The Rise of Political Parties and the Era of Jefferson in two minutes
- The election of 1800 pitted Federalists, who wanted a strong national government, Hamilton's bank and friendship with Britain, against Jefferson's Democratic-Republicans, who trusted the states and farmers and favored France.
- Jefferson and Aaron Burr tied in the electoral vote. The House chose Jefferson on the 36th ballot in 1801, and the Twelfth Amendment (1804) required separate votes for president and vice president.
- Jefferson called the peaceful change of parties the revolution of 1800. He cut the army, navy and internal taxes, including the whiskey tax, and let tariffs on imports pay most bills.
- In Marbury v. Madison (1803), John Marshall's Court claimed judicial review, the power to void laws that break the Constitution. McCulloch v. Maryland (1819) later put federal law above state law.
- Spain closed New Orleans to American farmers in 1802. Napoleon, whose army was losing in Haiti, sold all of Louisiana in 1803 for $15 million, doubling the size of the country.
- Jefferson doubted the Constitution allowed buying land but went ahead, while Federalists argued for limits. Lewis and Clark crossed the continent to the Pacific in 1804–1806, and slavery moved west with settlers.
- On the exam: expect continuity and change prompts on Jefferson using the federal power he distrusted, and comparisons of Federalist and Democratic-Republican ideas, linked to Hamilton's program and later Marshall Court rulings.
Topic 4.2 key terms
- Federalists
The party of Adams and Alexander Hamilton. They wanted a strong national government and a close tie to Britain. Jefferson's Democratic-Republicans had just beaten them in 1800.
- Democratic-Republicans
Party of Jefferson and Madison: states’ rights, a strict reading of the Constitution, farmers, the South and West, sympathy for France.
- Two votes per elector
Under the original Constitution, each elector cast two votes for president. The runner-up became vice president, and a tie went to the House of Representatives.
- Twelfth Amendment (1804)
Electors now cast separate votes for president and vice president, so a ticket can’t tie itself.
- Revolution of 1800
The first peaceful transfer of power from one party to another under the Constitution.
- Writ of mandamus
A court order telling a government official to do a duty the law requires. Marbury asked the Supreme Court for one, to make Madison deliver his commission.
- Judiciary Act of 1801
Passed in February 1801 by the outgoing Federalist Congress. It created sixteen new federal judgeships, which Adams filled with Federalists before he left office. Jefferson's Congress repealed it in March 1802.
- Judicial review
The courts' power to decide whether a law or an official act is constitutional, and to void it if it isn't. First used on an act of Congress in Marbury v. Madison (1803).
- Impeachment of Samuel Chase
Republicans in the House impeached the Federalist justice over his partisan rulings and speeches. The Senate acquitted him in 1805. After that, judges weren't removed for their politics.
- Right of deposit
Under Pinckney's Treaty (1795), Spain let Americans store goods in New Orleans and ship them out without paying duty. Spain suspended that right in 1802.
- Treaty of San Ildefonso (1800)
A secret treaty in which Spain gave Louisiana back to France. Napoleon hoped to rebuild a French empire in North America, with New Orleans as its gate. The United States learned of it in 1801 to 1802.
- Haitian Revolution (1791–1804)
An uprising of enslaved people in Saint-Domingue that ended slavery there and created independent Haiti, declared January 1, 1804. Its success helped end Napoleon's plan for an empire in North America.
- Louisiana Purchase (1803)
The U.S. bought France's claim to Louisiana, about 828,000 square miles, for about $15 million. It doubled the country and raised a question: did the Constitution allow it?
- Strict construction
Reading the Constitution to allow the federal government only the powers it lists. Jefferson's Republicans favored it; Hamilton's Federalists favored a looser reading.
- Sub silentio
Latin for 'in silence.' Jefferson's instruction to Madison: the way around the Constitution's silence on buying land should be done quietly, with no public debate.
- Parties switch sides
In power, Jefferson's strict constructionists stretched federal power. Out of power, the Federalists defended its limits, fearing new western states would outvote New England.
- Treaty power
The president can make treaties 'by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate,' if two-thirds of the senators present agree. This one cleared that bar with room to spare.
- Corps of Discovery
The official name of the Lewis and Clark expedition (1804–1806): a military unit sent to map the West, study its land, animals and peoples, and make allies of its nations.
- Exploration and diplomacy
After the Purchase, the U.S. government sought influence and control in the West by exploring it and by holding councils, giving speeches and handing out flags and medals to the nations who lived there (KC-4.3.I.A.i).
- Continental Divide
The ridge line that splits North America's rivers. Water on the east side drains toward the Atlantic, water on the west side toward the Pacific. Jefferson hoped the crossing would be short and easy. It was neither.
- Treason (Article III)
The Constitution defines it narrowly: levying war against the United States or helping its enemies. A person can be convicted only on two witnesses to the same overt act, or on confession in open court.
- Federal supremacy
When a valid federal law and a state law conflict, the federal law wins. Article VI says so, and Marshall's Court enforced it against the states.
- Implied powers
Powers the Constitution doesn't list but that follow from the ones it does. In McCulloch, the Court said the 'necessary and proper' clause let Congress charter a national bank.
- Commerce clause
Article I, Section 8 gives Congress the power to regulate commerce among the states. In Gibbons, the Court read commerce broadly and ruled that a state monopoly cannot override a federal law.
Transcript
Quotes are from the historical record and name their source. Lines marked Dramatized are reconstructions.
Thirty-Six Ballots
1800 – March 1801
Key terms: Federalists, Democratic-Republicans, Two votes per elector, Twelfth Amendment (1804), Revolution of 1800
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
Key terms: Writ of mandamus, Judiciary Act of 1801, Judicial review, Impeachment of Samuel Chase
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
Key terms: Right of deposit, Treaty of San Ildefonso (1800), Haitian Revolution (1791–1804), Louisiana Purchase (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
Key terms: Strict construction, Sub silentio, Parties switch sides, Treaty power
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
Key terms: Corps of Discovery, Exploration and diplomacy, Continental Divide
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
Key terms: Treason (Article III), Federal supremacy, Implied powers, Commerce clause
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.