MOST OF US LIVE in our own world rather than the world that brought it into being, so we tend to assume that our problems are unprecedented. The rage on the right that descended over the United States upon Barack Obama’s 2009 inauguration—the analogies to Nazism and socialism, the questioning of the president’s citizenship, the insistence that he was a Muslim (“Islamapologist-in-Chief”)—seemed to many on the left to be wholly new.1 But American politics has always been infused with the animal spirits of morality and religion, which when mixed have created a volatile cocktail: an absolutist politics of good and evil in which anxiety is palpable, compromise is elusive, and the metaphors are martial—culture as war. For this sort of politics, nothing tops the presidential elections of 1796 and 1800, when political feuds led to fisticuffs and founding fathers denounced one another as enemies of the state.
Here, just years after the founding, we see the culture wars cycle start to spin. Conservatives in John Adams’s Federalist Party attacked Thomas Jefferson’s religion. Jeffersonians in the Democratic-Republican Party—the liberals in this fight—counterattacked. According to the Constitution, there can be no religious test for the presidency. But can voters impose one? Is the United States a religiously plural nation with a godless Constitution? Or is it a Christian nation under the watchful eye of the Endower of unalienable rights? But the questions in this culture war were not confined to theology (or theocracy). They concerned as well the passing away of a society of white, Protestant, New England men—a hierarchical society rooted in colonial Puritanism, held together by a culture of deference, supported by clerical and business elites, and governed by the wise, the virtuous, and the wealthy. The cultural commitments of this society, in which free citizens turned out to vote on Election Day only to agree to be governed by their betters, included “pride of race, distrust of money-getting men, fears of ‘leveling,’ and suspicion of aliens.”2 Preserving these values was the Federalists’ lost cause.
The American Revolution had let loose a torrent of egalitarianism and diversity. The Jeffersonians tapped into that centrifugal force, directing its expansive energies into party politics. The Federalists, defenders of a waning centripetal order (an ancien régime of their own), were determined to hold this torrent back—to stanch rule by “the worthless, the dishonest, the rapacious, the vile, the merciless and the ungodly.”3 Jefferson they saw as a Jacobin from the South, the standard-bearer of a foreign culture of impiety, vice, and guttersnipe party politics.
As they fought over competing visions of their new republic—as they struggled to determine what America was to become—Federalists and Jeffersonians debated not only who should be included in the American family but also who should lead it. Those who cast their ballots in the elections of 1796 and 1800 would not settle these questions for all time, but they would decide that even heretics like Jefferson could be patriots. In fact, they could be president.
DURING THE AMERICAN Revolution, colonists had come together to oppose England’s King George III, whom they accused in their Declaration of Independence of “a long train of abuses . . . scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages.” When that war was over—after Paul Revere had concluded his midnight ride, and the minutemen were done firing on the redcoats at Lexington and Concord, and town criers had read every word of the Declaration aloud, and the ink on the Treaty of Paris had dried, and the tea floating in Boston Harbor had been eaten by fish who were then eaten by free citizens—Americans united under a different man. The general who had crossed the Delaware and endured that horrible winter at Valley Forge was revered as president when representatives of “we the people” gathered in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787 to craft a Constitution in order to form “a more perfect union.”
This union would never be perfect, of course, and the vexed compromises that attended the drafting of the Constitution—between federal and state power, between a more aristocratic Senate and a more democratic House, between slaveholding and antislavery states, and between proponents and opponents of established religion—by no means buried the differences. In fact, they were the seeds of bitter partisan fruit to come. Nonetheless, in its early years the United States largely lived up to its motto: e pluribus unum (“out of many, one”). And the magician behind that sleight of hand was the Great Unifier, George Washington.
This “Patriot King” won the presidency by acclamation in 1788 and 1792, but long before and after his eight-year reign, he was the father among the founders, a symbol of the unity of the states and the unifying icon of the nation that would come to grace its capital city with his name.4 America’s patriarch did more than symbolize national unity, however. He labored to foster moderation and civility in his own cabinet and beyond. Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton—the two great thinkers serving under Washington—were, according to Jefferson, “daily pitted in the cabinet like two cocks.”5 They fought about such matters as a national bank and the French Revolution, and about the ideas—liberty, equality, republicanism—that were coming to define America. In an August 23, 1792, letter to Jefferson, Washington begged for “charity for the opinions and acts of one another in governmental matters.”6 Three days later, in a letter to Hamilton, he pleaded for a “middle course”—for “mutual forbearances and temporising yieldings on all sides.” “Without these,” Washington wrote, “I do not see how the Reins of Government are to be managed, or how the Union of the States can be much longer preserved.”7
Washington did manage to hold the union together, but his vision of a politics of civility and moderation, free of “party animosities,”8 proved to be quixotic as the nation split for the first time into a political Left (the Jeffersonians) and a political Right (the Federalists). Historians disagree on the temperature of the partisanship that flared up during Washington’s second term, but nearly all resort to metaphors of combustion to describe, as one put it, “the partisan fires that blazed like a raging inferno” through much of the 1790s.9
The French Revolution, which saw the storming of the Bastille in 1789 and the guillotining of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette in 1793, stoked that inferno, as partisans of British-loving Federalists, on the one hand, and French-loving Jeffersonians, on the other, worked the bellows from both sides. But domestic crises also roiled the nation. Washington’s decision to meet the antitax resistance movement known as the Whiskey Rebellion with force—he led a militia of nearly thirteen thousand men (larger than the army he commanded in the Revolution) into western Pennsylvania in 1794—and then to denounce the rebels as “incendiaries of public peace and order,”10 cheered Federalists keen on a strong federal government. But this show of force angered Democratic-Republicans ever wary of centralized military and economic power.
After deciding not to seek a third presidential term, Washington published a farewell address on September 19, 1796. Solemnly warning “against the baneful effects of the spirit of party,” he described the emergent party system as the “worst enemy” of government and factionalism as a sort of hell: a “fire not to be quenched,” in his paraphrase of the Gospel of Mark (9:44-48). Of the spirit of party, he wrote:
It serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration. It agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which finds a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passions.
