The Most Divided Election in American History—The Story of America Series [Ep. 16]

00:00:10
Speaker 1: And we return to our American Stories. Up next, another installment of our series about Us: The Story of America series with Hillsdale College Professor and author of Land of Hope, Professor Bill McLay. After George Washington retired from public life, a resounding question hung over the heads of most Americans: What’s next? Let’s get into the story.

00:00:43
Speaker 2: In the past twenty years or so, we’ve seen close contested elections on the presidential, left a big call to make. CNN announces that we call Florida in the Al Gore column.

00:00:58
Speaker 3: In Georgia, the presidential race is also too close to Paul.

00:01:02
Speaker 2: This race is just as close as ever. The latest CNN Opinion Research tracking poll has a presidential candidates’ tie. Just moments ago, I spoke with George W. Bush and congratulated him on becoming the forty-third President of the United States. So, we don’t have a history of impeccable, imperishable elections.

00:01:26
Speaker 3: And this goes back to very early on, and the Constitution.

00:01:31
Speaker 2: The framers of the Constitution didn’t think about presidential elections as being competitions.

00:01:38
Speaker 3: Between political parties.

00:01:40
Speaker 2: It’s important to keep in mind the political parties arose of their own will,

00:01:46
Speaker 3: As it were.

00:01:48
Speaker 2: Of course, the first two elections were not contested. George Washington was the only candidate, but—

00:01:55
Speaker 3: When he stepped down, that was the first—

00:01:59
Speaker 2: Action rual contested election, and it was close, and its closeness revealed the fact that parties were coming into being despite all the admonitions and fears of Washington and others. John Adams ran in 1796.

00:02:25
Speaker 3: Adams, of course, had a lot of problems.

00:02:28
Speaker 2: He really came into the office with the burden of being compared to George Washington, the world’s most tough act to follow.

00:02:37
Speaker 3: Adams was a little guy, a—

00:02:39
Speaker 2: Little kind of pudgy, with a short temper, prone to a certain kind of pettiness and jealousy and envy and negative emotions which he was—

00:02:49
Speaker 3: A very frank about expressing.

00:02:52
Speaker 2: George Washington, on the other end, was a big man, broad shoulder, carried himself like the great soldier that he was, looked the way a father of a country ought to look, and a man who watched his tongue, was very careful what he said, and was very inclined to heal factions rather than try to exacerbate them.

00:03:16
Speaker 3: So Adams had a tough act to follow.

00:03:19
Speaker 2: He was a very different kind of man, and yet there were things about him, many things about him to admire. He might even be my favorite founder because he’s so human. But he did inherit a lot of problems, not just the fact of being George Washington’s successor.

00:03:42
Speaker 3: There was a problem with the French.

00:03:49
Speaker 2: The French are attacking American shipping and commerce. There’s a lot of pressure to declare war on France, which would have been a foolish thing to do. The American Navy, the American—

00:04:04
Speaker 3: Armed forces, the American government,

00:04:06
Speaker 2: Was still finding its footing in the world.

00:04:09
Speaker 3: So Adams was smart.

00:04:11
Speaker 2: This was no time to fight at war with a major power, including in this case, of power that had been our friend up until the day before yesterday. So we managed to tamp down the war fever. But to do so at considerable political expense is a real loss of political capital. These difficulties were not just overseas.

00:04:33
Speaker 3: They had domestic impact.

00:04:36
Speaker 2: Followers of Jefferson tended to be pro-French,

00:04:39
Speaker 3: As Jefferson did.

00:04:44
Speaker 2: The Federalists, who had never been pro-French to begin with, saw this as a perfect opportunity to harm their political opponents at home. So, foreign policy in this case, and domestic policy, they have a kind of reciprocal effect, balancing back and forth and affecting one another. This is always true in American life. The sort of notion that foreign affairs and domestic affairs are antiseptically separated from one another is an illusion that they never have been, much the same way that today we find the seepage between the two.

00:05:24
Speaker 3: It was true at the beginning.

00:05:26
Speaker 2: And here’s something else that was true at the beginning: lots and lots of fake news.

00:05:35
Speaker 3: Fake news was high art for at that time.

00:05:40
Speaker 2: Journalism was really conducted as a form of political warfare,

00:05:45
Speaker 3: Openly.

