1796 United States presidential election

Candidates

With Washington retiring after two terms, both parties sought the presidency for the first time. Before the ratification of the 12th Amendment in 1804, each elector was to vote for two persons but was not able to indicate which vote was for president and which for vice president. Instead, the recipient of the most electoral votes would become president and the runner-up vice president. As a result, both parties ran multiple candidates for president, in hopes of keeping one of their opponents from being the runner-up. These candidates were the equivalent of modern-day running mates, but under the law, they were all candidates for president. Thus, both Adams and Jefferson were technically opposed by several members of their own parties. The plan was for one of the electors to cast a vote for the main party nominee (Adams or Jefferson) and a candidate besides the primary running mate, thus ensuring that the main nominee would have one more vote than his running mate.

Federalist candidates

The Federalists' nominee was John Adams of Massachusetts, the incumbent vice president and a leading voice during the Revolutionary period. Most Federalist leaders viewed Adams, who had twice been elected vice president, as Washington's natural heir. Adams's main running mate was Thomas Pinckney, a former governor of South Carolina who had negotiated the Treaty of San Lorenzo with Spain. Pinckney agreed to run after the first choice of many party leaders, former governor Patrick Henry of Virginia, declined. Alexander Hamilton, who competed with Adams for leadership of the party, worked behind the scenes to elect Pinckney over Adams by convincing Jefferson electors from South Carolina to cast their second votes for Pinckney. Hamilton did prefer Adams to Jefferson, and urged Federalist electors to cast their votes for Adams and Pinckney.

File:Official Presidential portrait of John Adams (by John Trumbull, circa 1792).jpg|John Adams, Vice President of the United States from Massachusetts File:Thomas Pinckney.jpg|Thomas Pinckney, U.S. Minister to Great Britain from South Carolina File:OliverEllsworth.jpg|Oliver Ellsworth, U.S. Chief Justice, from Connecticut File:John Jay (Gilbert Stuart portrait).jpg|John Jay, Governor of New York File:JamesIredell.jpg|James Iredell, Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, from North Carolina File:NC-Congress-SamuelJohnston.JPG|Samuel Johnston, former U.S. senator from North Carolina File:CharlesCPinckney crop.jpg|Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, U.S. Minister to France from South Carolina

Democratic-Republican candidates

The Democratic-Republicans united behind former secretary of state Thomas Jefferson, who had co-founded the party with James Madison and others in opposition to Hamilton's policies. Congressional Democratic-Republicans sought to also unite behind one vice-presidential nominee. With Jefferson's popularity strongest in the South, many party leaders wanted a Northern candidate as Jefferson's running mate. Popular choices included Senator Pierce Butler of South Carolina and three New Yorkers: Senator Aaron Burr, Chancellor Robert R. Livingston, and former governor George Clinton. A group of Democratic-Republican leaders met in June 1796 and agreed to support Jefferson for president and Burr for vice president.

File:ThomasJeffersonStateRoomPortrait.jpg|Thomas Jefferson, former secretary of state File:Burr (cropped 3x4).jpg|Aaron Burr, U.S. senator from New York File:Samuel Adams by John Singleton Copley.jpg|Samuel Adams, Governor of Massachusetts File:George Clinton by Ezra Ames (full portrait).jpg|George Clinton, former governor of New York

Results

Tennessee was admitted into the United States after the 1792 election, increasing the Electoral College to 138 electors.

Under the system in place before the 1804 ratification of the Twelfth Amendment, electors were to cast votes for two persons for president; the runner-up in the presidential race was elected vice president. If no candidate won votes from a majority of the Electoral College, the House of Representatives would hold a contingent election to select the winner. Each party intended to manipulate the results by having some of their electors cast one vote for the intended presidential candidate and one vote for someone besides the intended vice-presidential candidate, leaving their vice-presidential candidate a few votes shy of their presidential candidate. But all electoral votes were cast on the same day, and communications between states were extremely slow at that time, making it very difficult to coordinate which electors were to manipulate their vote for vice president. Additionally, there were rumors that Hamilton had coerced southern electors pledged to Jefferson to give their second vote to Pinckney in hope of electing him president instead of Adams.

Campaigning centered in the swing states of New York and Pennsylvania. Adams and Jefferson won a combined 139 electoral votes from the 138 members of the Electoral College. The Federalists swept every state north of the Mason–Dixon line except Pennsylvania, though one Pennsylvania elector voted for Adams. The Democratic-Republicans won the votes of most Southern electors, but the electors of Maryland and Delaware gave a majority of their votes to Federalist candidates, while North Carolina and Virginia each gave Adams one electoral vote.

Nationwide, most electors voted for Adams and a second Federalist or for Jefferson and a second Democratic-Republican, but there were several exceptions to this. One elector in Maryland voted for both Adams and Jefferson, and two electors cast votes for Washington, who had not campaigned and was not formally affiliated with either party. Pinckney won the second votes from most of the electors who voted for Adams, but 21 electors from New England and Maryland cast their second votes for other candidates, including Chief Justice Oliver Ellsworth. Those who voted for Jefferson were significantly less united in their second choice, though Burr won a plurality of the Jefferson electors. All eight electors in Pinckney's home state of South Carolina, as well as at least one Pennsylvania elector, cast their ballots for Jefferson and Pinckney. In North Carolina, Jefferson won 11 votes, but the remaining 13 were spread among six different candidates from both parties. In Virginia, most electors voted for Jefferson and Governor Samuel Adams of Massachusetts.