Long before Washington had retired to Mount Vernon, however, efforts to “discourage and restrain” the “mischiefs of the spirit of party” had failed.11 As the refined Deism of the founding period gave way to evangelical enthusiasm, the unquenchable fire of partisan politics burst into flames during the election of 1796, and during the election of 1800 those flames threatened to consume the nation. The political battle between Federalists on the right and Democratic-Republicans on the left turned into a cosmic battle between God and the devil, and America’s first culture war was on.
IN BOTH OF these pivotal elections—1796 and 1800—the principals were John Adams, who had served as vice president under Washington, and Thomas Jefferson, who had been Washington’s secretary of state. The parties were Adams’s Federalists, who had run the country from the start, and Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans, who drew their strength from an odd combination of religious minorities (Baptists and Methodists) and nascent Democratic-Republican societies committed to citizen liberty. The elephant in the room was the French Revolution, which had produced, first, a Reign of Terror that had left tens of thousands dead and, later, a dechristianization campaign that sought to break the chain of memory between the French people and their Roman Catholic past by seizing church lands, forcing priests and nuns to marry, and rechristening the Notre-Dame Cathedral the Temple of Reason. The French Revolution also produced modern Anglo-American conservatism, classically articulated in Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). In the United States, events in France alarmed Federalists and inspired a Gothic literature that would resurface in later fights over Catholicism, Mormonism, and slavery. In this case, conservatives prophesied streets of blood, fields of corpses, and guillotined heads if their ordered culture of deference were displaced by the Jeffersonians’ anarchic culture of radical egalitarianism. Jefferson was according to the Federalists the gateway drug to this “terrorism,” and to the unbelief that had made it all possible. According to many Democratic-Republicans, however, it was Adams who was opening the “sluices of terrorism”—by supplanting liberty and democracy with aristocracy and monarchy.12
America’s first culture war would eventually extend to a battle on the House floor (instigated by a shot of tobacco spit to the eye) between a Connecticut Federalist brandishing a hickory cane and a Vermont Democratic-Republican wielding fireplace tongs; a deadly pistol duel between a former secretary of the treasury and a sitting vice president; and all manner of rumors, lies, and conspiracy theories. It would be aided and abetted by increased political activity and an expanding public square, which saw the nation’s newspapers swell from under one hundred to well over two hundred during the 1790s.
Virtually all of these newspapers were unapologetically partisan, “delighting and indulging in all manner of abusive, extravagant, witty, hyperbolic, outrageous, obscene, and ad hominem attacks.”13 The discourse that energized this expanding public square sounded more like Bill O’Reilly on FOX News in the 2010s than Edward Murrow on CBS in the 1950s. (The Federalist Gazette of the United States called Jeffersonians “the very refuse and filth of society” while the Democratic-Republican Philadelphia Aurora judged Adams “blind, bald, crippled, toothless.”14) It spread via its own sort of web, which extended in this case to popular pamphlets and not-so-private letters (the blogs of the day), all circulating through close to one thousand post offices (up from only seventy-five at the start of the 1790s).15 In these media, everyone was spinning for one cause or another. “Public discussions” in this era, Jefferson later observed, “were conducted by the parties with animosity, a bitterness, and an indecency, which had never been exceeded.”16 Or as Niles’ Weekly Register put it, “They called us ‘jacobins’—we called them ‘tories’—they called us ‘Frenchmen’ and we called them ‘Englishmen’; and, with the use of these repulsive terms, we could not come together, in peace, on any public occasion.”17
Even Washington came under not-so-friendly fire. “If ever a nation was debauched by a man, the American nation has been debauched by Washington; if ever a nation was deceived by a man, the American nation has been deceived by Washington,” editor Benjamin Franklin Bache wrote in his Aurora shortly before Washington’s retirement.18 After Washington stepped down, Bache added that “every heart in unison with the freedom and happiness of the people, ought to beat high with exultation that the name of Washington from this day ceases to give a currency to political iniquity, and to legalize corruption.”19 Such invective earned Bache a beating, both literally and otherwise. Federalist journalist William Cobbett called him “a liar; a fallen wretch; a vessel formed for reprobation” before concluding that “therefore we should always treat him as we would a TURK, a JEW, a JACOBIN or a DOG.”20 Bache was also physically attacked, both in his offices and in the Philadelphia streets. He was later arrested for “libeling the President & the Executive Government, in a manner tending to excite sedition.”21 He died of yellow fever while awaiting trial.
The election of 1796, America’s first real presidential race, pitted Adams and Thomas Pinckney of the Federalists against Jefferson and Aaron Burr of the Democratic-Republicans. Adams and Jefferson were once close friends, and as was customary at the time, neither campaigned. Jefferson sequestered himself at his Monticello estate in Virginia; Adams stayed close to home near Boston, Massachusetts. So neither delivered any stump speeches or kissed any babies. Their partisans pulled no punches, however, and thought nothing of hitting below the belt. The future of America was at stake, and the two parties had opposing visions.
Led by Hamilton, who would later find his way onto the ten-dollar bill, the Federalists backed a strong national bank, a strong executive branch, a strong judiciary, and a strong Senate. Though they agreed not to use federal power to support any Protestant denomination, they supported state religious establishments, such as Episcopalianism in South Carolina and Congregationalism in Connecticut. In disputes between England and France, they sided with England, and they mistrusted all who trusted godless France. Elitists at heart, they feared mob rule and believed in government by the best and the brightest. Their key words were “security,” “order,” and “stability,” and they believed that deference to the well born, well bred, well read, and well wed was essential to each. Federalists blasted their opponents as France-loving anarchists willing and eager to sacrifice social order on the altar of liberty. So they recoiled when Jefferson responded to an antitax revolt in Massachusetts called Shays’s Rebellion by writing (to John Adams’s wife, Abigail), “I like a little revolution now and then.”22 The Federalists also presented themselves as the anti-party party, anxious, like Washington, about “the mischiefs of the spirit of party.” But that was just their way of playing partisan politics—an effort to disqualify Jeffersonians on procedural grounds before the fighting began.