00:05:46
Speaker 2: One party had its paper, the other party has its paper. And if you think of Fox News versus MSNBC and cable television, you’d have a pretty good analogy for the way journalism was back in the 1790s. And a lot of the charges being thrown around were not just charges of corruption, not just charges of bad veal policies,

00:06:12
Speaker 3: But trees.

00:06:14
Speaker 2: And you know, remember, this is a country that’s not even two decades old. Jefferson was particularly good at these political taxes and spreading rumors the opposition spread some rumors about him too, some of which may have in the inter and out to be true, about his having children through his slave mistress and so on. This was all out there in the political campaign, all that kind of dirt. Don’t think that it was somehow more elevated in the past, but it was just as vicious, just as ad hominem, just as personal. This hyper-partisan climate allowed the Federalists were in power in Adams’s administration. The Federalists could push through the Congress legislation to silence their critics.

00:07:10
Speaker 3: How about that? Censor them.

00:07:13
Speaker 2: They did this through a series of legislative acts called the Alien and Sedition Acts. The Alien Says Edition Acts appeared to be and have generally been regarded as an attack on the right of free speech, which again was something that was just getting its wings as an American institution, and—

00:07:39
Speaker 3: It’s in danger. Well,

00:07:41
Speaker 2: Jefferson and Madison, both of whom, particularly Jefferson, were great believers in free speech. Jefferson said many wonderful things on the subject that are still quoted today.

00:07:53
Speaker 3: Jefferson wasn’t going to sit still for this.

00:07:56
Speaker 2: Jefferson and Madison responded with the Kentucky continued resolutions which were at tax on the Alien Edition Acts as unconstitutional, but going on to make the equally unconstitutional assertion that the states had every right to ignore federal law, to nullify it, or interpose themselves between the federal government and the citizenry.

00:08:27
Speaker 3: Both sides were going too far.

00:08:29
Speaker 2: Both sides were violating the letter and spirit of the Constitution. So you have a hyper-partisan environment producing a hyper-political rhetoric.

00:08:45
Speaker 3: All of this didn’t just stop.

00:08:47
Speaker 2: It built and built until the election of 1800 looked to be a watershed for the nation.

00:08:54
Speaker 3: Federalists really convinced—

00:08:55
Speaker 2: Themselves that if Jefferson became president, there would be a something like the French Revolution. There would be a radical overturning of all—

00:09:04
Speaker 3: Existing political institutions.

00:09:07
Speaker 2: On the other side, the Republicans have feared a Federalist victory would be a move in the erection of a kind of monarchism.

00:09:18
Speaker 3: And on top of it all, George Washington dies.

00:09:23
Speaker 2: The whole thing, the whole experiment seemed to be on the line.

00:09:29
Speaker 3: But that was an illusion. Something very important happened.

00:09:36
Speaker 2: When Jefferson was finally inaugurated in 1801.

00:09:48
Speaker 1: When we come back, more of this remarkable story. Here on Our American Stories. And we return to Our American Stories and our series about Us: The Story of America series with Professor Bill McLay. When we last left off, Dr. McClay was telling us about the election of 1800, one of the most divided elections in our nation’s history. Let’s return to the story.

00:10:30
Speaker 2: Despite the factions, despite the partisan hit jobs and other attacks, there was, for the first time in history, an orderly, peaceful transfer of power from one political party to another. That, as students of history of students of political science will tell you, is the most difficult test for any regime to pass. Can it offer the prospect of a peaceful and definitive and orderly transfer of power from one person to the next? You know, you think of the history of the Soviet Union, for example. Every time that a party chairman would die, and they never just peacefully left office, there’s a scramble because there’s no lawful pattern of—

00:11:22
Speaker 3: Succession laid out by a constitution.

00:11:26
Speaker 2: There was a constitution. It wasn’t worth the paper it was printed on. It had no real significance. But the Constitution of the United States did.

00:11:37
Speaker 3: And this proved it, this orderly—

00:11:40
Speaker 2: Transfer of power had been the first major test of the Constitution’s sturdiness, and it passed the test. And I bring this out just because we talk loosely these days about how the country’s falling apart; doesn’t have a future. We’re going to have massive secession where, you know, any number of highly speculative assertions flowing from the very real perception: We are very divided at this moment. We have been very divided before, and that’s a fact of life. There’s no way of curing dividedness.

00:12:21
Speaker 3: There are ways of channeling it. That’s what the Constitution does.

