The 12th Amendment and the wild 1800 presidential election

Charles Cotesworth Pinckney’s name may have been lost to history, and he may not have realized it at the time, but the South Carolina statesman and Founding Father was standing at the center of one the most consequential — and contentious — presidential elections in history.

Born in 1746, Pinckney served in the American Revolutionary War and later as a delegate to the 1787 Constitutional Convention. A Federalist, Pinckney pushed for his home state to ratify the new document. Like his allies, he was not immune, however, to the possibility that the Constitution was imperfect, suggesting “every part of it may be examined with critical minuteness.” If anyone had taken his advice, they would have discovered one such imperfection that remained unaddressed until after Pinckney ran as the Federalist Party’s vice presidential candidate in 1800.

The Founders, in drafting the Constitution, failed to anticipate the expeditious rise of American political parties. Partisanship, George Washington apprised in his 1796 Farewell Address, “exists under different shapes in all governments, more or less stifled, controlled, or repressed; but in those of the popular form it is seen in its greatest rankness and is truly their worst enemy.” It would lead “at length,” he feared, to a “formal and permanent despotism.” But by 1800, a mere four years after Washington’s desperate admonition, factionalism had already blossomed in American politics. Its ugliness, no doubt, vindicated the first president’s apprehension.

“I suppose this unexpected opposition to my Kinsman … will sever & divide me from him … for ever,” Pinckney’s cousin, also named Charles, wrote to Thomas Jefferson. The Pinckneys had served together at the Constitutional Convention. But the 1800 election, in which the cousins backed opposing parties, was exactly the kind of conflict that might sever close companions.

Jefferson, the sitting vice president, sought to wrest the presidency from his former friend-turned-rival, John Adams, the man under whom Jefferson had served the past four years. According to the Constitution, presidential electors, each of whom had two votes, could not distinguish between president and vice president when casting those votes; whichever candidate received the most would become president, while the runner-up, regardless of political affiliation, would become the vice president. In the case of a tie, the results would be kicked over to the House of Representatives to “chuse by Ballot” the next president.

The Framers believed — or, rather, hoped — that this complicated system would ensure, in the words of Alexander Hamilton, “that the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications.” They wanted electors to vote based not on party alliances or political wrangling but merit. It was a specious theory destined to fail.

Jefferson, a Democratic-Republican, and Adams, a Federalist, had run against each other in 1796. Presumably, Adams and his running mate, Thomas Pinckney, Charles Pinckney’s brother, would have tied, resulting (most likely) in Pinckney becoming Adams’ vice president. However, Hamilton, ever conniving, had plotted to win the presidency for Pinckney by secretly persuading southern electors to abstain from voting for Adams.

It backfired. The New Yorker’s stratagem was eventually exposed, prompting a backlash from New England Federalists, who refused to vote for Hamilton’s preferred candidate. As a result, Pinckney fell short of the necessary support to serve alongside Adams, who received 71 electoral votes to Jefferson’s 68 and Pinckney’s 59. After bitter mudslinging on both sides (this was the election in which allegations about Jefferson’s affair with an enslaved black woman, not yet identified as Sally Hemmings, first appeared), the Father of the Declaration of Independence would join his opponents’ administration.

But that was 1796, a year that merely set the stage for the subsequent presidential election. If anything, four years of “working together” only deepened the divide between Jefferson and Adams. Amazingly, the drama of 1796 had all unfolded after Washington revealed he would not seek a third term — about two months before the election. This time, the parties had time to plan. As Abigail Adams wrote to her sister in 1799: “Electionering is already began.”

Jefferson, knowing how low the Federalists were willing to stoop, maximized the time, allying himself with the sleazy journalist James Callender to pen sensationalized and slanderous stories about his rivals. Adams and company fired back with equivalent courtesy — which is to say, none at all. The acrimony spilled over to include the candidates’ running mates: Adams tapped Charles Pickney, and Jefferson selected the Revolutionary War hero and former Senator Aaron Burr.

Pinckney played a relatively unimportant role in the election, overshadowed in our remembrance by Adams, Jefferson, Burr, and Hamilton (who continued to pull strings in the background). Nevertheless, his electoral tally highlighted his party’s shrewdness in one key regard — and the opposition’s lack of foresight.

It quickly became apparent that Jefferson’s moment had arrived; Adams, plagued by a controversial foreign policy with France (it did not help that Pinckney had been personally involved in the humiliating XYZ Affair) and the Alien and Sedition Acts, which Jefferson condemned as “in the teeth of the constitution,” was on his way out. Even so, the Federalists came prepared.

They still controlled the House. And under the existing rules, the outgoing Congress (including lame-duck members of Adams’ party) was responsible for selecting the next president if multiple candidates tied. To avoid what would have been, for them, a mere inconvenience, the Federalists arranged for one of their electors to vote for John Jay instead of Pinckney, resulting in 65 votes for Adams and 64 for Pinckney. Jefferson’s electors, however, failed to think this through. Dutifully, they all voted for their lead man and his running mate, who tied with 73 votes (Jefferson suggested in a letter to Burr that he had expected Georgia or South Carolina to “withdraw from yourself one vote”). The outcome of the election, won by the Democratic-Republicans, rested in the hands of the Federalist-controlled House.