Unlike the Federalists, who were popular with New England merchants, the Jeffersonians were popular with Southern farmers. They favored agriculture over industry and commerce. They preached low taxes, limited government, and popular sovereignty. They opposed a national bank. If the Federalists feared the tyranny of the people, Jeffersonians feared the tyranny of government (though, it should be noted, their emphasis on majority rule extended only to white males with property). Jeffersonians read the controversial Jay Treaty, negotiated in 1794 with England by Supreme Court Chief Justice John Jay, as a betrayal of the Declaration of Independence—proof positive of the Federalists’ secret passion for monarchy and aristocracy. Their key word was “liberty,” which in their view could be secured only by representative government, states’ rights, and separation of the federal government from church life. According to Jefferson, Federalists were Tories in disguise—“an Anglican, monarchical and aristocratical party” consisting of “timid men who prefer the calm of despotism to the boisterous sea of liberty.”23
In retrospect, the gap between these two parties seems to have been bridgeable. Yes, they called on different strains of American identity, with Federalists tapping into Massachusetts Bay Colony governor John Winthrop’s call in his Arbella sermon for organic order and Jeffersonians stressing “the sacred cause of liberty.”24 They disagreed on foreign policy, religion’s role in political life, the right size of the federal government, and the proper burden of taxation. Still, they might have found room for compromise. They might have seen in the election of 1796 different interpretations of shared ideals rather than a black-and-white battle between good and evil. The individual liberty so prized by Jeffersonians and the social order coveted by Federalists are plainly needs of all modern societies. And both parties understood that the Constitution secured some mix of states’ rights and federal power. So they were arguing over the recipe, not the ingredients. Nonetheless, each side was quick to see its opponents as agents of foreign powers, traitors to the nation, and betrayers of Revolution and Constitution alike. In this way, they led the United States into its first and most florid culture war.
Today Jefferson’s face adorns Mount Rushmore alongside Washington, Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt. He is lauded for inventing the nation (as the principal author of the Declaration of Independence) and then reinventing it (via the Louisiana Purchase, which set the country on its march to the Pacific). Yet even in 1796 he had enjoyed a long and distinguished career in public service. In fact, his credentials—delegate to the Continental Congress, governor of Virginia, envoy to France, secretary of state—were surpassed only by Washington himself.
Nonetheless, Federalists attacked him as un-American. An unmanly coward and a woolly intellectual, Jefferson had turned tail in Monticello in 1781 rather than face British invaders, they argued. His talents were largely literary and scientific, and his thoughts ran to abstract philosophy, not pragmatic politics. Federalists also attacked Jefferson as a traitor, a stealth abolitionist, a cheat in business, an erstwhile dictator, and a spendthrift who ran up massive personal debts. They even blamed him for the bitterness of the new party politics, on the theory that the Federalists were the only party the United States needed or could endure. South Carolina Federalist Robert Goodloe Harper called Jefferson “a weak, wavering, indecisive character,” fit, perhaps, “to be a professor in a College, President of a Philosophical Society, or even Secretary of State; but certainly not the first magistrate of a great nation.”25
The lowest blows concerned Jefferson’s faith. Federalists read his call for national church–state separation—his disestablishmentarianism—as a fig leaf over his alleged atheism. He was, after all, a friend of Thomas Paine, that “filthy little atheist” (Theodore Roosevelt’s words) who had described the religions of the world as “human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.”26 Federalists were committed to preserving a uniform and hierarchical social order, which rested on a culture of deference. So their attacks on Jefferson’s faith were not just attacks on heresy. They were defenses of clerical elites.
This fight for Federalist culture was made urgent by the terrors of the French Revolution, which illustrated to many conservatives what happened when a society gave up on God and deference. To be an American, in their view, was to oppose the godlessness and “leveling” of the French Revolution. By this measure, Jefferson was no American. “We are not Frenchmen,” wrote a critic from Connecticut, “and until the Atheistical Philosophy of a certain great Virginian shall become the fashion (which God in his mercy forbid) we shall never be.”27
When the vitriol gave way to voting, Adams won 71 electoral votes to Jefferson’s 68. According to historian Jeffrey Pasley, this election established two key precedents:
It set the geographic pattern of New England competing with the South at the two extremes of American politics with the geographically intermediate states deciding between them. It established the basic ideological dynamic of a democratic, rights-spreading American “left” arranged against a conservative, social order–protecting “right,” each with its own competing model of leadership.28
Today New England is associated with the Left and the South with the Right, but in 1796 these roles were reversed: New England (where Jefferson won zero electoral votes) was the homeland of the Federalists, and the South (where Adams garnered only two votes) was the homeland of the Democratic-Republicans.
TWO YEARS AFTER this 1796 election, Rev. Timothy Dwight, Yale’s president and a staunch Federalist, was still preaching a politics of fear and anxiety. Should the “enemies of Christ” (the Democratic-Republicans) ever come to power, he prophesied, America could well see the end of both religion and family:
We may see the Bible cast into a bonfire, . . . our children, either wheedled or terrified, uniting in the mob, chanting mockeries against God . . . our wives and daughters the victims of legal prostitution; soberly dishonoured; speciously polluted; the outcasts of delicacy and virtue, and the lothing of God and man.29
That same year, Jefferson, in a letter to his daughter Martha, lamented the “rancorous passions” of even women in Philadelphia: “Politics and party hatreds destroy the happiness of every being here.”30 Virginia’s Patrick Henry, in his last public speech, delivered in March 1799, tried (in vain) to cool this partisan fever. “United we stand, divided we fall,” he said. “Let us not split into factions which must destroy that union upon which our existence hangs. Let us preserve our strength for the French, the English, the Germans, or whoever else shall dare invade our territory, and not exhaust it in civil commotions and intestine wars.”31
A few months later, Washington fell ill after riding a horse through a snowstorm. On December 14, 1799, after a series of ineffectual treatments, including the draining of perhaps half of his blood, the only man who had any chance of uniting this no longer indivisible nation was gone. There was grief, of course, and thirty days of official mourning after “the Father of His Country” spoke his final words (“’Tis well.”).32
But all was not well. America’s seat of government was moving at the time from Philadelphia to the “Federal City in the District of Columbia.” Washington’s secretary of treasury Oliver Wolcott Jr. complained that there was “no industry, society, or business” there. “Most of the inhabitants are low people,” he wrote, “and as far as I can judge, they live like fishes, by eating each other.”33 And so it went with the politicians maneuvering to move there. As the election of 1800 loomed and Washington metamorphosed into memory, America remained dangerously divided.
