A quick refresher on the situation in the day. In September of 1796, George Washington announced his decision to end his presidency with the end of his second term. There’s a commonly held notion that Washington was thereby setting a precedent for a tradition of presidential term limits that went unbroken until the third term of Franklin Roosevelt, but that was by no means the first president’s intention. Washington is on the record opposing term limits, by law or tradition. The Federalist Party even toyed with bringing him back for a non-consecutive third term in 1800—a plan rendered only slightly less feasible by his death in 1799.
Washington was just done, in ‘96: exhausted, frustrated, forgetful, bummed, eager to give full-time attention to his massive, complicated business ventures. Also: if he had stood for office again, the election might not have been unanimous. Not a great way to go out. He stepped down.
So here was a new and anxiety-provoking situation: a contested presidential election only eight years into the life of the national government. But America being America, we harkened to the better angels of our nature, rose to the challenges, overcame our differences, and did ourselves proud!
Not really. That would be boring. We’ve rarely been that.
The major candidates were the incumbent Vice President, John Adams, and the opposition party leader, Thomas Jefferson. They’d once been friends and allies. Now they were enemies and opponents. Things had gotten rough since those heady days of 1776, when the fussy, bustling, shortish, overdessed Yankee had recruited the philosophical, mercurial, lanky, sometimes shabby Virginian onto the committee to draft the Declaration of Independence. Their mutual enmity developed in the ‘90’s, and it didn’t spring solely from the fact that the Declaration, which nobody much cared about in 1776, had turned into a bit of a thing, inflaming Adams’s ever-flammable jealousy: Jefferson was getting all the credit for it. More important to their conflict was the zero-sum partisanship that rived the 1790’s governing elite. Adams, the Federalist Party Vice President in a Federalist Party administration, and Jefferson, having quit that administration in order to head the opposition becoming known as the Republican Party, found themselves on the opposite sides of what felt to both sides like a fight to the finish.
Yes, “partisan” and yes, “parties.” I know there’s a sense that the founding generation didn’t believe in parties, couldn’t see them becoming a major factor in American public life. That’s an area where the founding generation was quite full of it. When they loudly excoriated parties and partisanship, they meant their political enemies: parties were considered bad, so each party called the other one a party. Washington, in his famous farewell speech, warned against the development of parties. He meant the Jeffersonian opposition, and Washington was in fact the leader of a party. Hamilton, Burr, Jefferson, Madison, Adams, et. al.: by 1796, they were all party operatives.