November 4 – December 7, 1796 1800 → 9 7 53.4% 46.6% | 71 68 35,726 31,115 | |
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Winner John Adams | ||
The 1796 election explained
The United States presidential election of 1796 was the third quadrennial presidential election. It was held from Friday, November 4 to Wednesday, December 7, 1796. It was the first contested American presidential election and the only one in which a president and vice president were elected from opposing tickets.
Contents
- The 1796 election explained
- Candidates
- Federalist candidates
- Results
- Consequences
- Electoral college selection
- References
With incumbent President George Washington having refused a third term in office, incumbent Vice President John Adams from Massachusetts became a candidate for the presidency on the Federalist Party ticket with former Governor Thomas Pinckney of South Carolina as the next most popular Federalist. Their opponents were former Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson from Virginia along with Senator Aaron Burr of New York of the Democratic-Republicans. At this point, each man from any party ran alone, as the formal position of "running mate" had not yet been established.
Unlike the 1792 election, where the outcome was a foregone conclusion, Democratic-Republicans campaigned heavily for Jefferson, and Federalists campaigned heavily for Adams. The campaign was an acrimonious one, with Federalists attempting to identify the Republicans with the violence of the French Revolution and the Democratic-Republicans accusing the Federalists of favoring monarchism and aristocracy. Republicans sought to identify Adams with the policies developed by fellow Federalist Alexander Hamilton during the Washington administration, which they declaimed were too much in favor of Great Britain and a centralized national government. Paradoxically, Hamilton himself opposed Adams and worked to undermine his election. In foreign policy, Republicans denounced the Federalists over Jay's Treaty. Federalists attacked Jefferson's moral character, alleging he was an atheist, and a coward during the War of Independence. Adams supporters also accused Jefferson of being too pro-France; the accusation was underscored when the French ambassador embarrassed the Republicans by publicly backing Jefferson and attacking the Federalists right before the election.
Federalist John Adams defeated Democratic-Republican Thomas Jefferson. Despite the vituperation between their respective camps, neither Adams nor Jefferson actively campaigned for the presidency. This became a long-standing tradition in American lasting into the second half of the 19th century.
Jefferson received the second highest number of electoral votes and was elected vice president according to the prevailing rules of electoral college voting. This election marked the formation of the First Party System, and established a rivalry between Federalist New England and Democratic-Republican South, with the middle states holding the balance of power.
Candidates
Prior to 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 was 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. Adams's main running mate was Thomas Pinckney, who due to electoral law at the time was technically running against Adams for president. This technicality became a reality when Alexander Hamilton, who felt some animosity towards Adams, began working behind the scenes to elect Pinckney over Adams by convincing Jefferson electors from South Carolina to cast their second votes for Pinckney. The scheme ultimately failed, but it set the stage for tension between Adams and Hamilton for the next four years.
Results
Tennessee was admitted into the United States after the 1792 election, increasing the Electoral College to 138 electors. This was one of only two times that New York voted for the Federalists, the other being in 1812.
Under the system in place in 1796, electors were to cast votes for two persons. Both votes were for president; the runner-up in the presidential race was elected vice-president (this was prior to the passage of the Twelfth Amendment, which, in accommodating the notion of running mate, required that electors cast separate ballots for president and vice president). 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 somebody besides the intended vice-presidential candidate, leaving their vice-presidential candidate a few votes shy of their presidential candidate. Unfortunately, these schemes were complicated by several factors:
The result was that Adams was elected president while his opponent, Jefferson, was elected vice-president.
Source (Popular Vote): U.S. President National Vote. Our Campaigns. (February 11, 2006).
Source (Popular Vote): A New Nation Votes: American Election Returns 1787-1825
Source (Electoral Vote): "Electoral College Box Scores 1789–1996". National Archives and Records Administration. Retrieved July 30, 2005.
(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.
Consequences
The following four years would be the only time that the president and vice-president were from different parties (John Quincy Adams and John C. Calhoun would later be elected president and vice-president as political opponents, but they were both Democratic-Republican party candidates; Andrew Johnson, Abraham Lincoln's second vice-president, was a Democrat, but Lincoln ran on a combined National Union Party ticket in 1864, not as a strict Republican). Jefferson would leverage his position as vice-president to attack President Adams's policies, and this would help him reach the White House in the following election.
This election would provide part of the impetus for the Twelfth Amendment to the United States Constitution. 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 would be vice-president. However, no action was taken on his proposal, setting the stage for the deadlocked election of 1800.
Electoral college selection
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: