#AceHistoryReport – Feb.17: Democratic-Republican Jefferson defeated Federalist John Adams by a margin of seventy-three to sixty-five electoral votes in the presidential election of 1800.

#AceHistoryDesk says Today in History – On February 17, 1801, the House of Representatives, breaking a tie in the Electoral College, elected Thomas Jefferson president of the United States. Jefferson’s triumph brought an end to one of the most acrimonious presidential campaigns in U.S. history and resolved a serious Constitutional crisis.

When presidential electors cast their votes, however, they failed to distinguish between the office of president and vice president on their ballots. Jefferson and his running mate Aaron Burreach received seventy-three votes. With the votes tied, the election was thrown to the House of Representatives as required by Article II, Section 1 of the U.S. Constitution. There, each state voted as a unit to decide the election.

Still dominated by Federalists, the sitting Congress loathed to vote for Jefferson—their partisan nemesis. For six days starting on February 11, 1801, Jefferson and Burr essentially ran against each other in the House. Votes were tallied over thirty times, yet neither man captured the necessary majority of nine states. Eventually, Federalist James A. Bayard of Delaware, under intense pressure and fearing for the future of the Union, made known his intention to break the impasse. As Delaware’s lone representative, Bayard controlled the state’s entire vote.  On the thirty-sixth ballot, Bayard and other Federalists from South Carolina, Maryland, and Vermont cast blank ballots, breaking the deadlock and giving Jefferson the support of ten states, enough to win the presidency.

Jefferson was inaugurated on March 4, 1801. Ratified in 1804, the Twelfth Amendment to the Constitution provides that electors “name in their ballots the person voted for as President, and in distinct ballots the person voted for as Vice-President.”

Just three years after his vice-presidential inauguration, Aaron Burr shot and fatally wounded Alexander Hamilton in a duel. Hamilton, a longtime political antagonist of both Burr and Jefferson, played a key role in breaking the deadlocked presidential election in Jefferson’s favor.

Additional To Learn More

• Presidential Election of 1800: A Resource Guide contains a wide variety of material associated with the presidential election of 1800, including manuscripts, broadsides and government documents.
• Search the Thomas Jefferson Papers, 1606 to 1827 to learn more about Jefferson and his times. This is the largest collection of original Jefferson documents in the world. Document types in the collection include correspondence, commonplace books, financial account books, and manuscript volumes.
• Search the papers of George Washington, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton to find additional letters to, from, or referring to Jefferson and Aaron Burr.
• Research the deliberations of Congress from the Jefferson-era in A Century of Lawmaking for a New Nation: U.S. Congressional Documents and Debates, 1774-1875.
• In 1807, Thomas Jefferson was served a subpoena to testify in defense of Burr, charged with treason as a consequence of additional misadventures. This item is included in the Aaron Burr Papers in the Library’s Manuscript Division.
• Search Today in History for additional features related to Thomas Jefferson such as his birthday on April 13th and the approval of the purchase of his personal library to rebuild the collection of the Congressional Library on January 30, 1815.

#AceHistoryDesk report …………Published: Feb.17: 2022:

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