In Federalist No. 68, Hamilton had waxed eloquent about circumventing “cabal, intrigue, and corruption” in the presidential election process. “They [the Framers of the Constitution] have not made the appointment of the President to depend on any preexisting bodies of men, who might be tampered with beforehand to prostitute their votes,” he wrote. These were ironic words coming from Washington’s ambitious former aide. A Federalist, and an opinionated one at that, Hamilton found Burr insufferable, “beyond redemption”; Jefferson, on the other hand, “though too revolutionary in his notions, is yet a lover of liberty and will be desirous of something like orderly Government.”

“In a choice of Evils,” Hamilton concluded, “Jefferson is in every view less dangerous than Burr.” To prevent the latter’s ascendency, Hamilton would once again flirt with the “intrigue” he had previously denounced.

The Federalists in Congress, tantalized by the prospect of denying Jefferson, their long-time nemesis, the presidency, considered throwing their support behind Burr. A few even appeared to admire him. Burr himself protested that he had no interest in accepting; privately, however, he flirted with the possibility. In a letter to James Madison, Samuel Osgood, the nation’s first postmaster general, maintained that Burr’s party loyalty “has been and still is questioned by many.” James Bayard, a Federalist leader in the House, proposed to Hamilton that Burr’s disavowal to challenge Jefferson may have been “intended as a cover to blind his own Party.” According to sources “friendly to Mr. Bur,” Bayard wrote, Jefferson’s running mate was “willing to consider the Federalistes as his friends & to accept the office of President as their gift.”

“I take it for granted that Mr. B would not only gladly accept the office, but will neglect no means in his power to secure it,” he added.

Hamilton had already made up his mind, though; he would rally Bayard’s colleagues to ensure Burr never became president. He quickly set to work on a backroom deal: congressional support in exchange for key concessions from Jefferson. And unlike his bid to win support for Pinckney in 1796, this one actually worked. “Hamilton,” the would-be president noted to his daughter, Martha Jefferson Randolph, in a postscript, “is using his uttermost influence to procure my election rather than Colo. Burr’s.”

Voting began in the House on February 11, 1801; six days later, and after three dozen ballots, Jefferson emerged as the victor. Although several Federalist states had continued to support Burr, they eventually reached an arrangement to give Hamilton the results he so desperately wanted. “[T]he concequence to us personally,” Abigail Adams realized long before the House smoothed out this wrinkle, “is that We retire from public Life.”

Although we primarily remember the 1800 election as a showcase of acidic vitriol and Adams for skipping Jefferson’s inauguration (in the words of Bayard, “he had been Sufficiently humbled to be allowed to be absent”), it’s worth noting that Adams, in his departure, established an important, Washington-like precedent of his own. While the first president willingly relinquished power after two terms, he handed the presidency to a close ally. Adams, on the other hand, became the first incumbent president to leave office after losing to an opponent. We may take this practice for granted today, but we should not minimize its historical significance. Heated though the election may have been, Adams demonstrated that the peaceful transition of power would stand.

Nevertheless, the whole affair had exposed several shocking oversights within the Constitution, triggering interest in what became the 12th Amendment. Proposed on December 9, 1803, and ratified on June 15, 1804, in time for that year’s presidential election, the amendment, stated, in part, that electors should “name ... the person voted for as President, and in distinct ballots the person voted for as Vice-President,” thus enabling candidates to run together without worrying about the kind of crisis Jefferson and Burr faced. Presumably, many such crises have been avoided because of it. 

Perhaps wistful that the antagonism of the 1800 election was merely an aberration, a one-off anomaly, Jefferson sought to bind the nation’s wounds with his inaugural address. “We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists,” he declared in a statement evocative of modern platitudes. Unfortunately, such well-meaning gestures rarely stick; antagonism — just ask Hamilton and Burr — had become a mainstay in American politics.

Even after the House resolved any lingering fears about Burr supplanting Jefferson, the latter remained distrustful of his vice president, later confessing, “there never had been an intimacy between us, and but little association.” And Callender, spurned by the Jefferson administration, proved that his pen knew no bond of friendship. “IT is well known,” the scandalmongering journalist wrote about his former sponsor, “that the man, whom it delighteth the people to honor, keeps, and for many years past has kept, as his concubine, one of his own slaves. Her name is SALLY.”

But to say that only ill came from Jefferson’s infamous election would, of course, be an overstatement; from it, we received proof that the (more or less) peaceful transition of power would outlast Washington. And when Charles Cotesworth Pinckney ran against Jefferson in 1804, the 12th Amendment ensured that neither candidate had to fret about tying with their running mates. In the meantime, Pinckney exchanged endearingly personal letters with Hamilton (who would not live to see the 1804 election), in which the two men discussed farming, watermelons, and parakeets. “A garden, you know, is a very usual refuge of a disappointed politician.”