• The political propaganda and hot-button issues of today’s presidential elections were foreshadowed in the election of 1800.
• In 1800, each party claimed that despotism would ensue if the opposing side won.
• Intraparty scheming led to an attempt to replace the incumbent as the candidate of the Federalists.
• The Republican victor’s answers to concerns about despotism were limited government and the protection of constitutional freedoms.
• Political rivals were ultimately able to forgive the acrimony of 1800 and reunite the country.

​Presidential elections were born in innocence. The United States did not see a partisan presidential election until its third election.

But when it came in 1796, it came between old friends – and by the time the fourth presidential election arrived four years later, it rose to a level of bitterness and backstabbing to rival any in American history. Today’s campaign rhetoric (“Crooked Joe” and “idiot president” versus “sucker,” “loser” and “a threat to our freedom … to democracy … to everything America stands for”) would be de rigueur in the Adams-Jefferson contest of 1800.

Beyond the heated rhetoric and general public derangement, there are other remarkable parallels to today’s presidential elections. The hot-button issues of 1800 included: accusations of collusion with foreign powers; consternation about immigrants; speculation about whether one party or the other would impose a dictatorship; the Federalists’ suppression of free speech and weaponization of the government against political enemies; and an intraparty scheme to replace the incumbent with a new candidate. And while there was no assassination attempt, the war of words between two leading figures led to the shooting death of one of the most significant personages of the founding era.

But the resolution would launch the nation toward a period of relative comity and concord. Can we reach a similar destination in our age?

Friends become enemies

Though of different temperaments, regions and social backgrounds, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were forged together in the fire of the War of Independence. Adams sat at Jefferson’s elbow as he drafted the Declaration of Independence. Both served as leaders in the Second Continental Congress. Both held pivotal diplomatic posts in Europe. Adams served as vice president under George Washington; Jefferson served as secretary of state.

When Washington was first elected in 1788, there were no formal political parties, and he was reelected without opposition.

But in 1793, a war between England and France brought to the surface a deep-seated tension in the American economy between agrarian interests and mercantile interests. Jefferson and his idealistic “Republicans” (also known as the Democratic-Republicans) took the side of the French; Adams and the appalled “Federalists” took the side of the English.

In 1796, supporters of the two men put them forward as opponents in the first of two bouts for the presidency. The first match went to Adams, with Jefferson coming in second place and thereby serving as vice president under the peculiar approach of that time. Jefferson had put up little resistance and professed to be uncovetous of the presidency, though he privately expressed concerns about the rising “Anglican, monarchical and aristocratical party” – a “heresy” against the American spirit in which he implied even Washington was participating.

With the battle lines drawn, hostilities surged. In 1798, on the floor of Congress, a Federalist representative from Connecticut insulted a Republican from Vermont, who responded by spitting in the Federalist’s face. The Federalist took up a cane and the Republican grabbed tongs from the fireplace, and the two tangled like schoolboys until colleagues were able to pull them apart.

“Men who have been intimate all their lives,” Jefferson observed, now “cross the streets to avoid meeting and turn their heads another way, lest they should be obliged to touch their hats.” He referred to the Adams-Hamilton regime (as he viewed it) as a “reign of witches.”

There were brawls in the streets between the two political factions. Civil war was openly discussed.

Then the Federalists poured oil on the fire. With arch-Federalist Alexander Hamilton beating the war drums against France, Congress passed the notorious Alien and Sedition Acts. The Sedition Act made criminal any “false, scandalous, and malicious writing” against the government or any attempt “to excite against them … the hatred of the good people of the United States.” So much for the First Amendment: In short order, the Federalists weaponized the act against the Republicans. Under the act, the Congressional “spitter” from Vermont was prosecuted. By 1800, another 11 people who spoke or printed the wrong words were convicted.

The intent, Jefferson observed, was “to cripple and suppress the Republican efforts during the campaign which is coming on. In the meantime, their own batteries are teeming with every falsehood they can invent for defamation.” He characterized the Sedition Act as “an experiment” to see what Americans would tolerate; if tolerated, he predicted Adams would be made president for life and his sons made heirs to a presidential throne.

At its peril, the Republican press howled. One essayist called Adams a “hideous hermaphroditical character” and an “egregious fool.”

The Federalists, for their part, castigated the Republicans as “Jacobins,” “sons of faction, demagogues and high priests of anarchy” who were certain to overthrow the government within the year. Federalist propaganda described Jefferson as an atheist, a libertine, a weakling, a coward and a wannabe-Frenchman who trafficked in “arts and lies” and who had cheated clients when he was a young lawyer. They accused him of colluding with the French to Jacobinize America. (In that vein, the Alien Acts of 1798 sought to circumscribe the growing ranks of French immigrants.) Even Martha Washington bought in, describing Jefferson as “one of the most detestable of mankind.” And the first president himself, a couple of months before his death, complained of the Republicans that “whoever is not on their side must expect to be loaded with all the calumny that malice can invent.”

However, the Hamiltonian wing of the Federalists, disgusted by Adams’ failure to adequately embrace war against France, turned on him. Hamilton blamed the country’s problems on “the ungovernable temper of Mr. Adams” and his “unfitness” for the presidency. His faction secretly plotted to enlist Washington to replace Adams. Washington rejected this scheme, warning that “if principles, instead of men, are not the steady pursuit of the Federalists, their cause will soon be at an end.”

He couldn’t have known how right he was. Following the election, there were months of uncertainty as to which Republican – Jefferson and Burr had tied in the Electoral College – would win the support of Federalists in the House of Representatives and ascend to the presidency. Jefferson won, Burr became vice president (and then killed Hamilton in a duel), and the long reign of the Democratic-Republican Party began. After the election of 1800, the Federalists would not hold the presidency again, and their slow death had begun.

Binding up the nation’s wounds

In victory, Jefferson renounced the spirit of faction that had roiled American politics. In his inaugural address on March 4, 1801, he said, “Let us then, fellow citizens, unite with one heart and one mind, let us restore to social intercourse that harmony and affection without which liberty, and even life itself, are but dreary things. … We have called by different names brethren of the same principle. We are all republicans: we are all federalists.”

To quell public fear of despotism in the federal government, he promised – well, less federal government: frugal spending and limited debts; an avoidance of militarism and “entangling alliances”; the “support of the state governments in all their rights”; “constitutional vigor”; equal justice; and First Amendment protections.

In time, Adams and Jefferson would resume their friendship through perhaps the most treasured postal correspondence in American history. Both died on the same day, July 4, 1826 – the 50th anniversary of the Declaration. Adams’ last words: “Thomas Jefferson survives.”

But by then, after a quarter-century of one-party rule and an era of “good feelings,” a new era of faction was unfolding.

This article is the first in a series on past presidential elections.