The result was that Adams received 71 electoral votes, one more than required to be elected president. If any two of the three Adams electors in Pennsylvania, Virginia, and North Carolina had voted with the rest of their states, it would have flipped the election. Jefferson received 68 votes, nine more than Pinckney, and was elected vice president. Burr finished in a distant fourth place with 30 votes. Nine other candidates received the remaining 48 electoral votes. If Pinckney had won the second votes of all of the New England electors who voted for Adams, he would have been elected president over Adams and Jefferson.

Source (Popular Vote): Source (Popular Vote): A New Nation Votes: American Election Returns 1787-1825 Source (Electoral Vote):

(a) Votes for Federalist electors have been assigned to John Adams and votes for Democratic-Republican electors have been assigned to Thomas Jefferson. (b) Only 9 of the 16 states used any form of popular vote. (c) Those states that did choose electors by popular vote had widely varying restrictions on suffrage via property requirements.

Electoral votes by state

As per the terms of the unamended constitution, each elector was permitted two votes for president, with a majority of "the whole number of electors appointed" necessary to elect a president. Of the 138 participating electors, 70 voted for Adams and some other candidate and 67 voted for Jefferson and some other candidate; one elector from Maryland voted for both Adams and Jefferson, bringing their respective totals to 71 and 68. With both parties' electors divided on their choice of a vice president, Jefferson finished second in the electoral vote ahead of Adams' intended running mate, Thomas Pinckney of South Carolina, making him vice president-elect.

Source: A New Nation Votes: American Election Returns 1787-1825

Popular vote by state

Compiling reliable popular vote statistics for elections of the First Party System poses a challenge to historians. Election procedures of the late 18th century differed greatly from those of later campaigns: rather than vote for a presidential candidate, voters chose from candidates running to represent their state in the electoral college. Candidates for elector did not always advertise a party preference or even for whom they intended to vote; in some districts, candidates from the same party were in direct competition, while in others, inconsistent support for all candidates of a party led states to split their electoral votes. These conditions make it difficult or impossible to determine voter intent in some cases. Moreover, some states' returns have not survived to the present day, meaning that national popular vote totals in this article are necessarily incomplete.

The table below calculates each state's popular vote by comparing the vote for the most popular Adams elector to that for the most popular Jefferson elector.

In Massachusetts, the best performing elector candidates for the First Western and Second Middle Districts, Simon Larned and James Winthrop respectively, were not selected by the Massachusetts General Court to be electors. Larned was a Democratic-Republican and Winthrop was a former Anti-Federalist.

The totals for Massachusetts and Virginia appear to be incomplete. In several states candidates of unknown affiliation received votes.

Sources: A New Nation Votes; Dubin, p. 6-8.

Maps

File:1796 Presidential County Results.svg|Map of presidential election results by county, shaded according to the vote share of the highest result for an elector of any given party File:1796 United States presidential election by electoral district.svg|Map of presidential election results by electoral district, shaded according to the vote share of the highest result for an elector of any given party. Electoral boundaries and data for Kentucky, Massachusetts, and North Carolina could not be found

Close states

States where the margin of victory was under 1% (15 electoral votes):

1. Pennsylvania, 0.4% (89 votes)

States where the margin of victory was under 5% (11 electoral votes):

1. Maryland, 4.0% (539 votes)

Consequences

The following four years were the only time that the president and vice president were from different parties. John Quincy Adams and John C. Calhoun were later elected president and vice-president as political opponents, but they were both Democratic-Republicans, and while Andrew Johnson, Abraham Lincoln's second vice-president, was a Democrat, Lincoln ran on a combined National Union Party ticket in 1864, not as a strict Republican.

On January 6, 1797, Representative William L. Smith of South Carolina presented a resolution on the floor of the House of Representatives for an amendment to the Constitution by which the presidential electors would designate which candidate would be president and which vice president. No action was taken on his proposal, setting the stage for the deadlocked election of 1800.

This is also the first of only two elections so far in the life of the Republic which elected a presidential term of only 1,460 days rather than 1,461 days (the second was in 1896). This is because of the Gregorian calendar rule that years ending in “00” but not divisible by 400, are not leap years.

Foreign influence

The French foreign minister, Charles Delacroix, wrote that France "must raise up the [American] people and at the same time conceal the lever by which we do so... I propose... to send orders and instructions to our minister plenipotentiary at Philadelphia to use all means in his power to bring about a successful revolution, and [George] Washington's replacement." The French minister (ambassador) to the United States, Pierre Adet, openly supported the Democratic-Republican Party and its presidential nominee, Thomas Jefferson, while attacking the Federalist Party and its presidential nominee, John Adams.

The foreign intrigue France perpetrated was unsuccessful, as Adams won the election with an electoral vote count of 71–68. A significant factor in thwarting the French efforts was George Washington's Farewell Address, which condemned foreign meddling in America.

Electoral college selection

Main article: List of 1796 United States presidential electors

The Constitution, in Article II, Section 1, provided that the state legislatures should decide the manner in which their Electors were chosen. Different state legislatures chose different methods:

Notes

References

Web references

• A New Nation Votes: American Election Returns 1787-1825

Primary sources

• Cunningham, Noble E., Jr. ed. The Making of the American Party System 1789 to 1809 (1965), short excerpts from primary sources
• Cunningham, Noble E., Jr., ed. Circular Letters of Congressmen to Their Constituents 1789-1829 (1978), 3 vol; political reports sent by Congressmen to local newspapers

References

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