00:12:29
Speaker 2: Jefferson’s inaugural was an impressive event. What was most impressive about it was his speech. Jefferson was not much of a public speaker, and he hated doing it. He tended not to like things he wasn’t good at, and even though he was good at most things, public speaking was one of the ones he wasn’t so good at. But listen to some of this language and think about using a speech like this at a moment like this, when roughly speaking, half the country is angry and fearful. “The rising nation spread over wine and fruitful land, traversing all the seas with the rich productions of their industry, engage in commerce with nations who feel power and forget right, advancing rapidly to destinies beyond the reach of mortal eye. When I contemplate these transcendent objects and see the honor, the happiness, and the hopes of this beloved country committed to the issue and the auspices of this day, I shrink from the contemplation and humble myself before the magnitude of the undertaking.” He’s speaking in terms, he’s reflecting. He’s echoing the modesty of George Washington.

00:13:52
Speaker 3: This is a big job.

00:13:53
Speaker 2: “I tremble to think that this job is now entrusted to me, whether I can do it.” And he went on from that, from that humble beginning to address himself to the partisan divide, the bitterness of the lecture that had just passed, and made this strong claim. “During the contest of opinion through which we have passed, the animation of discussions and of exertions has sometimes worn an aspect which might impose on the strangers and used to think freely, to speak,

00:14:29
Speaker 3: And to write what they think.

00:14:31
Speaker 2: But this being now decided by a voice of the nation, announced according to the rules of the Constitution,

00:14:39
Speaker 3: All well, of course, arranged themselves under the will

00:14:42
Speaker 2: Of the law, and unite in common efforts for the common good. All two will bear in mind this sacred principle that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will, to be rightful,

00:14:57
Speaker 3: Must be reasonable.

00:15:00
Speaker 2: The minority possessed their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression. Let us, then, fellow citizens, unite with one heart and one mind. Let us restore it to social intercourse, that harmony and affection, without

00:15:18
Speaker 3: Which liberty and even life itself are but dreary things.

00:15:22
Speaker 2: And let us reflect that, having banished from our land that religious

00:15:26
Speaker 3: Intolerance under which mankind

00:15:28
Speaker 2: So long bled and suffered, we have yet gained little. If we count a political intolerance as despotic, as wicked, and capable of as bitter and bloody persecutions. During the throes and convulsions of the ancient world, during the agonizing spasms of infuriated men seeking through blood and slaughter, his long lost liberty, it was not wonderful that the agitation of the billows should reach even this distant and peaceful sure that this should be more felt than feared by some unless by others, and should divide opinions as to measures of safety. We have called by different names brethren of the same principle. We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists.

00:16:17
Speaker 3: If there be any among us

00:16:19
Speaker 2: 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.”

00:16:37
Speaker 3: Those are words that were the—

00:16:38
Speaker 2: Balm that the nation needed someone to say, and someone who had been a figure of fear and loathing for those who opposed them to say, we’re really won. We’re all Republicans, we’re all Federalists, and anybody who says otherwise, we’re not going to shut them up.

00:16:57
Speaker 3: We let them stand undisturbed.

00:17:00
Speaker 2: Monuments of how safe it is to let error of opinion be tolerated. No more an Alien Edition Acts, and then Jefferson goes on to make a beautiful defense of the American Republican, of the ideals by which, and for which and upon which it was created. “Let us, then, with courage and confidence, pursue our own federal and Republican principles, our attachment to union and representative government, kindly separated by nature and a wide ocean, from the exterminating havoc of one quarter of the globe, possessing a chosen country with room enough for our descendants to the thousandth and thousandths generation, entertaining a due sense of our equal right to the use of our own faculties, to the acquisitions of our own industry, to honor and confidence from our fellow citizens, resulting not from birth, but from our actions and their sense of them, enlightened by a benign religion professed, indeed, and practiced in various forms, but all of them inculcating honesty, truth, temperance, gratitude, and the love of man, acknowledging and adoring and overruling Providence, which, by all its dispensations, proves that it delights in the happiness of man here and his greater happiness hereafter. What more is necessary to make us a happy and prosperous people? Still one thing more, A wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the brand it has earned.”

00:19:01
Speaker 3: This is the sub of good government.

00:19:04
Speaker 2: And this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities.

00:19:13
Speaker 1: And could Jefferson write the story of us here on Our American Stories?