than three electoral votes. Jefferson received eight more than he; but even so Jefferson was not elected, because that same Aaron Burr, whom the Democratic Republicans had been supporting with an idea of making him Vice-President, received exactly the same number. This, according to the Constitution, threw the election into the House of Representatives. Three months must elapse before the House chose between them, for it could not proceed to an election until after the date for officially counting the electoral votes. Therefore there was plenty of time for sobering thought, and Burr was not a man to inspire confidence. He was talented, but unscrupulous-"Hamilton, with Hamilton's nobility left out." It was known that the vote in the House of Representatives would be exceedingly close. Jefferson's own account asserts that influential Federalists, among them that rock-ribbed, God-fearing man President Adams himself, caused it to be made plain to him that Federal opposition to his election would cease if he would only assure the country he meant to do none of those radical things threatened by his party, such as dismissing all Federal office-holders, abolishing the navy, or wiping out the public debt.

Jefferson refused to make any promises or to disclose his plans. Anxiety in creased; and as had been apprehended, the contest that followed the official counting of the electoral votes was long and close. The first votes by the House resulted in a deadlock that lasted almost a week, and the final struggle to break this deadlock occupied more than thirty hours. Those near enough to follow the proceedings watched breathlessly. The more distant parts of the country waited impatient for news. In Washington all thoughts centered on the unfinished Capitol crowning its hill; few had eyes for the President's house, equally unfinished, among the trees a mile away. The town was as yet scarcely begun. Scattered groups of houses were to be seen here and there, few in any one place, and most of those small and unimposing. A mile

beyond the President's house lay the little village of Georgetown. Among them all the members of Congress and officers of the Government had managed to find more or less uncomfortable lodging. On this occasion every representative had been summoned, even the ones who were ill. Then the doors were closed.

"Not an individual left that solemn assembly," a diary of the time tells us. "The necessary refreshment . . . was taken in rooms adjoining the Hall. . . . Beds as well as food were sent for the accommodation of those whom age or debility disabled from enduring such a long-protracted sitting. The balloting took place In the interval men ate, hour. drank, slept, or pondered over the result. of the last ballot; compared ideas and persuasions to change votes."

every

One woman was present. She had accompanied her "almost dying husband" through the raw February chill from his lodgings two miles away, and watched beside his bed in an anteroom, ready to rouse him and guide his weak fingers as he wrote his ballot. Hour after hour the vote was taken, counted, and the same announcement made. Daylight settled into dark; darkness dragged wearily again into light. The invalid slept and stirred. The wife sitting beside him grew perceptibly haggard. On the faces of the members determination gave place to anger and sullen, utter weariness.

It became evident that Jefferson's supporters would not yield; but which of the opposition could bear the reproach of making the first move? It was managed by a flutter of blank ballots and skilful beating of the devil around the stump. One member from South Carolina withdrew his vote by prearrangement. The sole member from Delaware, voting blank, "gave up his party for his country," as the diary picturesquely says; and so, to quote Jefferson, the election occurred "without a single vote coming over." News was quickly given to those waiting outside, who cheered dutifully, if not enthusiastically, and the wearied legislators hurried off to their lodgings, "the conspirators," as

they were darkly called, pursued by fears of bodily vengeance.

It was in this unflattering manner that Jefferson's "lurching for the Presidency," of which he had long been accused, was satisfied. But the choice undoubtedly reflected the popular will. Confronted with the alternative of Jefferson or Burr, a large majority of Americans preferred. Jefferson's frank theorizing to Burr's shifty politics. But to Adams's mind even the lesser of the two evils was a national calamity.

Angry and disappointed, he set about doing all that he could during the short re

mainder of his term to thwart the incoming President's plans. Two weeks before Jefferson's inauguration, Congress voted certain changes in the judiciary system which involved the appointment of new judges. As a matter of precedent and courtesy, these should have been left to the new executive. But Adams conceived it his duty to set patriotism above politeness, and signed appointments up to nine o'clock on the third of March; then early next morning he drove away from the city, too bitter to remain and take part in the ceremonies and amenities of the inauguration.

From his retirement in Massachusetts he exercised his privilege of free speech to lavish upon the new President the wealth of disapproval that his failure to realize the cherished ambitions and a sincere apprehension for the country's future caused to well up in his nature.

Time and the logic of events softened his resentment. Ten years after leaving the White House in such unseemly haste he had come to see that the difference between himself and his successor was one of method only. In 1811 he wrote to Dr. Rush:

In point of Republicanism, all the difference I ever could discover between you and me, or Jefferson and me, consisted:

1. In the difference between speeches and messages. I was a monarchist because I thought a speech more respectful to Congress and the nation. Jefferson and Rush preferred messages.

2. I held levees once a week that all my time might not be wasted by the visits. Jefferson's whole eight years was a levee.

3. I dined a large company once or twice a week. Jefferson dined a dozen every day. 4. Jefferson and Liberty were for straight hair. I thought curled hair was as republican as straight.

