Thomas Jefferson's Eventful Elections

From 1794 to 1797, Thomas Jefferson operated as the informal leader of what would become the nation's first opposition political party, the Democratic-Republicans. This party vocally challenged Hamilton's political views. When Washington declined to run for a third term in 1796, Jefferson allowed his name to be nominated by a caucus of Democratic-Republican leaders who were against John Adams's run for the presidency. Adams served as vice president under Washington. As was the aristocratic custom of the day, neither Adams nor Jefferson personally campaigned. Rather, the campaign battles were waged between the political party newspapers, a propaganda device rooted in the anti-British pamphlets of the American Revolution. These publications mercilessly criticized their respective opposing candidates.

All attention was on the mid-Atlantic states because it was clear that Jefferson would carry the South while the New England states would certainly go to Adams. In those days, most southern states chose presidential electors to the electoral college by direct vote. In the mid-Atlantic states, however, state legislatures selected the presidential electors, and the election of 1796 would be decided by the political scheming within those assemblies. In the electoral college balloting, Jefferson came in second to Adams (71 to 68 votes), principally because Adams had won the behind-the-scenes battle for the New York legislature. While the vice president received only two electoral votes south of the Potomac, Jefferson won only eighteen votes outside of the South, thirteen of which came from Pennsylvania.

In those days, the candidate receiving the second-highest vote became the vice president. In a scheme to deny Adams the presidency, Alexander Hamilton influenced South Carolina's Federalist electors to withhold their votes from Adams. This would have made Adams's running mate, Thomas Pinckney, President, with Adams as vice president. But New England Federalists, learning of the scheme, withheld their votes from Pinckney to counter Hamilton's ploy. As a result of the Federalist intraparty conflicts, Jefferson compiled more votes than Pinckney for second place and became vice president.