromise and it's distortion of electoral results is worthwhile, and quite relevant today.
Bush's legal blitzkrieg???
These people are insane.
After 1800 the remaining Federalist presence was pretty much restricted to New England, and the Hartford Convention was its last gasp before the tidal wave rolled over it completely. I've always seen the Hartford Convention as a last ditch reaction to the Federalists' impotence -- and their incompetance in reading the pulse of the public.
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