Thomas jefferson vice president quote
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Thomas Jefferson
Third President 1801-1809
[Martha Wayles Skelton Jefferson]Fast Fact: Thomas Jefferson gained the immense Louisiana Territory for the infant Republic.
Biography: In the thick of party conflict in 1800, Thomas Jefferson wrote in a private letter, "I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man."
This powerful advokat of liberty was born in 1743 in Albermarle County, Virginia, inheriting from his father, a planter and surveyor, some 5,000 acres of land, and from his mother, a Randolph, high social standing. He studied at the College of William and Mary, then read lag. In 1772 he married Martha Wayles Skelton, a widow, and took her to live in his partly constructed mountaintop home, Monticello.
Freckled and sandy-haired, rather tall and awkward, Jefferson was eloquent as a correspondent, but he was no public speaker. In the Virginia House of Burgesses and the Continental Congress, he
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"Jefferson is in every view less dangerous than Burr": Hamilton on the election of 1800
The presidential election of 1800 had resulted in a tie between the two Democratic Republicans, Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr. The founders had not foreseen the rise of political parties and the effects that development would have on the operations of the Electoral College. As that body was created at the Constitution Convention of 1787, each elector had two votes to cast and had to cast his votes for different individuals. The candidate receiving the highest number would become president; the candidate with the second highest number would become vice president. (Only after the adoption of the Twelfth Amendment in 1804 did electors vote separately and specifically for president and vice president.)
The presidential election of 1800 provided Alexander Hamilton, former secretary of the treasury, with a dilemma: a tie between Thomas Jefferson, a man whose principles were in direct
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Thomas Jefferson did not know he was going to become the Vice President of the United States. At that early moment in the American constitutional experiment, the person who got the most number of electoral votes became President, the person who came in second became the Vice President irrespective of party affiliation or his relationship with the President. Adams won the election of 1796 with 71 votes. Jefferson was runner-up with 68.
The 55 men who crafted the United States Constitution in the summer of 1787 were not really sure what a Vice President should do. It was not until near the end of their deliberations that they decided he’d preside over the United States Senate—if only to give him something to do for his $5,000 a year salary. As Founding Father Roger Sherman said, "If the vice-President were not to be President of the Senate, he would be without employment."
Disenchantment with the Vice Presidency began early. The nation’s very first Vice President John Adams called t