THE ELECTION OF 1800 was a turning point in U.S. history.34 It pitted a president against a vice president. It took negative campaigning to historic lows. It ended in a tie that produced a constitutional crisis. And it bequeathed to subsequent generations the ways and means of the culture wars.
There were some new issues. Congress had voted in May 1798 for a “Provisional Army” of ten thousand soldiers and in July of that same year for an “Additional Army” of twelve infantry regiments and six mounted infantry companies—all to combat a possible invasion by France, which had been making sport of capturing American ships. But Democratic-Republicans feared that the mustering of these forces was one giant step toward a standing army, which might be used against their fellow citizens. Also hotly debated were the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, which outlawed the publication of “any false, scandalous and malicious writing” against the U.S. government or its elected officials and empowered the president to deport almost any foreigner for almost any reason.
As in later culture wars, conservatives scapegoated immigrants as “hordes of ruffians” and “revolutionary vermin.”35 Washington had justified legislation against these undesirables by accusing them of “poisoning the minds of our people, and sowing dissensions among them.”36 Jeffersonians had responded by accusing the Federalists of attempting to “excite a fervor against foreign aggression only to establish tyranny at home.”37 They then passed resolutions in Kentucky (written by Jefferson) and Virginia (written by James Madison) declaring these acts unconstitutional and therefore null and void.
Federalists, meanwhile, accused their opponents of sedition. But with each arrest for this crime—twenty-five in total, almost all of them of Jeffersonian journalists—came a growing outcry that the Federalists were abusing their power. According to Democratic-Republicans, these arrests betrayed not only the Spirit of 1776 but also the First Amendment of 1791 by, in essence, outlawing the opposition press.
None of these new issues changed the basic conflict, however. Once again, it was Adams and the Federalists versus Jefferson and the Democratic-Republicans. Once again, each side resorted to battlefield metaphors to describe the contest. (Federalist John Ward Fenno called it “a warfare of confusion against order, an insurrection of every vile propensity, against every good.”38)
The election of 1796 had been held in the aftermath of the Reign of Terror and the beheading of Louis XVI. This time the news of the day was the November 9, 1799, coup d’état of Napoleon Bonaparte. Democratic-Republicans pointed to rising navy and army appropriations as proof that the United States was aping France’s military dictatorship. Again, Federalist rhetoric approached the apocalyptic. “Behold France, that open hell, still ringing with agonies and blasphemies, still smoking with sufferings and crimes, in which we see their state of torment, and perhaps our future state,” wrote Massachusetts Federalist Fisher Ames. If the “mobocracy” should triumph, “the people would be crushed, as in France, under tyranny more vindictive, unfeeling, and rapacious, than that of Tiberius, Nero, or Caligula.”39
Character assassination persisted, but this time the smears were more partisan and more personal, with the Federalist Connecticut Courant telling its readers to think of each and every Jeffersonian “as a ravening wolf, preparing to enter your peaceful fold, and glut his deadly appetite on the vitals of your country.”40 In fact, the venom flowing between the Jefferson and Adams camps made Watergate-era politicking look like an Emily Post tea party. Jefferson spoke of Federalists as “enemies of our Constitution” and of their time in power as a “reign of witches.”41 Hamilton spoke of saving America from the “fangs of Jefferson” even as Democratic-Republicans spoke of saving America from the “talons of Monarchists.”42 “Citizens choose your sides,” urged the Federalist Daily Advertiser of New York:
You who are for French notions of government; for the tempestuous sea of anarchy and misrule; for arming the poor against the rich; for fraternizing with the foes of God and man; go to the left and support the leaders, or the dupes, of the anti-federal junto. But you that are sober, industrious, thriving, and happy, give your votes for those men who mean to preserve the union of the states, the purity and vigor of our excellent constitution, the sacred majesty of the laws, and the holy ordinances of religion.43
Soon each side was openly questioning whether this either-or nation could survive rule by the other. “The country is so divided and agitated, as to be in some danger of civil commotions,” Secretary of the Treasury Wolcott told Hamilton.44 The Connecticut Courant wrote that there is “scarcely a possibility that we shall escape a Civil War.”45
This time things looked better for the underdogs. The Federalists, who controlled both branches of Congress, had been in power since the start of the republic, so unpopular taxes and unpopular laws were theirs and theirs alone. Moreover, the party of Washington and Adams was at odds with itself, divided between moderate Federalists and Ultra (or High) Federalists, much as the GOP was divided by Goldwater conservatives in the 1960s and the Tea Party in the 2010s. While moderates praised Adams for attempting to end an undeclared naval war with France (the so-called Quasi-War), Ultras criticized Adams as a peacenik who had gone soft on France. In a letter that circulated widely as a fifty-four-page pamphlet, Hamilton wrote that Adams was not presidential material because of “great and intrinsic defects in his character,” including “disgusting egotism,” “distempered jealousy,” and “ungovernable indiscretion of temper.”46 In a response that did little to disprove the allegation, Adams lashed out at Hamilton as “a bastard brat of a Scotch pedlar” and “a man devoid of every moral principle.”47
But Adams was also set upon by Jeffersonians. James Thomson Callender, a rabble-rouser who made his name by exposing Hamilton’s affair with a married woman, blasted Adams as a trigger-happy warmonger, urging his readers to “take your choice between Adams, war and beggary, and Jefferson, peace and competency.” The Adams administration, he wrote, was “one continued tempest of malignant passions.” As for Adams himself, he was a “repulsive pedant” and a “hideous hermaphroditical character which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman.”48
Ultimately, all this was a sideshow. The election did not turn on whether Adams was a warmonger (as the Democratic-Republicans insisted) or a peacenik (as many Ultra Federalists complained), or whether the freethinking Aaron Burr was “the most unfit man in the U.S. for the office of President.”49 In the end, Democratic-Republican claims that Hamilton, still the brains behind the Federalist outfit, was “a confessed and professed adulterer” canceled out Federalist claims that Charles Pinckney, Jefferson’s campaign manager in South Carolina, had seduced, impregnated, and then abandoned “an unhappy female of a respectable family in Paris.”50
Even more than the election of 1796, the election of 1800 came down to a referendum on Jefferson, whose character was the issue of the day. And once again, the shots were fired first and most often from the right, and not infrequently by ministers. “The question is not what he will do” should he win the presidency “but what he is,” wrote Rev. William Linn, a New York–based Presbyterian minister who had served as the House of Representatives’ first chaplain.51 And what he was, Federalists said, was a saboteur of everything sacred.
