Down to the Wire

...In addition, no mere narrative of all of these events can itself make clear that the election of 1801 was a critical moment in the constitutional history of the United States...

...To assume that in the mere telling of a story inheres its full signifi cance is to surrender the historian’s perspective, to cede to participants an event’s meaning, and to reduce history dangerously close to chronicle...

...The purchase of that vast western terrain by Jefferson’s administration in 1803 at a stroke doubled the size of the young nation, greatly enlarged its agricultural might, expanded the areas into which slavery would advance, and set the fi nal stage of the nation’s eventual spread from sea to sea...

...Bayard took this step, he explained, so as “not to hazard the constitution...

...Not naturally an easy story to relate, Larson tells it with consummate deftness and skill...

...Where and what is Larson’s point of view...

...That’s a pity, because he had the opportunity to refl ect on the enduring signifi cance of the contest...

...It turned out that James Bayard was doing more than precipitating an outcome that would preserve the integrity of the 1787 Constitution...

...Turmoil over excise taxes—the Whiskey and Fries’s rebellions— had interrupted domestic tranquility and occasioned the dispatch of federal troops into Pennsylvania...

...The idea that readers are interested primarily in stories and not in analysis, that they won’t accept argument, that they won’t devote some intellectual labor to understanding an issue, or aren’t intelligent enough to distinguish fact from interpretation, has gained ground in recent years...

...I know of no other book devoted to the contest which relates the tale so well...

...The choice between Jefferson and Burr thus fell to the old House, one under the control of the defeated Federalist party...

...The second is confi ned to a single institution, is governed by House rules enacted for this single event, and is held behind closed doors...

...It surely was more than that...

...Federalists were themselves of divided mind...

...But to steer clear, as Larson wisely does, of academic quarrels and ideological argument does not require him, like so many other authors of popular history, to forgo an authorial voice or to refrain from advancing any ideas...

...Small-government, agrarian capitalism became the ideological norm against which American public policy would be measured well into the 20th century...

...Larson seems willful in citing only published manuscript sources but not the work of his colleagues...

...This critical election—not just for president but for the entire House of Representatives and one-third of James M. Banner Jr...

...Bayard precipitated Jefferson’s election on the 36th House ballot by withholding his vote from Burr and leading a few other Federalists to do so as well, thus allowing Jefferson to be elected by the requisite majority of states...

...To make matters worse, the outgoing House had to make its choice between early February 1801, when it convened, and March 4, at that time the date on which one administration was required under the Constitution to give way to another...

...Making the distinction between the two events even more necessary is the fact that, in 1801, the deciding election in the House was unprecedented...

...Two others had to be decided by recourse to institutions the Founders didn’t contemplate getting involving in electoral matters: For the election of 1876 a specially constituted electoral commission...

...Its resolution in the House saved the Constitution...

...That decade had seen the emergence of political clubs and political parties, then called “factions”— although these parties were nothing like the organized institutions we know today...

...For another, it turned out to be one of the very few epochal elections in American history...

...Only the elections of 1828, 1876, and 1932 equaled it in importance, and only the election of 1860 surpassed it in signifi cance...

...Slavery was given 60 years to strengthen itself in the Old South and in the states carved out of the old southwest and across the Mississippi in the Louisiana Territory...

...The fi rst was armed intervention by forces loyal to the Democratic-Republicans in the manner of other regimes, then and now...

...Nor does one gain confi dence from the absence of references to prior scholarship...

...Even without addressing Ackerman’s arguments, Larson might have engaged his readers in consideration of the larger signifi cance—political, ideological, and cultural, as well as constitutional— of this critical contest...

...The South gained a chokehold on the presidency and Congress until Lincoln’s election took the nation into a new era for all time...

...So when Vice President Thomas Jefferson challenged incumbent John Adams for the presidency in 1800, and in effect threatened to put an end to the opening phase of American government under Washington’s stewardship and Adams’s succeeding presidency, the Federalists, who considered themselves Washington’s true followers and legatees, saw the republic’s demise around the corner...

...It requires a book like this to cover the election’s complexities...

...But that does not mean that A Magnifi cent Catastrophe is fully satisfactory as a work of history...

...No mere narrative of what we call the election of 1800 can capture that contest’s place in the history of the United States...

...More than that, as Bruce Ackerman has shown with penetrating skill in The Failure of the Founding Fathers (2005), not only the two elections themselves but many of the events leading to them were constitutional in nature, and a series of Supreme Court decisions afterwards owed their signifi cance to issues raised by the election...

...The trouble was that the votes of an absolute majority of states—in this case—were necessary to elect a president...

