My girlfriend asked me the other day whether someone had run against George Washington for the presidency. At first, I said, “Nah, I don’t think so. I seem to remember it was a unanimous decision to put Washington into office.”
To make sure, I looked it up on my handy Encyclopedia Brittanica CD. This ended up confusing matters even more.
The article on George Washington states, “In no state was any other name considered. The electors chosen in the first days of 1789 cast a unanimous vote for him …”
Yet another article on John Adams in the same encyclopedia says that Adams lost to Washington 1789, with the vote being 69 to 34. How is this unanimous? Later in the same article on Adams, it cites the Adams-Jefferson election as the first “contested” presidential election. Were Adams and Washington of the same party, and therefore the first two elections were not considered contested?
Some expert on presidential elections please explain.
Prior to the adoption of the 12th Amendment in 1804 (this is the 200th anniversary of it!!), each elector cast two votes, the man getting the most votes becoming President and the man in second place becoming V.P.
So 69 electors cast 138 votes (2 each), with Washington getting a unanimous vote of 69, and the V.P. choice scattered among Adams, Jefferson, and others, with Adams gaining a plurality of 34 and becoming the first Vice President.
So the results reported in that poll are accurate, but they erroneously imply to modern people an adversarial race between Washington and Adams. If there was any adversarial race, it was between Adams and Jefferson for VP, not between anybody and Washington, who was nearly as unanimous a national hero in his own day as he is today.
For the first four presidential elections, the runner-up of the presidential race became the vice president. This was changed after the passage of the 12th Ammendment. Each Elector cast twoelectoral votes. Every Elector cast one for Washington. The second vote was split among the other candidates. Adams received the second-most votes and so became the nation’s first vice president.
One element that has gone unsaid is that the result was essentially engineered to come out the way it did.
Remember, each state got to choose its electors any way it wanted. Most picked them through the state legislature, a few (one or two, IIRC) had direct elections of some sort, and others (notably the great state of New York – my home) could not get its act together in time to figure out what to do. What I’m getting at here is that the electors did not come to the election process with binding political commitments, so there was a lot of behind-the-scenes stagecraft going on to insure a pretty result.
It was a given that Washington was going to be picked president, so the stage managers – IIRC, Alexander Hamilton was the main manipulator – made sure everyone voted for him so his mandate would appear utterly unchallenged. The prevailing consensus was that Adams should be VP, so the stage managers directed most of the electors to vote for him, but not so many as to challenge GW’s primacy. *It is no coincidence that JA ended up with a hair less than half of GW’s tally. * The remaining votes were scattered among all the remaining also-rans, making sure that no one came close to GW of JA numbers.
JA votes 34 = 3 +4 = 7. AND we know the significant of that number for the Freemasons.
The 69 votes that GW received is 6+9 = 15 =1+5=6. This is one less than the mystical 7. So the hidden message revealed here is that it they wanted it to appear unanimous to the general public but those in the know would know better.
Of course 138 = 13+8 = 21 which is a trinity of sevens. Those wacky masons.
Adams was not particularly happy with the way the electoral votes were arranged. He had a lot of pride and assumed that anyone who wanted to vote for him should and not because Alexander Hamilton told him not to.
Men like Washington, Adams, and Jefferson wanted to project the image that they were all above partisan politics. They weren’t, but they wanted people to think that they were.
By the time Andrew Jackson came around, it was pretty clear that people running for president were partisan politicians and by the 1840 election, presidential elections started to resemble “races”.