AS IN 1796, Federalists attacked Jefferson as unmanly—a coward and a bookworm who preferred the solitude of his library and the companionship of ideas to the rough-and-tumble of political life. He was an enemy of the Constitution determined to remake America in the image of France, they said, and an impractical dreamer whose antediluvian nostalgia for agrarian life would bury America’s mercantile economy. Pointing to a 1796 letter he wrote to his Italian friend Philip Mazzei, Federalists charged him with disrespecting Washington (who had already begun his apotheosis into an American saint). And though rumors of an illicit sexual relationship with “Dusky Sally” Hemings would not see their way into print until 1802, more generic gossip about “Mr. Jefferson’s Congo Harem” spread far and wide.52 Nonetheless, this referendum on Jefferson’s character boiled down to a referendum on his religion, which became “the most defining issue” of the election.53
Jefferson may have been a libertine—DNA analysis has confirmed, to the satisfaction of most historians, that Jefferson likely fathered a child with Hemings—but he was not an atheist. Though he said he was “of a sect by myself,” he also self-identified as a Christian.54 But theologically he came down somewhere between Deism and Unitarianism, which is to say that he was in roughly the same company as John Adams, George Washington, and Alexander Hamilton. Each of these men believed in God and in afterlife rewards and punishments. None followed a path anything like the evangelical faith of the firebrands of the Second Great Awakening, the religious revolution that would ignite at Cane Ridge, Kentucky, in 1801 before spreading up and down the Eastern Seaboard and into the western frontier. Like Adams, Jefferson attended church (Anglican in his case), but Jefferson was more sharply critical of both clerics and organized religion. Still, the theological similarities between these two men were pronounced. Though both respected Jesus as a great moral teacher, neither would be recognized as a Christian today, since each rejected his divinity.
Federalists were more than happy to overlook this inconvenient truth. Embracing Adams as their candidate, they blasted Jefferson as a friend of Paine and an enemy of God whose hostility to revealed religion threatened to undermine public order and the Federalist way of life. Was Jefferson, as Massachusetts Federalist Theophilus Parsons divined, the “great arch priest of Jacobinism and infidelity”?55 Or was he, as The Connecticut Courant intimated, a secret Jew or Muslim?56
In one of the first shots in this conservative attack, Linn admitted that Jefferson was perfectly well qualified to be president, except for one thing: “his disbelief in the Holy Scriptures . . . and open professions of Deism.” In heated debates that preceded the Constitution’s ratification in 1788, proponents of a religious test for higher office had said that the absence of such a test amounted to an “invitation to Jews and heathens” and made it “most certain that Papists may occupy [the presidency], and Mahometans [Muslims] may take it.” Linn knew that the Constitution prohibited religious tests in federal elections, but he hoped that voters would impose one of their own for the presidency. “No professed deist, be his talents and achievements what they may, ought to be promoted to this place by the suffrages of a Christian nation,” he wrote. “Would Jews or Mahometans, consistently with their belief, elect a Christian?”57
Political cartoonists also attacked Jefferson’s faith. An anonymous cartoon called The Providential Detection depicted Jefferson preparing to offer the Constitution as a burnt offering on the “altar to Gallic despotism” while God watched from on high and an American eagle swooped down to stop the sacrilege. The fire on the altar before which Jefferson is kneeling is fueled by the radical writings of Voltaire, Paine, and other freethinkers, and Jefferson’s notorious Mazzei letter is tumbling from his hand (and incriminating him in the process).58
The most famous theo-smear on Jefferson originated with Hamilton (“our Buonaparte,” in Jefferson’s words), who called his rival “an atheist in religion and a fanatic in politics.”59 Meanwhile, New England divines, convinced that human reason was as depraved as human will, got up what Paine referred to as a “war whoop of the pulpit” against Jefferson, whom they labeled “a confirmed infidel” notorious for “vilifying the divine word, and preaching insurrection against God.”60 Pamphleteers and editorialists pointed out that he worked on Sundays and did not even make a show of attending church, prompting the Federalist Gazette of the United States to reduce the upcoming choice of citizens to this simple either-or proposition: “Shall I continue in allegiance to God—and a Religious President; Or impiously declare for Jefferson—and No God!!!”61
Some New England ministers also saw a conspiracy afoot between Jeffersonians and the Order of Illuminati, a secret society of freethinkers that had supposedly masterminded the French Revolution and was now dedicated to creating a post-Christian “New World Order.” Rev. Jedidiah Morse of Charlestown, Massachusetts, believed the Illuminati, if unchecked, would bring its “plagues” to America. “We have in truth secret enemies,” he said in a widely printed 1799 sermon, “whose professed design is to subvert and destroy our holy religion and our free and excellent government” and to spread in the process “infidelity, impiety and immorality.”62 Federalists even went so far as to concoct fictional critics of Jefferson’s faith, including a fake Jew named Moses S. Solomons who wrote in the Philadelphia Gazette that as a “follower of Moses and the Old Testament” he was in “common cause” with Christians against Jefferson and atheism.63
Today Jefferson’s faith is an open book, thanks to his extensive writings on religion, including the so-called Jefferson Bible, which have come to light since his death.64 In 1800, however, Jefferson’s theology was a closely guarded secret. The man who gave us the metaphor of a “wall of separation between church and state” also believed in a wall of separation between the public and the private, and for him faith fell on the private side of the ledger. “Our particular principles of religion are a subject of accountability to our God alone,” he would later write. “I inquire after no man’s, and trouble none with mine.”65 So when his critics blasted him as a “hardened infidel” practicing the “morality of devils,” he refused on principle to disabuse them of their errors.66
