Presidents, Congress, and Courts: Partisan Passions in Motion

Joyce Appleby

In a fascinating exchange of letters between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, Adams wrote words that fairly vibrated with alarm, "Elections, my dear sir, Elections to offices which are great objects of Ambition, I look at with terror."1 He unburdened himself of this opinion, rather startling for a man committed to representative government, after reading a copy of the new constitution for the United States that had just been sent from Philadelphia. Both men were on diplomatic missions in Europe, far from the fascinating developments taking place at home. The Constitution's provisions for the presidency drew their immediate attention. "A bad edition of a Polish king (they were elected for life)," Jefferson exclaimed. Adams chose to canvass their different reactions: "You are apprehensive the President when once chosen, will be chosen again and again as long as he lives. So much the better as it appears to me."2	1
Having grown to manhood as subjects of George II and George III, Adams and Jefferson could not wholly detach themselves from the referent of a king when they thought about the executive fashioned by the Constitution. However deficient hereditary monarchs might be in other ways, they had solved the transfer of power problem. "The King is dead; long live the King," crowds shouted when death delivered the throne to the heir apparent. Such considerations aroused Adams's fears; their absence marked Jefferson as the democratic iconoclast of his generation.	2
Elections, as the crusty John Adams saw, were the solar plexus of representative government, fragile vessels for performing that political alchemy of turning power into authority. They also diffused lifeblood into democracies. Through them that chameleon sovereign, the people, expressed its will. The United States Constitution, with all its awkward compromises, achieved a certain clarity in the office of the president, the only officer chosen by the whole electorate and answerable to them in quadrennial elections. In crafting the mechanism for selecting a president the convention delegates plunged into another one of their balancing acts.	3
The handiwork of the Founding Fathers invited searching scrutiny, as Adams and Jefferson demonstrated, if only because they had written a constitution de novo, based entirely upon the reasoning of fifty-five delegates working without benefit of customary institutions or ingrained traditions. Edmund Burke is supposed to have said that the British loved their Constitution because it had been theirs for time out of mind. No such association with the past ennobled the five-page document the drafters produced in sixteen weeks of sessions that hot summer in Philadelphia.	4
During the thirty-six days that the 2000 presidential election hung in the balance, pundits, soothing listeners with the balm of history, frequently referred to the election of 1876. They chose ineptly. The election of 1800 offers a far more illuminating comparison. That of 1876 formed part of the post–Civil War political trauma and sheds little light on the political institutions that were put at risk last November. Contemplating what went wrong in the elections of 1800 and 2000, by contrast, brings us sharply back to the constitutional arrangements for choosing a president. The contrast also throws a spotlight on political parties as the monkey wrenches thrown into our democratic machinery.	. . .