The Great Decision

John Adams stepped into the carriage and looked back one last time at the President’s House, illuminated from the inside by candlelight and from the outside by a quarter moon under a clear, cold sky. It was four o’clock in the morning on Inauguration Day, March 4, 1801, but Adams had decided to forgo the ceremony to gain an early start for the long ride to his home in Massachusetts. He traveled by public coach, accompanied by two loyal aides, Billy Shaw and John Briesler. As the first president to be voted out of office, Adams apparently could not bear to witness the ascension of his successor.

Three hours later, as the first light of the day streamed through his window, the president-elect awoke in his rented room at the Conrad and McMunn boardinghouse across from the Capitol. At home in Monticello, Jefferson typically ate his breakfast—bread or corn cakes with cold ham—at around eight o’clock, and he probably did so on this day. Breakfast was served in the dining room with the other boarders, who sat at a long communal table. The most coveted seat was near the fireplace, but according to his friend Margaret Bayard Smith, Jefferson had “occupied during the whole winter the lowest and coldest seat” and on inauguration day “no other seat was offered to him.” After breakfast, he may have made some last-minute revisions to the third draft of the inaugural speech that he had been working on for the last two weeks, perhaps while soaking his feet in icy cold water, a ritual that he believed had medicinal value.

On the other side of the Capitol, Chief Justice John Marshall sat at the desk in his rented room at the Washington City Hotel. Marshall, who had moved out of the President’s House when John and Abigail Adams moved in, had a simple room with his most notable possession: a footlocker of documents and letters that Martha Washington had given him when she learned in December that he had undertaken to write a biography of the first president. But on this day Marshall began a letter to his friend, the failed Federalist vice presidential candidate, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney. Marshall, who had already been informed of President Adams’s departure, wrote: “Today the new political year commences. The new order of things begins. . . . I wish however more than I hope that the public prosperity and happiness may sustain no diminution under democratic guidance.” Marshall was not optimistic: “The democrats are divided into speculative theorists and absolute terrorists. With the latter I am not disposed to classify Mr. Jefferson. . . . [If Jefferson goes with the terrorists] it is not difficult to foresee that much calamity is in store for our country—if he does not they will soon become his enemies and calumniators.” At this point, Marshall paused and put down his pen. It was time for him to leave for the Capitol.

IN 1797, THOMAS JEFFERSON had seriously considered skipping his own swearing-in as vice president because he felt the ceremony too closely resembled the coronation of European royalty, which he viewed as anathema to American democracy. As the president-elect, he gave a great deal of thought to the kind of ceremony that he wanted for himself on March 4, 1801. He had written to Chief Justice Marshall two days earlier to ask if he would accept a temporary reappointment as secretary of state until his successor was in place. More important, in his letter to Marshall, Jefferson asked his cousin to administer the oath of office of the presidency. He also asked the chief justice whether “the oath prescribed in the Constitution be not the only one necessary to take.” Congress required that all Federal officers recite a much longer oath than that required for the presidency by the Constitution. After receiving the letter, Marshall had replied on the same day: “I shall with much pleasure attend to administer the oath of office . . . and shall make a point of being punctual.” Marshall also informed his cousin that State Department records “furnish no information respecting the oaths which have been heretofore taken. That prescribed in the Constitution seems to me to be the only one which is [appropriate].”

In planning the ceremony, Jefferson studied the inaugurations of George Washington and John Adams. Washington had ridden to his first ceremony in a grand carriage pulled by six white horses. Clad in his military uniform with a sword strapped to his side, he had cut a regal figure. Adams had decided on “a simple but elegant enough” carriage drawn by just two horses. Vowing to be “a republican President in earnest,” he had worn a suit of gray broadcloth and a cockaded hat, and he, too, had carried a sword at his side. Jefferson decided that he would differentiate himself from his predecessors; he wanted to send a signal to the American people that his administration would live up to the democratic ideals on which the nation had been founded. Jefferson wore a plain suit with no sword and no powdered wig or hat to cover his reddish, graying hair. Instead of riding in a carriage, he had decided to walk to the Capitol.

At just before eleven o’clock, he emerged from his boardinghouse and was cheered by a number of Republican congressmen and senators who had gathered to accompany him to the Senate chamber. Leading the procession for the short walk to the Capitol was the Alexandria militia and several U.S. marshals. It was a clear and mild day in Washington. Spring was in the air as the temperature hovered in the mid-fifties.

