In 1800 president John Adams ran for a second term against Thomas Jefferson.  Few disputed that Jefferson was the intended winner, but the quirks of the electoral college system left him without the necessary majority[1].  Only after thirty-six exhausting rounds of balloting in the House of Representatives (and largely thanks to the agile political skills of Alexander Hamilton) did Jefferson become our third president.  This was the first presidential election since the formation of political parties and the vicious partisan attacks had been unrestrained.  Jefferson knew when he decided to run for the presidency that he would be the subject of a constant barrage of fake news, or as he phrased it, “absolute falsehoods without a circumstance of truth to rest on”[2]  Among other unhinged attacks from the Federalists, Jefferson was said to be an atheist who would burn all the Bibles after his election.  Not to be outdone, the Jeffersonian Republicans claimed that Adams was mentally unbalanced, a narcissist[3], and was plotting to establish a hereditary monarchy.  The campaign had been bitter enough, but in the weeks that it took for Jefferson to secure a majority in the House, the rhetoric became more cataclysmic.  There was wild talk of civil war and mobs marching on Washington.  Jefferson did not indicate that he would try to restrain the violence that might erupt if the election did not go his way.  Fortunately,  Jefferson was determined the winner and the American people witnessed the historically rare phenomenon of a peaceful transfer of power between two political parties.  The bitterness and acrimony, however, had not subsided.  Adams demonstrated his disgust by refusing to attend Jefferson’s inauguration.

As one of the greatest wordsmiths of the founding generation, Jefferson knew the power of language.  Words do in fact matter.  In his first opportunity to address the American people as president he used his words to lift Americans above the political divisions that party labels emphasized and focus on the values that united the nation.  “Every difference of opinion,” spoke Jefferson, “is not a difference of principle.”  Americans must focus on the elevating principles and not the antagonizing differences.  There was a heavy dose of unabashed American exceptionalism—what is referred to today as America first nationalism—but  the emphasis was on what made America great in the first place: the virtuous character of the American people that was nourished by liberty.  Jefferson knew how to craft sentences that could focus on the unifying truths of our nation.  Might be helpful to mull them over now:

 “Let us, then, fellow-citizens, unite with one heart and one mind. Let us restore to social intercourse that harmony and affection without which liberty and even life itself are but dreary things. And let us reflect that, having banished from our land that religious intolerance under which mankind so long bled and suffered, we have yet gained little if we countenance a political intolerance as despotic, as wicked, and capable of as bitter and bloody persecutions…. Let us, then, with courage and confidence pursue our own Federal and Republican principles, our attachment to union and representative government. Kindly separated by nature and a wide ocean from the exterminating havoc of one quarter of the globe; too high-minded to endure the degradations of the others; possessing a chosen country, with room enough for our descendants to the thousandth and thousandth generation; entertaining a due sense of our equal right to the use of our own faculties, to the acquisitions of our own industry, to honor and confidence from our fellow-citizens, resulting not from birth, but from our actions and their sense of them; enlightened by a benign religion, professed, indeed, and practiced in various forms, yet all of them inculcating honesty, truth, temperance, gratitude, and the love of man; acknowledging and adoring an overruling Providence, which by all its dispensations proves that it delights in the happiness of man here and his greater happiness hereafter — with all these blessings, what more is necessary to make us a happy and a prosperous people? Still one thing more, fellow-citizens — a wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities.”

[1] Fixed by the 12^th Amendment

[2] “From Thomas Jefferson to Benjamin Rush, 23 September 1800,” Founders Online, National Archives, last modified June 13, 2018, http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-32-02-0102. [Original source: The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 32, 1 June 1800 – 16 February 1801, ed. Barbara B. Oberg. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005, pp. 166–169.]

[3] They would not have used the word “narcissist” but that’s what they meant when they wrote about his dangerously vain personality.