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Clash of the Kinsmen Still Echoes Today |
| Section: CULTURE / HERITAGE--JEFFERSON'S CHALLENGES |
| Author: Lyman B. Coddington |
| Publication:
The World & I Online |
| Issue Date: 1/1/2006 |
| Size: 4,380 Words, 28,783 Characters |
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Real U.S. nation-building began with a quarter-century of friction inspired by two Virginia cousins--John Marshall and Thomas Jefferson. Marshall's vision prevailed while they were alive, but he wondered if the Constitution would survive.
On March 4, 1801, about 300 people assembled in the U.S. Senate chamber to witness the first presidential inauguration in the new national capital, Washington, D.C. The chamber consisted of the basement and first floor of the only completed wing of the Capitol.
With 10,266 white citizens, 738 free blacks, and 3,244 slaves, the federal city was a rather desolate place--muddy streets, a few drab boardinghouses, half-built federal structures. In the unfinished White House, first lady Abigail Adams had resorted to using the East Room to hang out her laundry. The incoming president would be obliged to use a rope ladder for reaching the second floor. (Lomask, Vol. 2, p.296; and p. 279; McCullough, p. 553)
Shortly after noon, Thomas Jefferson, accompanied by outgoing President John Adams' Cabinet, arrived in the Senate chamber. Adams himself had left the city before dawn, apparently in no mood to effect a gracious transfer of power to his former vice president. Already on hand, seated next to the newly elected vice president, Aaron Burr, was Jefferson's fellow Virginian and distant kinsman, John Marshall. Adams had named Marshall chief justice of the United States only one month ago, and Marshall would administer the oath of office.
Everyone rose as Jefferson entered the chamber, and Burr moved to his right and motioned the president-elect to his vacated chair. Jefferson was thus seated at the center of the platform, flanked on his right by a man he would later accuse of treason and on his left by the stubborn jurist who would frustrate Jefferson's efforts to convict the accused.
In 1801, none of these principals could have anticipated the irony of this tableau. Burr and Jefferson, who had recently experienced a tie in the Electoral College vote for president of the United States, were soon to become political adversaries. Marshall also was to become a frustrating opponent of Jefferson. Adams and Jefferson themselves, friendly correspondents during their younger days but frequently at odds during the previous four years, were shortly to stop speaking to one another for the next eleven years.
Such were the omens for the third president of the United States, who reassuringly said in his inaugural address, "We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists," in a bid to alleviate tensions between the two political parties of that time. In fact, Jefferson and Adams did eventually end their mutual isolation; and Jefferson succeeded in marginalizing Burr, who was unsuccessfully prosecuted for treason but went into self-exile in Europe for four years. But Marshall--closest by birth and by ...
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...ter, 2002.
Smith, James Morton, ed. The Republic of Letters: The Correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. New York: Norton, 1995.
Vidal, Gore. Inventing a Nation: Washington, Adams, Jefferson. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003.
Wheelan, Joseph. Jefferson's Vendetta: the Pursuit of Aaron Burr and the Judiciary. New York: Carroll & Graf, 2005.
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Publication Details
(The World & I Online) |
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The World & I Online is a
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Originally published monthly in print as The World & I, our site
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