1796 United States presidential election

George Washington, the incumbent president in 1796, whose second term expired on March 4, 1797

With Washington retiring after two terms, both parties sought the presidency for the first time. Before the ratification of the 12th Amendment in 1804, each elector was to vote for two persons but was not able to indicate which vote was for president and which for vice president. Instead, the recipient of the most electoral votes would become president and the runner-up vice president. As a result, both parties ran multiple candidates for president, in hopes of keeping one of their opponents from being the runner-up. These candidates were the equivalent of modern-day running mates, but under the law, they were all candidates for president. Thus, both Adams and Jefferson were technically opposed by several members of their own parties. The plan was for one of the electors to cast a vote for the main party nominee (Adams or Jefferson) and a candidate besides the primary running mate, thus ensuring that the main nominee would have one more vote than his running mate.

• 
  Results by county explicitly indicating the percentage of the winning candidate in each county. Shades of blue are for Jefferson (Democratic-Republican) and shades of yellow are for Adams (Federalist).
• 
  1796 Presidential County Results, shaded according to the winning candidate's share of the vote.

Tennessee was admitted into the United States after the 1792 election, increasing the Electoral College to 138 electors.

Under the system in place before the 1804 ratification of the Twelfth Amendment, electors were to cast votes for two persons for president; the runner-up in the presidential race was elected vice president. If no candidate won votes from a majority of the Electoral College, the House of Representatives would hold a contingent election to select the winner. Each party intended to manipulate the results by having some of their electors cast one vote for the intended presidential candidate and one vote for someone besides the intended vice-presidential candidate, leaving their vice-presidential candidate a few votes shy of their presidential candidate. But all electoral votes were cast on the same day, and communications between states were extremely slow at that time, making it very difficult to coordinate which electors were to manipulate their vote for vice president. Additionally, there were rumors that Hamilton had coerced southern electors pledged to Jefferson to give their second vote to Pinckney in hope of electing him president instead of Adams.

Campaigning centered in the swing states of New York and Pennsylvania.[8] Adams and Jefferson won a combined 139 electoral votes from the 138 members of the Electoral College. The Federalists swept every state north of the Mason–Dixon line except Pennsylvania, though one Pennsylvania elector voted for Adams. The Democratic-Republicans won the votes of most Southern electors, but the electors of Maryland and Delaware gave a majority of their votes to Federalist candidates, while North Carolina and Virginia each gave Adams one electoral vote.

Nationwide, most electors voted for Adams and a second Federalist or for Jefferson and a second Democratic-Republican, but there were several exceptions to this. One elector in Maryland voted for both Adams and Jefferson, and two electors cast votes for Washington, who had not campaigned and was not formally affiliated with either party. Pinckney won the second votes from most of the electors who voted for Adams, but 21 electors from New England and Maryland cast their second votes for other candidates, including Chief Justice Oliver Ellsworth. Those who voted for Jefferson were significantly less united in their second choice, though Burr won a plurality of the Jefferson electors. All eight electors in Pinckney's home state of South Carolina, as well as at least one Pennsylvania elector, cast their ballots for Jefferson and Pinckney. In North Carolina, Jefferson won 11 votes, but the remaining 13 were spread among six different candidates from both parties. In Virginia, most electors voted for Jefferson and Governor Samuel Adams of Massachusetts.[9]

The result was that Adams received 71 electoral votes, one more than required to be elected president. If any two of the three Adams electors in Pennsylvania, Virginia, and North Carolina had voted with the rest of their states, it would have flipped the election. Jefferson received 68 votes, nine more than Pinckney, and was elected vice president. Burr finished in a distant fourth place with 30 votes. Nine other candidates received the remaining 48 electoral votes. If Pinckney had won the second votes of all of the New England electors who voted for Adams, he would have been elected president over Adams and Jefferson.

Source (Popular Vote): Dubin, Michael J. (2002). United States Presidential Elections, 1788-1860: The Official Results by County and State. Jefferson: McFarland & Company. pp. 6–8. ISBN 9780786410170.[11]
Source (Popular Vote): A New Nation Votes: American Election Returns 1787-1825[12]
Source (Electoral Vote): "Electoral College Box Scores 1789–1996". National Archives and Records Administration. Retrieved July 30, 2005.

^(a) Votes for Federalist electors have been assigned to John Adams and votes for Democratic-Republican electors have been assigned to Thomas Jefferson.
^(b) Only 9 of the 16 states used any form of popular vote.
^(c) Those states that did choose electors by popular vote had widely varying restrictions on suffrage via property requirements.

