In addition to the insults, there was high drama inside the Federalist camp, where Hamilton secretly worked to have Adams’ running mate, Thomas Pinckney of South Carolina, win the election by getting southern Federalists to withhold their votes for Adams. He was also accused of being overweight and given the nickname “His Rotundity.” Adams was accused of wanting to be a king and starting a dynasty by having his son succeed him as President. Jefferson’s folks had been using their own strong campaign tactics in the fight against Adams. Phocion also paid compliment after compliment to Adams and claimed Jefferson would emancipate all slaves if he were elected president. Phocion also accused Jefferson of running away from British troops during the Revolution, unlike his brave friend Alexander Hamilton. Phocion said, in terms understood by most readers, that presidential candidate Jefferson was having an affair with one of his female slaves. On October 1796, a mysterious editorial from a writer named Phocion appeared in the Gazette of the United States, a popular Federalist newspaper in Philadelphia. (Back then, it wasn’t proper for candidates to campaign directly for office, but Aaron Burr, Jefferson’s running mate, campaigned anyway.) The campaign featured Vice President Adams of the Federalist Party and former Secretary of State Jefferson of what was called the Republican Party and quickly descended into mudslinging between their supporters. “They are likely, in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterward the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.” “They serve to organize faction, to give it an artificial and extraordinary force to put, in the place of the delegated will of the nation the will of a party, often a small but artful and enterprising minority of the community,” he said in his Farewell Address. With that announcement, it became certain the 1796 election on November 4, 1796, would be the first race contested by divided political parties with separate candidates for office, a fact not lost on Washington. Washington said on September 17, 1796, he wouldn’t seek a third term, in his well-crafted Farewell Address to the American public, written with some help from Alexander Hamilton and James Madison. It was unknown if Washington would seek a third term until less than two months before Election Day. Under the newly enacted Constitution, George Washington was elected president twice with little drama. In a campaign that rivals any current presidential election for insults and rancor, John Adams defeated Thomas Jefferson on this day in the 1796 election, in a race that changed American politics forever.
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