Transcript
The Envelope
March 3–4, 1801
Washington City, March 3, 1801. John Adams has lost the election. He is president for one more night.
Adams is spending it handing out government jobs to his own party, the Federalists.
Sealing their commissions is the Secretary of State, John Marshall. A month ago, Adams also made him Chief Justice. Tonight he's doing both jobs. William Marbury. Justice of the peace, five years. Signed, sealed, and still on the desk when the clock ran out.
It stayed on the desk. In two years, a lawsuit over that commission will let the Supreme Court claim the last word on the Constitution.
At four in the morning, Adams left town by stagecoach. He didn't stay to watch his old friend and new rival take over.
Thomas Jefferson had spent ten years warning that the federal government was growing too powerful. In a few hours, he would run it.
Over the next five years, Jefferson and Marshall would each do something the Constitution never mentions.
Forty-Eight Years
1800 → 1848
In 1800 the United States has sixteen states and 5.3 million people. Almost 900,000 of them are enslaved.
The country stops at the Mississippi. West of the Appalachians, Native nations still hold most of the land.
By 1848 it has thirty states and reaches the Pacific. It gets there by purchase, treaty, annexation and war.
Property tests fall. Almost every white man can vote. But New Jersey women lose it, and so do free Black men in several states.
Canals, steamboats and railroads tie farms to cities and mills. Americans start buying what they used to make at home.
The regions pull apart: Northern mills, Southern cotton grown by enslaved people, Western farms. Each wants something different from Washington.
Americans paint their own wilderness and write their own books. Revivals fill the woods, and reformers take on drinking, prisons and slavery.
And every time the map grows, one question gets louder: will slavery go west?
Under almost every fight sits one argument left from the 1790s: how much power the federal government really has.
In 1801, that government passed to the man who wanted it smaller.
Thirty-Six Ballots
1800 – March 1801
Two parties fought the election of 1800. Federalists wanted a strong national government, Hamilton’s bank and friendship with Britain. Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans trusted the states and farmers, and liked France.
Federalist papers called Jefferson an atheist.
Then the system jammed. Each elector cast two votes. Every Republican elector picked Jefferson and his running mate, Aaron Burr. A tie.
The House had to break the tie, one vote per state.
Federalists there tried to make Burr president instead. Thirty-five ballots, no winner.
Alexander Hamilton had fought Jefferson for ten years. He wrote his friends to choose him anyway.
Alexander Hamilton Jefferson is to be preferred. He is by far not so dangerous a man and he has pretensions to character.
On the thirty-sixth ballot the Federalists gave up, and Jefferson won.
Jefferson’s margin came from the South. The Constitution counted three of every five enslaved people when it handed out electors. Without those extra electors, Adams would probably have won.
On March 4, Jefferson walked to the Capitol to take office.
Thomas Jefferson every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle.
Thomas Jefferson We have called by different names brethren of the same principle. We are all republicans: we are all federalists.
Then the new Chief Justice swore him in: his cousin, John Marshall. They couldn’t stand each other.
as real a revolution in the principles of our government as that of 76. was in it’s form
One party had handed power to another, with no army and no coup. Jefferson called it the revolution of 1800.
Then he cut the army, the navy and the internal taxes, whiskey tax included. Tariffs on imports now paid nearly all the bills.
In 1803 he received Britain’s new minister in worn-out slippers.
Say What the Law Is
March 1801 – February 1803
Back to the envelope.
Twenty-two years later, Jefferson remembered it.
Thomas Jefferson I found them on the table of the department of State, on my entry into office, and I forbade their delivery.
William Marbury went straight to the Supreme Court. He asked it to order Secretary of State James Madison to deliver his commission.
Jefferson's Congress struck back. It abolished Adams's new judgeships, then rewrote the Court's calendar so it didn't meet for fourteen months.
Madison sent no lawyer. Order Madison to deliver, and Jefferson would ignore the order. Refuse, and the Court looked scared.
John Marshall Has the applicant a right to the commission he demands?
Marshall handed Jefferson the win, and took something much bigger.
John Marshall It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is.
Marbury got nothing. The Court got the power to void laws that break the Constitution.
Jefferson thought each branch should judge the Constitution for itself.
Judges deciding for everyone, he told Abigail Adams, would make the judiciary…
Thomas Jefferson a despotic branch.
His party tried impeaching Justice Samuel Chase. Vice President Burr presided, under indictment for killing Hamilton in a duel. The Senate acquitted Chase.
1803 → 1857 Fifty-four years
For fifty-four years, the Court struck down no other act of Congress. Then came Dred Scott.
One Single Spot
1801 – April 1803
Western farmers floated corn, pork and whiskey down the rivers to one port: New Orleans. Spain owned it. In 1802, Spain shut them out.
Worse, Spain had secretly handed Louisiana back to France. And France meant Napoleon.
Thomas Jefferson there is on the globe one single spot, the possessor of which is our natural & habitual enemy. it is New Orleans
Jefferson loved France. But if Napoleon took the city, he warned,
Thomas Jefferson we must marry ourselves to the British fleet & nation.