The following four years were the only time (as of 2023) that the president and vice president were from different parties. John Quincy Adams and John C. Calhoun were later elected president and vice-president as political opponents, but they were both Democratic-Republicans, and while Andrew Johnson, Abraham Lincoln's second vice-president, was a Democrat, Lincoln ran on a combined National Union Party ticket in 1864, not as a strict Republican.

On January 6, 1797, Representative William L. Smith of South Carolina presented a resolution on the floor of the House of Representatives for an amendment to the Constitution by which the presidential electors would designate which candidate would be president and which vice president.[17] No action was taken on his proposal, setting the stage for the deadlocked election of 1800.

This is also the first of only two elections so far in the life of the Republic which elected a Presidential term of only 1,460 days rather than 1,461 days (the second was in 1896). This is because of the Gregorian calendar rule that years ending in “00” but not divisible by 400, are not leap years.[18]

The French foreign minister, Charles Delacroix, wrote that France "must raise up the [American] people and at the same time conceal the lever by which we do so… I propose… to send orders and instructions to our minister plenipotentiary at Philadelphia to use all means in his power to bring about a successful revolution, and [George] Washington's replacement."[19] The French minister (ambassador) to the United States, Pierre Adet, openly supported the Democratic-Republican Party and its presidential nominee, Thomas Jefferson, while attacking the Federalist Party and its presidential nominee, John Adams.[20]

The foreign intrigue France perpetrated was unsuccessful, as Adams won the election with an electoral vote count of 71-68. A significant factor in thwarting the French efforts was George Washington's Farewell Address, which condemned foreign meddling in America.[20]

The Constitution, in Article II, Section 1, provided that the state legislatures should decide the manner in which their Electors were chosen. Different state legislatures chose different methods:[21]

• Inauguration of John Adams
• Bibliography of Thomas Jefferson
• History of the United States (1789–1849)
• First Party System
• 1796–97 United States House of Representatives elections
• 1796–97 United States Senate elections

Web references

• "A Historical Analysis of the Electoral College". The Green Papers. Retrieved March 20, 2005.
• A New Nation Votes: American Election Returns 1787-1825

• Cunningham, Noble E., Jr. ed. The Making of the American Party System 1789 to 1809 (1965), short excerpts from primary sources
• Cunningham, Noble E., Jr., ed. Circular Letters of Congressmen to Their Constituents 1789-1829 (1978), 3 vol; political reports sent by Congressmen to local newspapers

• Encyclopedia of the New American Nation, 1754–1829 ed. by Paul Finkelman (2005), 1600 pp.
• The North Carolina Electoral Vote: The People and the Process Behind the Vote. Raleigh, North Carolina: North Carolina Secretary of State. 1988.
• Banning, Lance. The Jeffersonian Persuasion: Evolution of a Party Ideology (1978)
• Chambers, William Nisbet, ed. The First Party System (1972)
• Chambers, William Nisbet. Political Parties in a New Nation: The American Experience, 1776–1809 (1963)
• Charles, Joseph. The Origins of the American Party System (1956), reprints articles in William and Mary Quarterly
• Cunningham, Noble E., Jr. Jeffersonian Republicans: The Formation of Party Organization: 1789–1801 (1957)
• Cunningham, Noble E., Jr., "John Beckley: An Early American Party Manager," William and Mary Quarterly, 13 (Jan. 1956), 40–52, in JSTOR
• Dawson, Matthew Q. Partisanship and the Birth of America's Second Party, 1796-1800: Stop the Wheels of Government. Greenwood, (2000) online version
• DeConde, Alexander. "Washington's Farewell, the French Alliance, and the Election of 1796," Mississippi Valley Historical Review, Vol. 43, No. 4 (Mar. 1957), pp. 641–658 in JSTOR
• Dinkin, Robert J. Campaigning in America: A History of Election Practices. (Greenwood 1989) online version
• Elkins, Stanley and Eric McKitrick. The Age of Federalism (1995) online version, the standard highly detailed political history of 1790s
• Freeman, Joanne. "The Presidential Election of 1796," in Richard Alan Ryerson, ed. John Adams and the Founding of the Republic (2001).
• Miller, John C. The Federalist Era: 1789-1801 (1960).
• Pasley, Jeffrey L. The First Presidential Contest: 1796 and the Founding of American Democracy. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2013.
• Schlesinger, Arthur Meier, ed. History of American Presidential Elections, 1789–1984 (Vol 1) (1986), essay and primary sources on 1796
• Wood, Gordon S. Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815 (2009)

Wikimedia Commons has media related to United States presidential election, 1796.

• Presidential Election of 1796: A Resource Guide from the Library of Congress
• Election of 1796 in Counting the Votes Archived January 13, 2015, at the Wayback Machine