This principled silence led critics to scour Jefferson’s only published book, Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), for signs and portents of infidelity. Here, Federalists argued, Jefferson called into question the story of the Great Flood and opposed teaching the Bible to schoolchildren. He also attacked religious establishments in the name of religious liberty, arguing in a now infamous passage, “It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” Opponents saw these words as proof of Jefferson’s godlessness, and Linn reasoned that any ship of state captained by such a man would run aground on the rocks of anarchy. “Let my neighbor once persuade himself that there is no God, and he will soon pick my pocket, and break not only my leg but my neck,” he wrote. “If there be no God, there is no law.”67
Most Americans at the time believed that social order depended on morality, that morality depended on religion, that the only true religion was Protestantism, and that the only firm foundation for Protestantism was the King James Bible. So any perceived slights on Protestantism or its Bible were seen as theological errors and threats to social order. A victory by “the greatest villain in existence” could well lead to the sorts of attacks on Christianity that had convulsed postrevolutionary France.68 “Should the infidel Jefferson be elected to the Presidency,” wrote an alarmist in The Hudson Bee, “the seal of death is that moment set on our holy religion, our churches will be prostrated, and some infamous prostitute, under the title of the Goddess of Reason, will preside in the Sanctuaries now devoted to the worship of the Most High.” Outside the churches, “murder, robbery, rape, adultery, and incest will all be openly taught and practiced,” prophesied The Connecticut Courant.69 The American people, a “Christian Federalist” from Delaware added, would become “more ferocious than savages, more bloody than tygers, more impious than demons.”70
A Jefferson victory would also challenge traditional Federalist deference to clergy and could provoke God to withdraw his blessing from his chosen nation. From colonial times, many Americans had seen themselves as the New Israel. If they acted in accordance with their new covenant with the Almighty, God would bless them. But if they broke that sacred compact, God would curse them. According to Linn, the election “of a manifest enemy to the religion of Christ” would constitute “a rebellion against God.” So a vote for Jefferson was a vote “to destroy religion, introduce immorality, and loosen all the bonds of society.”71
IN THEIR COUNTERATTACK, Democratic-Republicans appealed not only to freethinkers but also to Catholics and Jews, Baptists and other revivalist upstarts, by contrasting Jefferson’s firm faith in individual conscience and religious liberty with Adams’s antidisestablishmentarianism. They also introduced to American public life the now familiar claim that, when preachers get involved in politics, they inevitably bow down at the altar of party and demand that the Almighty genuflect with them. Jefferson didn’t want to destroy real religion, argued his Connecticut supporter Abraham Bishop, he wanted to destroy “that kind of religion, which is made a foot-ball or stalking horse, and which operates only to dishonour God and ruin man.” True religion would suffer “a gradual, certain, and painful extermination,” in Bishop’s view, if politicians continued to manipulate it for political purposes.72 In this way, Jeffersonians promoted their candidate as a defender of the faith, a bulwark against the reduction of religion to a political stratagem.
In the end, the presidential campaign of 1800 proceeded on fear more than facts. Each party trafficked in horror stories of an impending shipwreck should the traitors come to captain the ship of state. Both sides claimed to be defending the Constitution; each accused the other of declaring war on it. The Federalists insisted that Jefferson’s vision of an underpowered federal government and overpowered states undermined the Constitution by rendering the federal government powerless and returning the No-Longer-United States to the chaos of the Articles of Confederation. Jeffersonians insisted that Federalists were intent on trampling the Bill of Rights and on trading in their hard-won republic for a crypto-monarchy made in the image of England.
What was most palpable in this election was the hatred. Rather than viewing members of the other party as patriotic Americans with different understandings of America’s past and different visions of its future, each saw the other as enemies of the nation, heretics to the true faith, and betrayers of everything real patriots held dear.
In a December 1800 letter to his son, John Adams wrote that the new party politics was leading toward “a dissolution of the Union and a civil war.”73 And with each new accusation this nightmare seemed increasingly likely. According to the Federalists, Jefferson and his ilk mistrusted government. These French-loving Jacobins were determined to overthrow Christianity, morality, and social order. If Jefferson triumphed, God would be dishonored, Bibles would be confiscated, social chaos would reign, and blood would run in the streets. According to the Democratic-Republicans, Adams and the Federalists fundamentally mistrusted the people. These British-loving monarchists were stealth Tories, enemies of religious freedom who wanted to restore, in the name of social order, European patterns of hierarchy and deference. Adams’s heart’s desire was for a quasi-monarchy, with himself as king, and Hamilton (who was even more feared among Jeffersonians) wanted to raise a strong central army in order to suppress dissent. If Adams triumphed, the country would be run by an unholy alliance of powerful clergy and rich merchants hell-bent on overturning Revolution and Constitution alike.
These differences did not seem to brook compromise. But surely the election of 1800 would settle them. That is what elections are supposed to do. When the electors cast their ballots, however, nothing was settled.
