Crooked US elections?

 

My friends in the USA will no doubt be thoroughly tired of unsubstantiated cries of ‘Stop the Steal’ etc. But I read today that Republican representatives on the election board of Fulton County, GA, approved a new rule that would allow them to withhold certification of the presidential election result if they consider that there has been any irregularity. No doubt there will be other similar manoeuvres before November.

 

However, election gerrymandering is nearly as old as the United States itself. I am reading a wonderful, enormous, history of New York City to 1898*. In the spring of 1800 elections were due to choose representatives in New York state’s Assembly, and the congressman who would represent New York City in Washington. The Federalists (led by Alexander Hamilton), who advocated property restrictions to limit the vote to the better type of person and rule by the most successful better type of person (e.g. A. Hamilton), had been accustomed to winning elections. But in 1800 they faced a relatively new group, the Democratic-Republicans, whose leading light was Aaron Burr.

 

Burr, who turned out to be ‘a master of the electioneering arts,’ invented a new concept called ‘fagot voting.’ A property requirement (£20) limited those able to vote and excluded the likes of bakers, potters, ship’s chandlers and the like, but Burr’s scheme expanded the franchise to supporters of his party by making them joint owners of a single piece of property. Burr’s fagots (or bundles) of voters tipped the balance in favour of the Democratic- Republicans. A Columbia College professor won the New York City Congressional seat for the Democratic party, and all thirteen of the state’s Assembly seats. Democrats now had a narrow majority in the Assembly, which was critical for the upcoming presidential election, since the Assembly chose the state’s federal electors. Thus, New York was guaranteed to back Democratic-Republican Thomas Jefferson against the Federalist incumbent John Adams. Asked by a Federalist how he had pulled off such a result, Burr replied: ‘We have beat you by superior Management.’

 

Nothing daunted, Hamilton wrote to New York governor John Jay to propose that he call a special session of the outgoing state Assembly (with a Federalist majority) which would alter the procedure for choosing Federal electors to guarantee their votes for the Federalist candidate. ‘Jay, whose sense of rectitude wasn’t so easily laid aside, refused.’ The result: Jefferson was elected, and his Vice President was none other than Aaron Burr.

 

If John Jay is the 1800 equivalent of Mike Pence in refusing to rig the vote, there is another parallel in this story, since a bullet also played a part in its dénouement. Hamilton and Burr were bitter enemies. In early 1804 Hamilton made it known that Burr was unfit to rule. Burr challenged him to a duel. On 11 July the two men crossed the Hudson to Weehawken, NJ. Today Weehawken is essentially a large commuter parking lot, with a hotel and some shops. You reach it by ferry from the end of 42^nd Street, but in 1804 in a more bucolic setting the two men stood ten paces apart. Hamilton had declared that he would let Burr shoot first: he did and mortally wounded his foe. Hamilton died the next day in what is now Greenwich Village. Tributes ‘poured in from all over the country.’ Burr, about to be indicted for murder and fearing for his safety, ‘slipped out of town into obloquy everlasting.’

 

I noted with interest that in 1803, Dewitt Clinton, the nephew of seven-times governor of New York George Clinton, was elected governor with a salary of $15,000. By coincidence, this was my own annual salary when I arrived in Washington one hundred and sevety three years later.

 

* Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898, Oxford University Press, New York 1999 (1,383pp.)