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Thomas Jefferson was elected the third president of the United States, following a deeply divisive race in opposition to John Adams that threatened to tear aside the younger nation, on this day in historical past, Feb. 17, 1801.
It was the primary American presidential race pitting party rivals — Federalist Adams vs. Democratic-Republican Jefferson — and the primary to unseat a sitting president.
“By early 1799, both parties, Republican and Federalist, were convinced of the other’s determination to subvert the government and overthrow the Constitution,” writes Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello in its on-line account of the election.
The election was underscored by stunning accusations of faulty ballots, politically partisan media, even ominous threats of civil conflict – proving that little has modified in American presidential politics in greater than 200 years.
Jefferson himself dubbed the election “The Revolution of 1800.”
Challenger Thomas Jefferson, left, defeated President John Adams in the bitterly divisive election of 1800. The two males had been allies in the reason for liberty and political enemies in the new nation — however developed a heat friendship in later life. Jefferson portrait: picture by Kean Collection/Getty Images. Adams portrait: Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images. (Getty Images)
He first defeated President Adams in the electoral school in the autumn of 1800.
Jefferson grew to become chief government over party ally Aaron Burr solely after an unbelievable 36 votes in the House of Representatives that adopted the final election.
“By early 1799 both parties … were convinced of the other’s determination to subvert the government and overthrow the Constitution.” — Monticello
Thousands of individuals reportedly gathered in the streets of Washington, D.C., as the political drama mounted in Congress, with Federalists in search of methods to dam a Jefferson presidency.
The Virginian was inaugurated president, with Burr his vice president, on March 4.
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Just three years later Burr, in 1804, the sitting vice president of the United States, famously shot and killed political rival and Adams ally Alexander Hamilton in a duel that appeared to portent a tragic trajectory forward for the United States.
Hamilton had written earlier that the election of 1800 was a contest to avoid wasting the new nation from “the fangs of Jefferson.”
Said Smithsonian Magazine in 2004 of the election, “Only a quarter of a century after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the first election of the new 19th century was carried out in an era of intensely emotional partisanship among a people deeply divided over the scope of the government’s authority.”
American politicians Alexander Hamilton (1757-1804) and Aaron Burr (1756-1836) take intention at one another in 1804 in the duel that may finish Hamilton’s life in Weehawken, New Jersey. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
President George Washington had warned in opposition to the corrosive potential of rising political factions throughout his farewell deal with in September 1796.
“However [political parties] may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people,” Washington mentioned.
It took only one election cycle for party politics to tear aside the Founding Fathers.
Jefferson and Adams had been mental allies in revolt.
The mixture of every man’s unbelievable mind solid the philosophical basis of the American Revolution.
Cropped picture of the official presidential portrait of Thomas Jefferson (by Rembrandt Peale, Dec. 31, 1799). (Public Domain)
They gave the world the Declaration of Independence, impressed hopes of freedom around the globe and reshaped individuals’s relation to authorities for the higher.
Yet they proved ferocious enemies in the new nation.
“A civil war, or a surrender of independence is not more than a twelvemonth’s distance,” Federalist William Cobbett, underneath the pseudonym Peter Porcupine, wrote ominously as divisiveness grew through the Adams presidency of the late 1790s.
“A civil war, or a surrender of independence is not more than a twelvemonth’s distance.” — William Cobbett, political pundit in the 1790s
Voters quarreled over party traces, most notably variations over the French Revolution, America’s quasi-war with France, and Adams’s Alien and Sedition Acts — extensively perceived by historians as a black mark on the in any other case unbelievable legacy and sensible political thoughts of Adams.
American voters had been additionally regionally divided.
New Englanders supported Adams and the Federalists.
Southerners supported Jefferson and the Democratic-Republicans. The mid-Atlantic States had been divided — what we now would possibly name “purple states.”
Yet the American individuals overcame the divide.
Jefferson succeeded Adams as president, marking the primary of many peaceable transfers of energy between the events in the United States — and among the many very first in human historical past.
This undated engraving exhibits the scene on July 4, 1776, when the Declaration of Independence, drafted by Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Philip Livingston and Roger Sherman, was authorized by the Continental Congress in Philadelphia. The phrases “all men are created equal” are invoked typically however are troublesome to outline. (AP Photo)
Jefferson and Adams grew to become buddies once more in their later years, their friendship cemented by voluminous mail correspondence in which each mirrored on their unbelievable position in forging the new nation.
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By the twentieth century, their imaginative and prescient of a consultant constitutional republic — a revolutionary idea in the 1700s — had turn into the world customary of governance.
“Time had allowed partisan and ideological passions to recede and a friendship that was forged in the crucible of war was rekindled through the quill,” writes the Adams National Historical Park.
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Both males died on the identical day, July 4, 1826 — 50 years to the day after pledging their “lives, fortunes and sacred honor” collectively in the Declaration of Independence.
“We can no longer say there is nothing new under the sun, for this whole chapter in the history of man is new,” Jefferson wrote after his election. “The momentous crisis which lately arose, really bespeak a strength of character in our nation which augurs well for the duration of our republic.”
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