The most extreme accusations Democrats and Republicans hurl at one another today would be familiar to the Founding Fathers.
In fact, the election of 1800 alone featured almost everything that’s made Donald Trump’s three presidential contests a wild ride.
Accusations of foreign interference?
Check –John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, the candidates in 1800, each thought the other was subservient to a foreign power. The French Revolution divided Americans as bitterly as any foreign-policy crisis today.
Jefferson’s Republican Party, which is actually the ancestor of today’s Democratic Party, thought Adams and his Federalist Party were monarchists and traitors to the American Revolution because they were pro-British and anti-French.
The Federalists thought Jefferson’s pro-French party was as radical as France’s own revolutionaries: The phrase “godless communists” didn’t exist yet, but Federalists perceived Jeffersonians as atheists who would abolish private property if they got the chance.
Federalists were anti-democratic, said Republicans. Republicans were against the Constitution, Federalists shot back.
Each side fervently believed the other was “illiberal” and in league with foreign regimes antithetical to America’s principles.
Immigration was a red-hot issue then as well and tied to fears of anti-American influences from abroad.
Under President Adams, Congress raised the number of years a foreigner would have to live in the United States before being naturalized as a citizen.
The Federalist-controlled Congress also gave the president broad powers to deport immigrants –or “aliens,” as they were then called.
How about complaints of government being used against domestic opponents? With the Sedition Act of 1798, Congress criminalized “false, scandalous, and malicious writing” critical of the government.
Nowadays, administrations like President Joe Biden’s lean on social media companies to do their censoring for them, as critics of COVID policy, such as Jay Bhattacharya, discovered.
Jefferson and his supporters didn’t just oppose the Alien and Sedition Acts, they were prepared to resist them to the point of inciting states to defy the federal government.
The Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions of 1798 –the former written by Jefferson, the latter by James Madison, both making their case anonymously – argued states could obstruct or even “nullify” federal law.
The “sanctuary city” progressive mayors declare this in response to federal immigration restrictions that have a precedent here.
A new twist, however, is when states like Florida and Texas find themselves having to enforce immigration laws that Biden won’t. When the president himself in effect nullifies laws, states have to un-nullify them.
Jefferson had a more consistent state-centric philosophy of government than most politicians of his time, to say nothing of ours.
But Jefferson could be inconsistent when he needed to be, not least about observing the Constitution’s separation of powers.
Negotiating the Louisiana Purchase and presenting it to Congress as an accomplished fact when he was president in 1803 may have been overstepping the bounds of his office, but Jefferson was content to have the Senate ratify the treaty, and his actions, after he made his move.
As for his commitment to civil liberties, there too Jefferson was less than perfect – he opposed the Sedition Act but believed the same crime, “seditious libel,” should be recognized and punished at the state level.
In another parallel to modern politics, the bitterness of the Adams-Jefferson contest in 1800 didn’t end with the election itself.
And then as now, disgruntled members of one’s own party could be an acute source of embarrassment.
An ex-supporter of Jefferson’s, James Callender, first published details of a long-rumored sex scandal that today shadows the third president’s reputation, when he alleged Jefferson fathered children with his slave Sally Hemings.
Earlier, Callender brought almost modern gender controversy into the 1800 campaign when he assailed Adams as a “hideous hermaphroditical character, which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman” in a pamphlet that got him prosecuted under the Sedition Act.
Jefferson tried to assuage lingering partisan hostilities in his first inaugural address: “We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists,” he said.
Even those “who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form” should be tolerated, he urged, as “monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.”
The Constitution was in no danger from free speech.
And while Jefferson rejected the political violence of Daniel Shays’ rebellion in the 1780s, he wrote to Madison, “I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.”
Conflicts as intense as ours are nothing new in American politics; and while we may not have leaders like Jefferson or Adams, we have one advantage they did not – we have their history to inspire us.
