The election of 1800 was the first time power was transferred from one political party to another. The first president, George Washington, and the second, John Adams, were both Federalists, so there was not much to transfer in the spring of 1797 when Washington retired to Mount Vernon for the last time. As the first U.S. vice president, Adams considered himself the “heir apparent,” as he put it in a private letter to his wife Abigail. He simply took over where Washington left off. In fact, out of a sense of respect and loyalty, Adams made the grave mistake of retaining Washington’s cabinet ministers, most of whom (hearkening to Alexander Hamilton rather than to their president) proved to be disloyal.
After a rocky and somewhat inept four-year term, Adams was retired by the American people in the election of 1800. He was defeated by his old friend and now enemy Thomas Jefferson, who employed what Adams (and historians) regard as some unscrupulous campaign methods to unseat the Massachusetts patriot and co-author of the Declaration of Independence. Nothing Jefferson did was illegal or even seriously unethical, but by encouraging the rascally journalist James Callender to write ugly broadsides against Adams, Jefferson broke the code of gentlemanly civility and the code of friendship. Callender declared, for example, that “the reign of Mr. Adams has, hitherto, been one of continued Tempest of malignant passions.” He called Adams “a hideous hermaphroditical character which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman.” Adams would eventually forgive Jefferson for unleashing Callender on him, but Abigail and John Quincy (the sixth president) never fully did.
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