The Election of 1800

Although the Federalists had controlled Congress and the presidency for twelve successive years, their policies had not been popular. If the Judiciary Act of 1789, the funding of the national debt, the assumption of the states’ debts, the national bank, the system of internal taxation, Jay’s Treaty with Great Britain (1794), and the creation of a professional standing army and navy had been submitted to a popular referendum, probably none of them would have been approved, nor would the federal Constitution have been ratified in the first place. Early Federalist political success in passing their program and holding on to power can be attributed to three factors: the lack of an organized political opposition until the late 1790s, the success of the new political system in thwarting the popular will, and General Washington’s tremendous popularity and prestige. If the president had been elected directly by the people, Jefferson would have given his first inaugural address in 1797 instead of in 1801. However, the popular memory is short, and the Republicans could not hope to ride to power simply on the basis of the unpopularity of Federalist measures in the early 1790s. They finally triumphed in 1800 because the internal tax system provided a regular reminder that the Federalists believed in an intrusive and energetic government, and the quasi-war with France in 1798 demonstrated beyond any doubt that the Federalists were inveterate Anglophiles—Jefferson called them “Anglomen”—who wanted to build an expensive professional war machine to go to war against Spain and France in alliance with England.

The Republicans were right to believe that the Federalists wanted to turn the American confederation of states into an empire mightier than the British empire and one with a perpetual public debt, high domestic taxes, a large standing army, a navy with ships-of-the-line, large manufacturing establishments subsidized by government, a permanent civil bureaucracy, a strong executive, an irresponsible political judiciary, the consolidation of political power in the federal government, and financial corruption of the federal legislature. Jefferson could speak of his election as a “revolution” because he believed that the people of the states had rejected the Federalist theory and program of government, which were British, neomercantilist, centralizing, and statist, in favor of the agrarian, decentralist, libertarian, and republican principles which had been dominant during the Revolution and were once again ascendant.

As president, Jefferson set out to reverse the Federalist program, to restore the federal government to its constitutional role (that is, protecting the confederacy and its trade from foreign enemies and managing relations between the states), and to ensure that the people of the states were left alone to regulate their own private pursuits in a state of freedom. He hoped to gradually break the alliance between the government and the monied elite which had already been forged by the Federalists. According to Albert Jay Nock, Jefferson “was for control of government by the producing class; that is to say, by the immense majority which in every society actually applies labor and capital to natural resources for the production of wealth,” and that he opposed Federalist efforts to forge a neomercantilistic alliance between the general government and “the exploiting classes,” that is, bankers, bondholders, and officeholders.[2]