. . a more tranquill & unoffending
station could not have been found for me . . . It will
give me philosophical evenings in the winter & rural
days in the summer.
- Thomas Jefferson to Benjamin Rush, 1797
Most students of Virginia history know the commonwealth
provided four of the first five presidents of the United
States. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison
and James Monroe all called the Old Dominion home. Over
the next 100 or so years, an additional three native Virginians
would take the helm – William Henry Harrison, John
Tyler and Woodrow Wilson.
What is less known is that two of these gentlemen also
served as vice commanders-in-chief, and under unusual
circumstances. Due to the eccentricities
of the electoral system back in 1796, Thomas
Jefferson, who was trying to retire from public life,
ended up as vice president to his opposition party’s
candidate, John
Adams. A little more than 40 years later, John
Tyler had the unique distinction of being the first
vice president to succeed a president who died in office.
Jefferson’s odd road to the vice presidency began
in September 1796 when George Washington announced he
would not seek a third term. By then a two-party system
had begun to emerge in the new nation with Federalists
on one side and Jefferson’s Republicans (also called
the Democratic
Republicans, later to become the modern Democratic
Party) on the other. The Federalists decided to select
Adams, Washington’s vice president, as their presidential
candidate. The Republicans turned to Jefferson. They felt
he was the only candidate who could beat Adams, who was
popular in New England and associated with the success
of the American Revolution.
At the time electors could cast two votes for president.
The candidate with the highest number of votes would become
president; the one with the next highest tally would be
vice president. The framers of the Constitution had set
up the system in the hopes that the top candidate would
have broad national popularity and the vice president
would have at least regional support. They hadn’t
anticipated the possibility that parties would propose
opposing slates of candidates, which occurred for the
first time in 1796. Jefferson and Aaron
Burr ran against John Adams and Thomas
Pinckney.
When Jefferson came in second behind Adams, he was actually
relieved. He had retired from public office two years
before and was enjoying his days at Monticello. That’s
when he wrote to Benjamin
Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence,
declaring his relief at being vice president. In fact
within days of being sworn in as vice president, Jefferson
also took on the duties of president of the American
Philosophical Society, a well-respected scientific
and philosophical body. In his inaugural speech to that
organization, he talked about a subject dear to his heart
– the recently discovered fossil remains of a large
animal he referred to as Megalonyx or “Great Claw.”
No, it wasn’t a dinosaur. It’s now referred
to as “Jefferson’s giant sloth,” a creature
that lived during the last Ice Age about 11,000 years
ago.
As with everything he touched, Jefferson made his mark
on the vice presidency. Jefferson was only the second
person to serve in the office, and he found the position
still ill-defined. The U.S. Constitution stated that the
vice president should serve as president of the U.S. Senate,
but didn’t actually define what that role meant.
John Adams, who served as president of the Senate before
Jefferson, had been considered officious. The new vice
president decided what the U.S. Senate needed was a Manual
of Parliamentary Practice that would better define
his role and how the body should conduct business. He
was concerned that the rights of the minority party should
be respected. Jefferson had kept notes on parliamentary
procedure when he served in the Virginia House of Burgesses
and he also admired how the British Parliament operated.
Using those sources, he developed a 53-section manual
that dealt with topics such as privileges, petitions,
motions, resolutions, bills, treaties, conferences and
impeachments. As Jefferson biographer Dumas
Malone wrote, the vice president “exercised
his limited functions [as presiding officer] with greater
care than his predecessor and left every successor his
debtor.”
In 1993, on the 250th anniversary of Jefferson’s
birth, the Senate even published a special edition of
Jefferson’s parliamentary rules. Thus, our second
vice president can take credit for any decorum that remains
in the chambers of Congress.
John Tyler’s contribution to the vice presidency
occurred more by chance. He actually served as vice president
for only 33 days before President William
Henry Harrison succumbed to pneumonia in April 1841
and Tyler became president.
He is probably best known as the second part of the political
slogan, “Tippecanoe and Tyler, too!” The slogan
which referred to Whig
presidential candidate Harrison’s success as an
Indian fighter at the Battle
of Tippecanoe in 1811. In a country that was becoming
more divided over the issue of slavery, the Whigs chose
Tyler in the hopes that, as a slaveholder, he would balance
presidential candidate Harrison, who was rumored to sympathize
with abolitionists.
When the ticket won, Tyler attended his and Harrison’s
inauguration on March 4, 1841, opened the Senate in his
role as president and the next day returned to his Sherwood
Forest plantation in Charles County. As with Jefferson,
he went home “with the expectation of spending the
next four years in peace and quiet.” (Oliver Perry
Chitwood, John Tyler: Champion of the Old South.)
Such a quest was not to be. He received a letter on April
5 informing him that Harrison had died of pneumonia the
day before. He immediately returned to Washington. Since
Harrison was the first president to die in office, many
feared a constitutional crisis. It was not clear whether
Tyler would become president until a new president was
elected in a special election or if the Constitution allowed
him to fill out Harrison’s term.
Tyler, of course, championed the second interpretation
and even though some newspapers continued to refer to
his term as “His Accidency,” in the end few
questioned Tyler’s authority as the new president.
It was not until the 25th Amendment, ratified in 1967,
that the language of the Constitution on the order of
succession was clarified. But Tyler had set the precedent.
These two Virginians helped fine-tune the murky role of
the vice president in our nation’s early years;
it’s doubtful those who have held the position since
still look forward to “a tranquill and unoffending
station.”
(Sources: Vice Presidents of the United States, 1789 –
1993, Mark O. Hatfield, U.S. Government Printing Office,
1997; "Thomas
Jefferson, 2nd Vice President (1797-1801," Senate
Historical Office.)
September 25, 2006
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