Democracy’s Demands: Thomas Jefferson’s First Inaugural Address

(Note:  The American experiment in self-government depends for its success on the American character – how we exercise our responsibilities as citizens.  As then-Governor Ronald Reagan said: “freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.”  This periodic series, “Democracy’s Demands,” invites you to connect with a key document or speech in our history.  As you read, consider what its words challenge us to be and do today to preserve what Abraham Lincoln called “the last best hope of earth.”)

On March 4, 1801 Republican Thomas Jefferson took the Oath of Office, the first president to do so in the nation’s new capital city.  Jefferson had beaten his Federalist foe, John Adams, by eight electoral votes on February 11th but was tied with his own running mate, Aaron Burr, throwing the election into the House of Representatives (the 12th Amendment preventing such a problem would not be ratified until 1804.)  It took 36 ballots over six days for Jefferson to emerge victorious, as Federalists tried to prevent his election.  

Though Adams and Jefferson were allies throughout the Revolution, a chasm opened during Washington’s presidency. Adams favored a strong national government and Jefferson a very limited one. Adams and the Federalists favored England; Jefferson and the Republicans preferred France. When Adams beat Jefferson by three electoral votes in the presidential election of 1796, the first after Washington stepped down, Jefferson became his Vice-President.  As Jefferson later recounted, they almost never spoke to each other for the next four years.

Their divide grew during Adams presidency, especially after he signed the Alien and Sedition Acts, one of which made criticism of the president (but interestingly not the vice-president) a crime.  Jefferson referred to the Adams Administration as a “reign of witches” and the election of 1800 turned sharply partisan.  Jefferson and the Republicans were labeled as “artful and ambitious demagogues” and Jefferson was called a “howling atheist”.  Republicans warned voters of Adams’s monarchical tendencies.

Jefferson thus faced a herculean challenge in his Inaugural Address.  He had to establish his legitimacy to Federalists and try to heal a deeply divided nation. After a salutation to “Friends and Fellow-Citizens” and words of hope for the country and humility for the tasks he faced, Jefferson drove to the heart of partisan animosities in the recent “contest of opinion”:

“All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression. Let us, then, fellow-citizens, unite with one heart and one mind. Let us restore to social intercourse that harmony and affection without which liberty and even life itself are but dreary things. And let us reflect that, having banished from our land that religious intolerance under which mankind so long bled and suffered, we have yet gained little if we countenance a political intolerance as despotic, as wicked, and capable of as bitter and bloody persecutions.”

He continued by articulating his belief that Federalist and Republicans shared much more than divided them, using the lower case to refer to their ideas and not the upper case to call attention to political parties:

“But every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle. We have called by different names brethren of the same principle. We are all republicans, we are all federalists.”

Two days later he would write to the “financier of the Revolution,” Pennsylvanian Robert Morris, that: “I hope to see them [the people] again consolidated into a homogeneous mass, and the very name of party obliterated from among us.”

Jefferson then focused on what he believed both parties shared and that this government was “the world’s best hope.” As historian Stephen Howard Browne noted, his writing in the Inaugural reminds us of his description of the task he had set himself in drafting the Declaration of Independence in 1776: “not to find out new principles . . . never before thought of . . . but to place before mankind the common sense of the subject, in terms so plain and firm as to command their assent.”

Jefferson did not wipe away party divisions but he managed a peaceful transition of power across party lines, the first in our history. He bought the nation time to calm itself down. Federalist John Marshall wrote of Jefferson’s address that “It is in general well judged and conciliatory.  It is in direct terms giving the lie to the violent party declamation which has elected him; but it is strongly characteristic of the general cast of his political theory.”  Even Alexander Hamilton, a strong Federalist but who had supported Jefferson over Burr in the climactic weeks of February, gave him the benefit of the doubt: “We view it as virtually a candid retraction of past misapprehensions, and a pledge to the community that the new President will not lend himself to dangerous innovations.”

Jefferson’s words echo across time. On the night before his 1961 inauguration John Kennedy, who had also won a close and hotly contested election, attended a concert in Constitution Hall.  As his biographer, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. tells it:

“An hour later they [Kennedy and his wife] left at the intermission to go on to the Inaugural Gala at the Armory . . . With the light on inside the car, he settled back to read Jefferson’s First Inaugural, which had been printed in the concert program.  When he finished, he shook his head and said wryly: “Better than mine.””

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