...And not surprisingly, when Jefferson emerged victorious in the battle for the nation’s electoral votes, they sank into despond—except, that is, for the chance the election’s outcome offered for their continuance in power...

...It was an act, one of the most important and statesmanlike in American history, that effectively put an end to his party’s chances of ever winning the presidency or holding a majority in Congress again...

...But in a nutshell, here’s what occurred: When, in late 1800, the balloting for president— which in the nation’s early years involved a diverse set of practices and took place over many months and not on a single, national Election Day as it does now—had ended, the DemocraticRepublican ticket of Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr had narrowly edged out Adams and his running mate Charles Cotesworth Pinckney in the tally for electoral votes...

...This doesn’t mean that American constitutional government would have ended then and there had Thomas Jefferson been denied offi ce...

...And therein lies the nub of the tale...

...It is the case, for instance, that Bayard’s explanation of his decision to precipitate the election’s resolution in the House—that he did not want “to hazard the constitution” by further defying the people’s choice—brought into being a new line of constitutional reasoning and decision-making...

...That signifi - cance was enormous...

...That’s what we know it as, and not foolishly so...

...In gaining the most votes in the electoral college, however, the winning duo’s party had been too disciplined and lacking in foresight...

...This may seem like an unsurprising, if dangerous, political game today...

...While George Washington’s two administrations, and John Adams’s single one, had laid the foundations for America’s economic stability, temporarily settled important outstanding issues with Great Britain, and ended an undeclared naval war with France, the threat of foreign military intervention and economic warfare continued to hang over the nation’s affairs...

...But in an election like that of 1800 (as of 1824) in which the results are determined not by the voters but, instead, by members of the House of Representatives, two elections, not a single one, take place...

...But after 1801, a new standard of constitutionalism had been established, one that would allow the Marshall Court, starting with its Marbury decision in 1803, to issue its great decisions in some comfort that, controversial as these decisions would be, there now existed a broad constituency for which the Court’s decrees, announced as constitutional interpretations, would have the authority of legitimacy...

...One has no sense of a historian wrestling with intractable evidence, or asking himself whether the facts themselves don’t yield up some questions that need tackling...

...In that event, the constitution emerging from that second convention would have been signally different from the Constitution we know now— and different in ways the Federalists deeply feared: one with a weaker president and court system and a greatly strengthened Congress...

...the facts arrange themselves too easily into a smooth narrative...

...And herein lies a problem with so much avowedly popular history—of which this is a fi ne example—today...

...Because all electors pledged to their party had cast an equal number of votes for each man, Jefferson and Burr ended up with the same number of electoral votes...

...An academic historian, Larson is clearly aware of criticisms of academic prose and aims, criticisms that also embody complaints about the ideological positioning and intellectual posturing of much academic history...

...The fi rst is a public election contest fought throughout the country under regulations enacted by state authority...

...The second possibility—and the Federalists’ darkest fear—was that the Democratic-Republicans might convene a second constitutional convention...

...Americans will come to no unanimous agreement about how the Constitution should best be interpreted so that it “wins...

...That tacit understanding was enough to convince one Federalist, in particular, that he should no longer stand in the way of Jefferson’s election but, instead, move to end the crisis...

...The necessity of turning to the House to choose a president precipitated the election’s great crisis...

...But it does mean that two possibilities, one putting the nation on a footing with others, the second obnoxious to the Federalists, hung in the air...

...This presented the House and its members with no end of decisions to make, some of them juicily partisan, all of them gravely constitutional...

...But smoothness is not a characteristic of history—history in the past or history today...

...Each is governed by different rules pertinent to its distinct institutional arena...

...Instead, the voters and their congressmen were determining the course of American government, the nature of American culture, the fate of African Americans, and the geographic reach of national authority for much of American history...

...for the election of 2000 the Supreme Court...

...It now becomes the standard account...

...The Constitution was of little help...

...indeed, because of its many defects—defects that would, in part, be repaired by the 12th Amendment— the Constitution contributed to the electoral crisis in the fi rst place...

...The governors of Virginia and Pennsylvania refused to deny rumors that, were the people’s will thwarted, their militias would march on Washington to enforce it...

...but in those days such political deals were rare and a deal concerning a presidential election unprecedented...

...The arrangement concluded by gobetweens was to assure the Federalists (without Jefferson’s saying or writing a word to lend credence to the fact) that Jefferson wouldn’t overturn Federalist policies or turn out Federalist offi ceholders wholesale upon taking offi ce...

...the Senate—concluded the opening decade of government under the infant Constitution of 1787...

...But doesn’t that name embody some hidden propositions that it might be useful to question...