AS IN 1796, New England voted for Adams and the South for Jefferson. No surprise there. But thanks to effective campaigning by the savvy and charismatic Aaron Burr, New York flipped. Its 12 electoral votes, won by Adams in 1796, went to Jefferson in 1800. So when the ballots of electors from the sixteen states (the original thirteen plus Vermont, Kentucky, and Tennessee) were counted on February 11, 1801, the Democratic-Republicans had won. Improbably, however, the election had ended in a tie, with 73 votes for Jefferson, 73 for Burr, 65 for Adams, and 64 for Pinckney.
Since the ratification of the Twelfth Amendment in 1804, electors have voted for presidents and vice presidents on party tickets. Through 1800, however, the Constitution had mandated one ballot to determine both the presidency and the vice presidency. Whoever got the most electoral votes became president, and whoever came in second became vice president. In the case of a tie, the election would be decided by the House of Representatives, which in the winter of 1801 was dominated by Federalists. The Jeffersonians should have instructed one of their electors not to vote for Burr, but they had neglected that crucial detail, so Jefferson and Burr had tied. What ensued was the sort of fight you would expect if a House controlled by Tea Party Republicans were charged with deciding whether Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton should be president.
The House balloting dragged on for days amid death threats and talk of secession. Each state had one vote and no candidate was able to command a majority. Federalists feared that Jefferson might call in France to settle the matter by force, while Jeffersonians feared that Adams might pull the same trick with England. Meanwhile, governors of Virginia and Pennsylvania prepared their militias to march on Washington to reverse a rumored Federalist coup. Jefferson warned Adams that further Federalist maneuvering “would probably produce resistance by force, and incalculable consequences.”74 Meanwhile, Joseph Nicholson, a gravely ill Republican representative from Maryland, was carried back and forth each day through the snow on a stretcher in order to cast his vote for Jefferson and prevent his state from going to Burr.
A week passed, and thirty-five ballots. Convinced “that we must risk the Constitution and a civil war or take Mr. Jefferson,” James Bayard, a Delaware Federalist and his state’s sole representative, let it be known that he (and Delaware) had decided to take Jefferson.75 It is not clear what changed Bayard’s mind. He may have won secret concessions from Jefferson’s camp. He may have come to fear that anything short of a Jefferson victory would throw the country into chaos. In the end, Vermont and Maryland Federalists, hearing of Bayard’s change of heart, decided to abstain, throwing their states to Jefferson. On the thirty-sixth and final ballot, held on February 17, 1801, Jefferson carried ten states, with four for Burr and two (Delaware and South Carolina) abstaining. The United States thus became the first country in modern history to peaceably pass control over its government from a ruling party to the opposition. However, in a fit of partisanship that anticipated today’s Capitol, not one Federalist congressman cast a vote for Jefferson. And Adams refused to attend the inauguration.
JEFFERSON’S FIRST INAUGURAL address, though not typically classified as a masterpiece, is one of the great speeches in U.S. history. In 1795, Jefferson had written that it was “immoral to pursue a middle line” when the division was “between the parties of Honest men, and Rogues.” Now he inaugurated not only his presidency but also his country’s “great tradition of conciliation.” Foreshadowing Lincoln’s irenic first inaugural (“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies.”), he nudged America’s first culture war cycle beyond attack and counterattack into the stage of compromise and negotiation.76
Jefferson called the election “the revolution of 1800”—“as real a revolution in the principles of our government as that of 1776 was in its form.”77 And the common-man optics of the new capital’s first inauguration contrasted sharply with President Washington’s coronation-style festivities. On the eve of his March 4, 1801, swearing in, Jefferson slept in a boardinghouse and dressed for the day as “a plain citizen, without any distinctive badge of office.”78 Rather than riding in a coach, he walked to the Capitol. He did not powder his hair. He did not carry a sword. His ordinary brown-and-green suit was made in America. And he delivered his inaugural address in “so low a tone that few heard it.”79
Noting that the task before him was above his talents (it wasn’t), Jefferson confessed that as president he would “often go wrong through defect of judgment.” He tipped his cap to Washington—“our first and greatest revolutionary character, whose preeminent services had entitled him to the first place in his country’s love”—and to the Constitution, whose core commitments he succinctly conveyed. In an olive branch to his clerical critics, he invoked “that Infinite Power which rules the destinies of the universe” and that “overruling Providence, which by all its dispensations proves that it delights in the happiness of man here and his greater happiness thereafter.” The United States he described in mythic terms—as both “a chosen country, with room enough for our descendants to the thousandth and thousandth generation” and “a rising nation . . . advancing rapidly to destinies beyond the reach of mortal eye.” At the heart of this speech lay a conciliatory effort to restore the “harmony and affection without which liberty and even life itself are but dreary things.”80 Jefferson took aim at the view that the political battle between his party and the Federalists was also a cosmic battle pitting God’s angels against Satan’s minions. In short, he was trying to bring America’s first culture war to an end by beating into ploughshares its swords.
Long before the election of 1800, both Jefferson and Adams had railed against political parties. “There is nothing which I dread so much as a division of the republic into two great parties, each arranged under its leader, and concerting measures in opposition to each other,” Adams said in 1780.81 Nine years later, Jefferson wrote, “If I could not go to heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all.”82 But this election had delivered to Americans a permanent two-party system, turning partisanship and factionalism into the inhalations and exhalations of American political life. Jefferson was not so impractical as to imagine he could pull the plug on this new machine. But he sought to atone for his not insignificant contributions to it, and to return America’s body politic to some measure of civility.
“Political intolerance” can be as dangerous as “religious intolerance,” Jefferson said, “as despotic, as wicked, and capable of as bitter and bloody persecutions.” So he called on his fellow citizens to be “united with one heart and one mind.” This unity had once been ensured by the charisma of America’s first president, and Jefferson was under no illusion that he was Washington’s Second Coming. So he sought to unite the American people around a simple idea. In this speech’s most celebrated passage (and one of the most important in American political thought), he reminded his “brethren” that they were all Americans:
But every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle. We have called by different names brethren of the same principle. We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists. If there be any among us who wish to dissolve this Union, or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated, where reason is left free to combat it.83
Though both parties had their partisans, all were Americans first, Jefferson said. Few were ultras of any sort. Most were moderates, committed to republicanism rather than monarchy and to a federal system that honored both national power and states’ rights. So the Alien and Sedition Acts could go the way of the Inquisition. Reason would triumph over foolishness without government intervention.