Conrad and McMunn’s was located on the south side of Capitol Hill and the parade could not have lasted more than fifteen minutes—along unpaved streets, up a hill, past a wooden fence that encircled the Capitol, and to the building’s entrance from which the president-elect was then escorted to the Senate chamber. Jefferson entered the chamber to thunderous applause from the Republicans and polite clapping on the part of the Federalists. He was led to the dais, where Aaron Burr and John Marshall were already seated. The two men stood to greet him and after perfunctory handshakes, Jefferson sat between them. Burr, who had tried to snatch the presidency from him, sat at his right; and Marshall, the cousin who openly disdained him, at his left.

As the room quieted, Vice President Burr, who had been sworn in earlier that day, rose to introduce the new president to the nearly 1,000 people who filled the Senate chamber. Jefferson was not an especially accomplished public speaker and he began his address in a nervous, “almost femininely soft” voice. People in the rear of the chamber leaned forward to hear him, but his tremulous voice did not carry beyond the first few rows. While he may have lacked oratorical skills, Thomas Jefferson was a masterful writer who understood the power of language, and his address on that day was an eloquent call for national healing and reconciliation. Jefferson had arranged for copies of his address to be printed. As many inside the hall read the speech they could not hear, the new president sounded a note of hope that, notwithstanding the political divisions within the country, so bitterly apparent during the recent election, all Americans would “arrange themselves under the will of the law and unite in common efforts for the common good.” Jefferson appealed to a broad nationalism when he said, “We are all republicans, we are all federalists.” He was referring not to political parties per se but, rather, to the principle that undergirds the particular form of American democracy—a commitment to the union and to republican government, which Jefferson called the “world’s best hope.”

Jefferson went on to address many broad themes that Americans, whatever their political affiliation, would probably have agreed with. Although he had been pilloried as a Francophile during the campaign, Jefferson now declared that he sought “peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations—entangling alliances with none.”

Jefferson then laid out what he “deem[ed] the essential principles of our Government,” declaring his support for “state governments in all the rights, as the most competent administration of our domestic concerns and the surest bulwarks against antirepublican tendencies; the preservation of the General Government in its whole constitutional vigor, as the sheet anchor of our peace at home and safety abroad.”

The new president never made any specific reference to the judiciary. Instead, he only briefly mentioned his support for “trials by juries impartially selected.” This is somewhat surprising given that, years earlier, he had written his friend James Madison about the Bill of Rights, noting the importance of putting “the legal check . . . into the hands of the judiciary.” As he then had prophesized, the judiciary “if rendered independent and kept strictly to their own department, merits great confidence for their learning and integrity.” Since that remark, however, Jefferson had seen the federal judiciary enforce the Alien and Sedition Acts and generally become identified in his mind with antidemocratic Federalists.

Rather than mention the judiciary in his inaugural address, Jefferson reached out to the “gentlemen, who are charged with the sovereign functions of legislation,” in whom he would “find resources of wisdom, of virtue, and of zeal on which to rely under all difficulties.” Since the House and the Senate were now filled with Republicans, Jefferson’s words were warmly received. But not everyone was impressed by the speech. Gouverneur Morris noted in his diary that it was “too long by half and so he will find himself before he is three years older.” The speech had taken less than thirty minutes to deliver, but Morris, portly and impatient, may have been reacting to the fact that the room was overcrowded, hot, and uncomfortable.

Morris’s complaint notwithstanding, when Jefferson concluded he was greeted with enthusiastic applause. Chief Justice Marshall then stood and held the Bible that Jefferson had designated for the occasion. After Marshall administered the presidential oath, Jefferson left the chamber and the Senate adjourned until the following day.

After the ceremony, Marshall returned to his hotel, where he finished his letter to Pinckney, adopting a far more optimistic tone than the one he’d used that morning when he had begun it. The chief justice considered Jefferson’s address “in general well judged and conciliatory. It is in direct terms giving the lie to the direct party declamation which has elected him: but it is strongly characteristic of the general cast of his political theory.”

PRESIDENT JEFFERSON did not occupy the President’s House for another few weeks, but well before his inauguration he had been making plans both for his new residence and for the government that he would head. Jefferson needed a personal and professional staff. He asked Meriwether Lewis, a young army officer from Virginia and a family friend, to serve as personal aide. On advice from his friends in the foreign diplomatic corps, Jefferson hired a French chef and a French steward. Next, he made arrangements to obtain “a handsome chariot for both city and country use.”

He also engaged in a great deal of correspondence—personally replying to the dozens of congratulatory letters, writing to old acquaintances in France (he entrusted the letters to his ally John Dickinson, who was travelling to Paris), and forwarding to former President Adams a stack of letters that had arrived after his departure from Washington. Just before his term expired, Congress adopted a law giving free postal service for all mail to Adams in his new role as a private citizen—“all letters and packets to John Adams, now President of the United States, after the expiration of his term of office, shall be carried by mail, free of postage.” Adams, who was both a prolific correspondent and a parsimonious yankee, welcomed the perquisite. Adams replied to Jefferson on March 24 that he was in a “state of tranquility” in Massachusetts and he wished Jefferson “a quiet and prosperous administration.”