...Above all else, the United States found itself, after the Bastille’s fall in 1789, a republic in a revolutionary world, a world torn by radical ideas, marching armies, preying navies, and two powerful nations (Great Britain, France) waiting to bind American trade and territory to their own interests or, failing that, to threaten American independence directly...

...Under procedures set forth in the Constitution, voting in the House took place by state, each state having a single vote...

...It is the Constitution itself, rather than any party or any individual, which must be made “to win...

...All involved covered their tracks and denied that any kind of agreement to accede to Jefferson’s election was entered into...

...For one thing, the election produced, and then resolved, the most critical constitutional crisis between the Philadelphia Convention of 1787 and the Civil War...

...It would be hard to conceive of a more fl uent, balanced, and full telling of the election’s background and realities than Larson’s...

...In short, the election of 1800 laid the groundwork for the nation’s emergence as a slaveholding, agrarian, democratic, continental colossus...

...They could not know that then, but we know it now...

...It’s also patronizing...

...With ideological sustenance from Jefferson and his followers, white manhood suffrage became nearly universal by 1840...

...By another quirk of the untried Constitution (which would be later amended also in this respect), the new Congress elected in 1800, overwhelmingly in the hands of Jefferson’s party, would not convene until late 1801...

...To assert without extensive explanation its importance is to empty the election of anything but its contents as an exciting episode...

...Yes, we normally have a single election: The voters vote, and a clear outcome, a winner, results...

...Unfortunately, however, A Magnifi cent Catastrophe lacks both that voice and those ideas...

...It doesn’t speak well for an author and his publisher to accept these assumptions...

...For Democratic-Republicans, to allow the people’s will to be set aside was to invite nothing less than the corruption of the infant constitutional regime...

...By 1825, the Federalist party was effectively dead...

...Larson ends with Jefferson’s inauguration...

...Little wonder, then, that, given the untried history of republican government over an extended republic, Americans were deeply apprehensive that the nation might not survive...

...The House delegations of 8 of the nation’s 16 states were solidly in Jefferson’s camp, the remaining eight either under Federalist control or evenly split...

...For many of them, however tempting might be the bait of substituting Burr the New Yorker for Jefferson the people’s choice, to approach Burr was like courting the devil himself...

...No rules, no experience for resolving an electoral tie, could be borrowed from the past...

...The Court could now freely declare that it was protecting the Constitution...

...Furthermore, all is too serene...

...Larson draws readers along while lucidly supplying the necessary complement of detail about the election’s political context and its progress from intraparty scheming to congressional resolution...

...That being the case, a kind of analytical clarity results when these separate contests are treated as separate events...

...The Federalists thus saw an opening, not only to make mischief but also, in their view, to save the republic from their opponents...

...is a cofounder of the National History Center and the author of To the Hartford Convention: The Federalists and the Origins of Party Politics in Massachusetts, 1789-1815...

...Consequently, neither man having been designated by electors as presidential and vice-presidential candidates on the DemocraticRepublican ticket (subsequently required by the 12th Amendment, enacted to avoid a repeat of this crisis), the choice between the two men fell to the House of Representatives...

...To be sure, no single person, no single institution, is free to determine what the Constitution is or means...

...Fear of the spread of sedition and of foreign immigrants arriving on American shores had led to passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts...

...This situation was ideal for some kind of political deal...

...Had the House not chosen a president by March 4, or not chosen one at all, there are solid grounds for fearing armed intervention or a second constitutional convention...

...So did the failure of Congress to anticipate and address through legislation or constitutional amendment some of the problems that were foreseeable...

...Open, competitive campaigns for public offi ce had made their appearance...

...That man was James Bayard of Delaware, his small state’s sole congressman...

...Let’s take simply the matter of the “election of 1800...

...So they decided to hold out to bring in Burr under some kind of agreement...

...It thus turned out that, in 1800, the voters, and in February 1801 the members of the House of Representatives, were deciding more than which party and, of the two Democratic-Republicans, which man would occupy the presidency for the next four years...

...A Magnifi cent Catastrophe would have been better than it is had its author led his readers to contemplate those extraordinary consequences of a single presidential election...

...Their anxieties freighting each event with heavy signifi cance, they tended to interpret each act of government or each partisan affray as tolling the knell of American liberties or America’s independent existence...

...We’ll never know precisely what was suggested to whom in whose name and with what provisions...

...But some kind of arrangement surely was concluded— one made essential when Burr, while desiring to gain the prize, remained adamant that he wouldn’t accept the presidency unless free of obligations to the Federalists...

...What’s more, it was one of but two presidential contests, the other being that of 1824, to be decided in the House of Representatives...