MEDIA CONTACT: Pat Vaughan Tremmel at (847) 491-4892 or p-tremmel@northwestern.edu

October 15, 2003

Wills’ Book Examines ‘Slave Vote’ in Jefferson’s Election

EVANSTON, Ill. --- The presidential election of 1800 is one of the most thoroughly studied events in our history, yet few treatments of it recognize the perverse power of the “slave vote” in Thomas Jefferson’s victory, according to a new book by Garry Wills, the widely acclaimed professor of history at Northwestern University.

“Negro President: Jefferson and the Slave Power” (Houghton Mifflin, Nov. 3, 2003), the new book by Pulitzer Prize-winning Wills, makes a compelling argument that the “slave power” -- the power slave states wielded over non-slave states -- was at the core of the South’s and Jefferson’s political ascendancy.

Like other Southerners of the time, Jefferson took every step he could to prevent challenges to the protection and extension of slavery. Through the three-fifths clause of the U.S. Constitution, an extraordinary source of political and economic power, Southerners made sure that slavery was embedded in the legislative process itself. In a bargain to secure ratification in the South, the agreement decreed that each slave held in the United States would count as three-fifths of a person for representation of a state in the House of Representatives and, consequently, in the Electoral College.

Largely ignored by historians, the “federal ratio” made the margin of difference in the election of 1800. Though Jefferson received eight more votes than John Adams in the Electoral College, at least 12 were not based on citizenry that could express its will, but on the federal ratio, a key electoral tool for maintaining slavery against a majority of white voters.

Jefferson’s contemporary critics argued fiercely that the “slave power” assured his victory, challenging the boast that the election of 1800 was a second revolution, based on the express will of a popular majority.

Agreeing with Jefferson’s Federalist critics on that point, Wills offers a disturbing perspective of an election that was hailed as a triumph of stability in the young, constitutional system. The incumbent was ousted without violence, and the election was applauded for demonstrating that control of the vast political power of the national government could pass peacefully from one political party to another.

Missing from those optimistic accounts is the federal ratio’s influence on that passing of power, Wills says, and on the politics of the new nation.

Timothy Pickering, the former secretary of state under George Washington and John Adams, was a central player in the politics that plagued Jefferson. He coined the term “negro president” and made it current among Jefferson’s Federalist critics. Jefferson, who Wills otherwise views as a giant in our nation’s history, played a critical role in the persistence of this country’s racial divide, Wills contends, while Pickering, a relatively controversial contemporary, towers over him on this haunting issue.

With “Negro President: Jefferson and the Slave Power,” Wills joins modern historians’ growing awareness of the pervasiveness of slavery’s effects on our early history. But he insists that he does not mean for his book “to join an unfortunate trend toward Jefferson-bashing.” The slave power had nothing to do with Jefferson’s approval of slavery, but rather with the political use of it to fend off challenges to the Southern economic base, he says.

Jefferson’s efforts to maintain and expand slavery were based on a simple political and economic calculus. The Constitution rewarded too well any new slave territories for Jefferson to throw away the advantage, Wills says. Because the North almost always had a majority of seats in Congress, Southerners – with Jefferson in the lead – were determined to gain the territory that would make the federal ratio give them a majority.

“My Jefferson is a giant but a giant trammeled in a net and obliged to keep repairing and strengthening the coils of the net,” says Wills.

Known for the depth of his thought and the gracefulness of his writing, Wills is the author of more than 20 widely read books on American culture and politics. “Lincoln at Gettysburg” won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature, for its close textual analysis of the Gettysburg Address, and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Wills delivered the 2002 Julius Rosenthal Foundation Lecture Series on “Jefferson and the Slave Power” at Northwestern University School of Law.