Over the course of the next several weeks, President Jefferson began to fill out his cabinet, notably appointing his close friend and confidante, fellow Virginian James Madison as secretary of state, Albert Gallatin as secretary of the treasury, and Levi Lincoln as attorney general. The appointments were well received, especially by Republicans such as Congressman John Fowler of Kentucky, who, in a letter to his constituents, described his “unspeakable satisfaction and universal confidence in the talents and integrity of the new administration.”

Unlike President Adams, who felt compelled to hold over many of President Washington’s cabinet members, Jefferson had the freedom to appoint an entirely new government. Despite the fact that he hailed from Federalist Massachusetts, Levi Lincoln was a loyal Republican who had served several terms in the state house of representatives and in the state senate before being elected to the U.S. Congress. Harvard-educated, he was also a fine lawyer who was involved in some of the most important legal cases in the history of the state, notably The Commonwealth v. Nathaniel Jenison, dealing with the claimed right to own a slave in clear opposition to the state’s Bill of Rights. Lincoln successfully argued against the legality of slavery in Massachusetts. Jefferson thought highly of Lincoln and not only appointed him attorney general but asked him to assume the duties of acting secretary of state—replacing Chief Justice John Marshall—until James Madison arrived in Washington.

While he maintained a low profile as secretary of state, James Madison was President Jefferson’s closest adviser during his presidency. Jefferson once remarked, “I can say conscientiously that I do not know in the world a man of purer integrity, more dispassionate, disinterested . . . nor could I in the whole scope of America or Europe point out an abler head.”

Born in 1751 in Port Conway, Virginia, Madison graduated from Princeton College, completing a four-year course in just two years. Like many of his contemporaries, he studied law and subsequently entered politics, winning a seat in the Virginia House of Delegates while still in his mid-20s. Madison lost his bid for reelection when he refused to set up barrels of whiskey at polling places, insisting instead that he would win because voters preferred his views on the issues. But state leaders thought so highly of Madison that they immediately arranged for his appointment to the Governor’s Council, a nonelective body with significant influence.

Five feet four inches tall and weighing only 100 pounds, he did not cut an imposing figure. Moreover, he was painfully shy. Yet Madison had a disarming quality about him that undermined his opponents, calmed his competitors, and enthralled his admirers, including, to the surprise of many, at least one charismatic member of the opposite sex. His wife, Dolley Madison, was buxom, vivacious, and smart; she was a 26-year-old widow when she met and quickly married the slight, pale congressman who was seventeen years older than her.

Madison was unfailingly polite and gentle, but also demonstrably brilliant. He had a significant hand in many of the fundamental decisions that shaped the new republic. He played an important role in drafting the Constitution, earning him the title “Father of the Constitution”, and made a major contribution to its adoption by collaborating with Alexander Hamilton and John Jay to write the Federalist essays. He and Hamilton became close friends, but subsequently had a falling-out over political and policy differences when Hamilton became secretary of the treasury.

Madison served eight years in Congress and helped frame the Bill of Rights. Working with Thomas Jefferson, the two Virginians organized the Republican Party in response to the Federalists and in 1798, secretly co-authored the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions to protest the Alien and Sedition laws. Madison and Jefferson were not only colleagues, they were close friends and enjoyed spending time together. Jefferson often loaned books to Madison.

Madison did not attend the inauguration of Thomas Jefferson: His father, who had lingered near death for several weeks, died days before the ceremony, and it was several more weeks before Madison assumed his duties as Jefferson’s secretary of state. When Madison finally did return to the nation’s capital, Jefferson invited him and Dolley to live in the President’s House. With only Meriwether Lewis occupying the East Room of the large house, Jefferson may have been lonely: He wrote his daughter that he and Lewis were “like two mice in a church.” The Madisons moved into the grand residence for several months and Dolley often acted as hostess at afternoon teas and dinners.

With the naming of Jefferson’s cabinet, the “quiet revolution” was nearly complete. In his Farewell Address in 1796, President Washington had warned “in the most solemn manner against the baleful effects of the spirit of party.” But political parties representing divergent political philosophies had taken root in America, and notwithstanding Washington’s foreboding, the leadership of government had changed hands democratically and peacefully. Both the Legislative and Executive branches of the government were now in the control of the Republican Party. The judiciary, the weakest branch of government, remained the last bastion of Federalist power.