Notes on Jefferson

Election results for the Presidential Election 0f 1800. Notice how most of the Northeast part of the country is for Adams and the rest is for Jefferson. The orange circles mean that Adams received that number of votes from that state, but Jefferson still won the state overall. Notice also by the way that now Vermont (VT 4 votes); Kentucky (4 votes); and below it Tennessee (3 votes) are added to the original 13 states. Notice also that Maine is not a state, but is considered part of Massachusetts (MA 16 votes)

This shows the breakdown of Congressional elections 1788-1806. Notice again how after 1800 the Republicans pull away from the Federalists and the difference only increases every election

	Election Year
House	1788	1790	1792	1794	1796	1798	1800	1802	1804	1806
Federalist	37	39	51	47	57	60	38	39	25	24
Republican	28	30	54	59	49	46	65	103	116	118
Percentage Republican	43	43	51	56	46	43	63	73	82	83
Senate
Federalist	18	16	16	21	22	22	15	9	7	6
Republican	8	13	14	11	10	10	17	25	17	28
Percentage Republican	31	45	47	34	31	31	53	74	71	82

Once of the biggest reasons for the Republicans dominance over the Federalists in elections was the highly unpopular alien and sedition acts of 1798. At this point the U.S. was in an undeclared war against France: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quasi-War. This helps explain why laws that make it a crime to speak against the government could be passed. As they had already done in the past, the Federalists used the pretext of a crisis or a national emergency to put through controversial measures. In this case however it backfired on them and helped lead to the devastating electoral victories of Jefferson's Republicans.

I forgot to mention this in class, but the election of 1800 also revealed another flaw in the electoral college. In 1796 members of opposing political parties became president and vice-president, Adams and Jefferson respectively. In 1800 now you had a tie for president between Jefferson and Aaron Burr, who was supposed to be Jefferson's vice-president and everyone knew that was the intention, but he ended receiving as many votes as Jefferson. Burr seemed to have second thoughts about stepping down This dispute was resolved obviously in Jefferson's favor, but due in part to the influence of Hamilton, who though disagreeing with Jefferson personally disliked Burr. Burr never forgave Hamilton over this and along with other incidents helped lead up to the duel between Hamilton and Burr. Aaron Burr was the other guy in the duel, he was the one who shot Hamilton. He's not someone that we usually talk about much, but he is an interesting person so here's a little profile on him: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Burr