The Election of 1800 Was Worse Than 2020 in Every Way Imaginable

Published: Nov. 3, 2020, 7:10 a.m.

b"The election was perhaps the nastiest election the country has seen. It had horrible partisan rancor, personal insults, and a politicized media. But we aren't talking about the 2020 election between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. Rather it was the 1000 presidential election, where President John Adams faced his own vice president, Thomas Jefferson.
Adams was decried as a \\u2018repulsive pedant\\u2019 and \\u2018gross hypocrite\\u2019 who \\u2018behaved neither like a man nor like a woman but instead possessed a hideous hermaphroditical character.\\u2019 Jefferson was said to be \\u2018a mean-spirited, low-lived fellow\\u2019 who would create a nation where \\u2018murder, robbery, rape, adultery and incest will openly be taught and practiced.
Today's guest, Jeffrey Sikkenga, Executive Director of the Ashbrook Center and Professor of Political Science at Ashland University, believes that the election of 1800 has more parallels to today than any other election, but it also can give us hope.
Only 24 years after the Declaration of Independence proclaimed that the Americans were \\u2018one people,\\u2019 it looked like America could be torn apart. The Constitution was only 12 years old and the great unifying figure of George Washington \\u2014 who was unanimously elected twice as president \\u2014 had died the year before, in 1799. Even though Washington warned about the dangers of parties in his farewell address, two competing parties had formed \\u2014 the Federalists of Adams and the Democratic-Republicans of Jefferson. Power had rarely been transferred peacefully between rival parties, and never in the new country.
Sikkenga argues that nevertheless, America surprised the world. Jefferson won, and Adams, despite personal bitterness at what he regarded as Jefferson\\u2019s betrayal, followed the Constitution and stepped aside peacefully. For his part, in his inaugural address Jefferson implored his \\u2018fellow-citizens\\u2019 to \\u2018unite with one heart and one mind\\u2019 and \\u2018restore to social intercourse that harmony and affection without which liberty and even life itself are but dreary things.\\u2019
Jefferson wasn\\u2019t just mouthing platitudes. He believed that during the election Americans may \\u2018have called by different names,\\u2019 but above all they were \\u2018brethren of the same principle.\\u2019 The truths they shared in the Declaration and Constitution \\u2014 equality, liberty, consent of the governed, the rule of law \\u2014 were stronger than the differences of opinion dividing the parties."