Napoleon's plan ran through the Caribbean. Louisiana would feed Saint-Domingue, France's richest sugar colony. But Saint-Domingue had freed itself.
In 1791, enslaved people there rose up. By 1794 they had won their freedom. In 1802, Napoleon sent an army to take the colony back.
The colony's soldiers, most of them formerly enslaved, fought on. Yellow fever killed the French by the thousands.
France had lured their leader, Toussaint Louverture, to a meeting and arrested him. He died in a French mountain prison on April 7, 1803.
Four days later, in Paris, Napoleon's foreign minister asked whether America wanted all of Louisiana.
Robert R. Livingston I told him no
Then Talleyrand asked what America would pay. Livingston hadn't thought about it. Now he did.
They settled on fifteen million dollars for about 828,000 square miles, roughly three cents an acre. The country doubled.
Where exactly were the borders? Talleyrand said he didn't know.
Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand you have made a noble bargain for yourselves & I suppose you will make the most of it.
Blank Paper
April – December 1803
One problem. Jefferson believed the federal government could do only what the Constitution listed. Buying land wasn't on the list. So he drafted an amendment.
To a Kentucky senator, Jefferson admitted that the executive, meaning himself,
Thomas Jefferson have done an act beyond the constitution.
Word came from Paris that Napoleon might back out. Jefferson wrote to Madison:
Thomas Jefferson the less we say about constitutional difficulties respecting Louisiana the better
To a Virginia senator, he defended the written text.
Thomas Jefferson let us not make it a blank paper by construction.
To Congress, in October:
Thomas Jefferson an ample provision for our posterity, & a wide spread for the blessings of freedom and equal laws.
Not a word of doubt. Same man, same problem, two audiences.
The Federalists, champions of federal power, suddenly wanted limits.
Fisher Ames Now, by adding an unmeasured world beyond that river, we rush like a comet into infinite space.
The Senate approved it anyway, twenty-four to seven.
December 20, 1803. Three weeks ago, Spain's flag came down here and France's went up. Today France's follows.
Watching were French and Spanish Creoles, free people of color, enslaved workers, Choctaw traders and Kentucky boatmen. Nobody had asked them.
France sold its claim to rule this land. The land itself belonged to the Osage, Lakota, Pawnee, Mandan and dozens of other nations. The United States would buy it again, treaty by treaty, or take it.
Slavery went west with it. That fight reaches Congress in 1819.
Ocian in View
1803 – 1806
Jefferson planned the expedition while Louisiana was still foreign territory. In secret, he asked Congress for $2,500.
Thomas Jefferson the most direct & practicable water communication across this continent, for the purposes of commerce.
He also wanted maps, plants, animals and allies. Lewis and Clark started up the Missouri in May 1804 with more than thirty men. One was York, a man Clark enslaved.
At council after council, they gave speeches and handed out medals with Jefferson's face. The new 'great father' lived in Washington. It was diplomacy, and it was a claim.
They wintered with the Mandan and Hidatsa and hired a French trader, Toussaint Charbonneau. His wife came too: Sacagawea, a Shoshone teenager with a baby.
That spring, they shipped Jefferson skins, bones, seeds and one live prairie dog. It reached Washington alive.
Jefferson hoped the Missouri's source sat a short walk from a river to the Pacific. In August 1805, Lewis went to find out.
Meriwether Lewis I discovered immence ranges of high mountains still to the West of us with their tops partially covered with snow.
There was no short walk, and no water route across the continent.
Five days later, the Shoshone leader Cameahwait proved to be Sacagawea's brother. His people sold the Corps horses.
Weeks later, they stumbled out of the mountains, starving. The Nez Perce fed them.
William Clark Ocian in view! O! the joy.
It was the Columbia's wide mouth. The ocean still lay about twenty miles off.
Choosing a winter camp, Clark wrote down everyone's vote. That included York's, and Sacagawea's. Back east, neither could have voted.
In February 1806, Jefferson's newest letter from Lewis was dated April 1805. That October, he wrote to Lewis.
Thomas Jefferson the length of time without hearing of you had begun to be felt awfully
The Corps had reached St. Louis in September, to cheers. York asked Clark for his freedom. Clark refused, for years.
The Last Word
1807 – 1835
Jefferson had Aaron Burr tried for treason, over a plot in the West. The judge was Marshall.
Treason takes two witnesses to the same overt act. None put Burr at the scene. He walked free.
Marshall led the Court for thirty-four years. It struck down state laws that broke the Constitution. Federal law beats state law.
John Marshall the power to tax involves the power to destroy
And the Court let Congress use powers the Constitution implies but never lists.
It even broke a steamboat monopoly. It began with Robert Livingston, who first said no to Louisiana.
So who won? Jefferson's party won every presidential election for the next twenty-four years. Marshall's Court won the argument.
The man who feared federal power used it to double the country. The party that lost in 1800 wrote its ideas into law anyway.
William Marbury never served a day. Nobody knows where his commission went.
Jefferson's second term brought a harder test. Britain and France, at war, both went after American ships.