Becoming Modern

Results of the Presidential Election of 1800

While the Presidential election of 1800 was essentially a do-over from the previous election with the same candidates for President and Vice President, certain other aspects had changed from the prior election besides the outcome. 

As a result of the escalation of partisan competition at the state level, there was a reworking of the rules that states used to appoint their presidential electors.^[1]  Four states (Georgia, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Pennsylvania) switched from statewide popular vote determining the appointment of electors to direct appointment by the stale legislature.  They joined with Connecticut, Vermont, New York, New Jersey, Delaware, South Carolina, and (in its own special way) Tennessee, resulting in eleven states appointing electors by the state legislature process.  Two states (Rhode Island and Virginia) also changed their process by adopted statewide popular voting, thus joining with Kentucky, Maryland, and North Carolina.

A table with the voting result in those states where the popular vote determined the electors to the Electoral College is below; voters were mainly white male property owners, a significant minority of the population.  Total number of recorded votes were 75,012.  Of which 45,714 voted for Jefferson (61%), and 29,298 voted for Adams (39%).  By way of comparison, the U.S. census count for 1800 was 5,308,483 people were living in the United States, of whom 893,602 were slaves.

Popular Vote by State:^[2]

An interesting aspect of the 1800 campaign was the absence of any substantive debate on issues related to indigenous people (who were denied the ability to vote) or about slavery despite both parties being deeply split by the issue.

Although Jefferson, Burr and Pinckney owned slaves (Adams did not), and Hamilton despised slavery, there was little appetite for a discussion about slavery in the respective campaigns.  In this election, none of the candidates argued about the right under various state laws authorizing slavery or made any campaign proposals to end such practices.  There was some general whispering campaign gossip “that all southern slave masters were known to cohabit with slave women and that the Sage of Monticello was no exception”.^[3]  It was only two years later, after the 1800 election, that James Callender wrote an article alleging that Jefferson had kept his slave Sally Hemings, as his mistress, which remained a persistent rumor until the advent of DND testing 200 hundred years later.^[4]  The only closely related event generating any public discourse was a small slave rebellion in Virginia led by a man known as Gabriel.  It was quickly extinguished by Governor James Madison, a key supporter of Jefferson and the Republican Party.  It did, however, generate some partisan debate over the Governor’s handling of the uprising, and the mass hangings of the participants in that affair.^[5]