JEFFERSON’S FIRST INAUGURAL did contribute to a great tradition of conciliation that serves, even today, as a counterpoint to the poisonous partisanship of the culture wars, but it did not usher in a golden age of political moderation. In fact, one of the most revolutionary legacies of the “revolution of 1800” was the two-party rancor of today’s culture wars. Newspapers did not repent of partisanship. Conservatives and liberals continued to accuse each other of betraying the Revolution and trampling on the Constitution. On the very day he administered Jefferson’s oath of office, Chief Justice John Marshall told Charles Pinckney that there were two types of Jeffersonians: “speculative theorists” and “absolute terrorists” (though he was generous enough to include Jefferson among the former rather than the latter).84 Later that year, John Adams would lament that “we have no Americans in America.”85
Meanwhile, nothing Jefferson did to counteract accusations of heresy—his inaugural day references to God, his attendance at Sunday worship services, his financial contributions to churches, or his extensive theological correspondence with friends and acquaintances—was able to convince his religious despisers that he was on the right side in the cosmic battle between the forces of light and darkness.
After the nation’s library went up in smoke at the hands of the British in August 1814, Jefferson (now retired to Monticello) offered to sell Congress his extraordinary personal library, which included among its more than six thousand volumes a British translation of the Quran. Some Federalists objected to the price ($24,950), but the central objection was to the contents, which included in the judgment of Rep. Cyrus King of Massachusetts “many books of irreligious and immoral tendency.” Some even suggested that the United States should buy the overall collection and burn the “atheistical” volumes.86
Congress did agree to buy (and not to burn) the collection, which became the foundation for the Library of Congress, and few of the horrors Jefferson’s books were supposed to visit on the country came to pass. The United States did not become a nation of atheists. Americans did not start speaking French. Those who had buried their Bibles were able to dig them up and read them unmolested. Jefferson’s “revolution” did not lapse into anarchy or terror or dictatorship. There was no coup d’état, and neither Jefferson nor Adams was assassinated. By 1812, Adams and Jefferson had not just made peace, they had entered into a wide-ranging correspondence that historian Lauren Winner has described as one of the classic expressions of American literature.87
As for the Federalist Party, it never returned to power. Voters cooled to its conservative nostalgia for Old World aristocracy and monarchy, and in 1804 they reelected Jefferson in a 162 to 14 landslide. Thanks to a coalition of “rationalists cool about religion and pietists hot for it,” liberals did more than win this culture war.88 They put their conservative opponents out of business and Federalist culture to rest. The Federalist Party enjoyed a brief resurgence thanks to its staunch opposition to the War of 1812, which pitted the United States against England. But by that war’s end in 1815, the Federalist Party had for all intents and purposes vanished, fatally injured by calls at its 1814–15 Hartford Convention for New England’s secession from the union.
What did not vanish with the Federalists were the culture wars themselves. In the election of 1800, we hear in Jefferson’s despisers a new voice: the voice of modern American conservatism, anxious about the fate of deference, stability, and hierarchy in a world in which liberty, democracy, and emotionalism are running amok. We see conservatives turning religion into an engine of political partisanship and evangelicalism starting to become “a quasi party of its own.”89 We see a nation divided into North and South over cultural questions, though in this case the North was the hotbed of political and religious conservatism. (What Susan Jacoby calls the “reversal of southern and New England patterns of religious intolerance” will come later.90) We also see Americans wrestling with the tensions and ambiguities bequeathed to them by the founding compromises of the Constitution, trying to turn shades of gray into black and white. As a group, the founders never approved of either the strict separation of church and state or their fusion. Neither did they settle, once and for all, the question of federal power versus states’ rights, or the question of the relative importance of liberty and equality (for that matter, what these two key words were to mean). Part of the genius of the founding was its equivocation, which was both a product of compromise and a model for more to come. But all this gray all but commanded future conflict, including the Civil War itself, calling to arms individuals and movements intent on transforming by some time-traveling alchemy the complexity of the founders (and the Constitution itself) into some unambiguous “original intent.”
But the Jefferson wars did produce—as culture wars typically do—some agreement. As Americans debated the virtues and vices of Adams and Jefferson, religious uniformity and religious freedom, a culture of hierarchy and a culture of inclusion, they agreed that their leaders did not need to meet a religious test. Citizens did not yet agree that their presidents could be avowed atheists. But they did agree that their presidents need not be traditional Christians. Though America’s population was then (as it is today) overwhelmingly Christian, its leaders did not need to check the “evangelical” box to take up residence in the White House.
Voters also agreed to move beyond the aristocratic airs of Washington and Adams to a more egalitarian style. They agreed not to resurrect the conservative culture of deference that had characterized New England from the Puritans to the Federalists. Instead they decided to move forward into an unknown future, “advancing rapidly to destinies beyond the reach of mortal eye.” Their cultural disagreements were by no means behind them, however. As they moved into that unknown future, they would continue to turn “differences of opinion” into “differences of principle.” They would also continue to denounce one another as betrayers of everything U.S. citizens were supposed to hold sacred. In short, the view of the pro-Jefferson National Intelligencer that Americans were “universally agreed” that “religion ought to be kept distinct from politics” would prove to be hopelessly naïve.91 Thanks to this first of America’s many culture wars, the faith of political figures had become a proxy for character, and religion had become a wedge issue in American politics. Later conservatives would work hard to insert that wedge into questions as diverse as immigration, polygamy, alcohol consumption, abortion, and gay marriage. And they would come to question the Americanness of Catholics, Mormons, and Muslims alike.