Jeffersonian South vs Hamiltonian New England

The issue between the Federalists and the Republicans, or Democrats as the Jeffersonian Party had also begun to be called, was clear. It stemmed back to the difference in political philosophy between Jefferson and Hamilton…. Caucuses of the two parties in Congress selected respectively President John Adams and C. C. Pinckney as Federalist candidates, and Jefferson and Aaron Burr as Republican, a Northern President and Southern Vice-President, and vice-versa. The campaign was one of extreme bitterness, the Republicans being denounced as Anti-Christ in New England, and every possible slander being everywhere heaped upon the several candidates.

Hamilton was the “boss” of the Federalist Party, but… had come to hate Adams, who, nevertheless, after a tour of New England, Hamilton realized had to be the party candidate. Blinded with passion, Hamilton wrote for private circulation a pamphlet in which, with a complete breakdown of political sense and ordinary decency, he declared at length that Adams was utterly unfit for office but that Federalists should vote for him so as to bring in the party. Some of the saner leaders, such as George Cabot, urged its suppression but one of the printed copies fell into the hands of Aaron Burr, who immediately saw to its publication. When the Electoral votes were counted it was found that Jefferson and Burr each had seventy-three, Adams sixty-five and Pinckney sixty-four.

It was a Republican victory, revealing markedly distinct sectional and class cleavages. The West and the entire South up to Maryland voted for Jefferson, as did Pennsylvania and New York. Maryland was divided evenly, but Adams, who also got some votes in North Carolina and Pennsylvania, carried the whole of New England. The adroit manipulation of Burr in New York decided the final result but two facts stood out. One was that the agrarian South and the frontier West was strongly Democratic and anti-Federalist, and the other was, on a closer analysis of the local returns everywhere, that the poorer people, the farmers and town artisans and others, were Democratic whereas the main Federalist strength came from the mercantile and other moneyed interests.

Excerpted from The March of Democracy: A History of the United States Volume II by James Truslow Adams, Charles Schribner’s Sons, New York, 1947, pages 29-30
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