Further lapse of time completely healed the breach between them. It is agreeable to remember that the tact of Mrs. Adams revived their old friendship, that they exchanged long and cordial letters during the latter years of their lives; and on the memorable fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, when the spirits of both these brave men passed on, each died thinking of the other, comforted in the belief that the other still lived.

CHAPTER II

DEMOCRAT OR IMPERIALIST

THE Country waited in anxiety to see what the political reformer would do. He had refused to bind himself by promises, and had remained withdrawn. upon his estate during the entire campaign summer, following the precedent set

by Washington and Adams, who held that the choice of a President was no matter for a candidate's meddling, but one exclusively between the voters and their own consciences.

While the country did not know what Jefferson meant to do, it did know that Jefferson's election was in effect a minor revolution, giving sanction to the trial of a whole brood of new theories. It was reserved for an American of a later day to call the Declaration of Independence a self-evident lie, but many looked upon its broad assertions as dangerous and its author as a dangerous man. Politics was a

vital matter, so vital that statesmen whose interest wandered were regarded with suspicion, and Jefferson was known to have explored in many fields of thought. He was suspected of holding lamentably lax views upon religion. He enjoyed converse with men of lawless minds under the guise of research in philosophy and science. He had even entertained such men as Priestley and Tom Paine in his own home.

His service as minister to France had given him a large acquaintance and experience. Less erudite than Adams, his knowledge was wide rather than deep, but it was ample to afford him a grasp of many practical things, and ready sympathy in realms of thought to which his countrymen gave little heed. The sum of this knowledge was to make him an all-around, wide-awake man, given to theorizing, but with enough common sense in the long run to ballast his theories, a mental equipment providential in a President at that moment, but one to fill conservatives with deep foreboding.

The campaign had reeked with personalities. Social and political sins had been piled before Jefferson's door in unreasoning profusion, and the aims of his party had been denounced in no measured terms. "In plain language," one good and earnest Federalist mourned, "the greatest villain in the community is the fittest person to make and execute the laws. . . . Can imagination paint anything more dreadful this side Hell?"

belong to natural history," was his more genial way of echoing Adams's crabbed "parties begin in human nature." He serenely refused to recognize the Jefferson they abused as anything more than a man of straw, made up of all his supposed vices.

There were of course some politically opposed to him who saw no reason to believe the country in extreme peril. "So, the anti-Federals are now to take a turn at rolling stones uphill," Chief-Justice Ellsworth wrote to Rufus King. "Good men will get a breathing-spell, and the credulous will learn to understand the game of out and in."

This was the first exchange of places in the political game of out and in, and both sides had yet to learn how astonishingly pliable new theories become in bending to hard conditions of fact. The optimists were justified. Responsibility had its usual sobering effect, the liberals becoming more conservative, just as conservatives had already been more liberal than their creed. It is always so; hence the paradox that human fallibility (another name for abstract sin) in the long run brings about an approach toward perfection.

Of the fourteen points emphasized in Jefferson's inaugural address there was scarcely one over which honest Federals and honest Republicans could not indulge an honest handshake, and it is hard to see wherein his treatment of large questions differed greatly from that which the Federalists might have given them under like conditions. Indeed, in the crowning act of his administration, the purchase of Louisiana, he was more imperialistic than Adams could have been, for Adams's near-sighted New England vision was incapable of reaching beyond the Alleghanies.

The two great achievements of Jefferson's life, for which all his mistakes must be forgiven and his whimsicalities condoned, stand at the two extremes of his wide political range. The writing of the Declaration of Independence was an exercise of his intellect, a statement of what

he believed ought to be, which caught popular sentiment and focused it to power, as rays of light are focused in a burningglass. The purchase of Louisiana was quite beyond reason or even theory. He knew it by inspiration to be the will of destiny in regard to his country. His democracy was always a matter of the head rather than of the heart; and to his honor be it said that whenever his carefully cultivated principles bumped in painful collision against his sense of what was fitting for a great nation, he threw theory to the winds and followed instinct rather than be hampered by the kind of consistency that Emerson called the hobgoblin of little minds.

Jefferson's first acts as President were not at all alarming. Far from turning out all Federal office-holders, he "proceeded with moderation," appointing party friends only as the terms of Federals expired; and he returned to the rule observed by Washington, which Adams was inclined to violate, of refusing to appoint his own relatives, no matter what their politics. Justly enough, he resented Adams's "midnight" appointment of new judges. "So far as they are during pleasure," Jefferson wrote, "I shall not consider the persons named as candidates," "nor pay the respect of notifying them that I consider what is done a nullity.”

Adams had tried in this way to safeguard the reorganized judiciary. It was an act justifiable only on the plea of extreme necessity, as was the beguiling offer made to Jefferson when his election hung in doubt in the House of Representatives. But, after all, morality is not a fixed quantity: had Jefferson been the unsafe man Adams feared, the country would have been in danger, and Adams justified in any measure he could take to lessen it. Actuated by the highest motives, but without the excuse of necessity, these acts degenerate into stupid political blunders that the white intensity of Adams's patriotism is enough to burn from the record.

Adams's hasty departure had already shorn inauguration day of half its cere