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A
Heartbeat Away:
Vice
Presidents from Virginia
.
. . 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.)
NEXT: Is Virginia Really a State? What the Heck is a
Commonwealth?
--
September 25, 2006
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