Here we are in Edinburgh in the School of History, Classics and Archaeology. I want to spend the next few minutes setting the scene for our study of the election of 1800. And in order to do that we need to consider what the United States was like in 1800. And in order to do that we need to take a look back at the politics and culture and the development of the United States during the 1790s. Now the first thing to bear in mind is that the United States was a much smaller country in 1800 than it is today. Rather than 50 states, there were only 16 states in 1800. There were the original 13 states that rebelled against Britain in 1775, and declared their independence in 1776, and won their independence in 1783. In addition to those 13 states, which were mainly along the Eastern Seaboard, three new states had joined the union since independence. Vermont, Tennessee, and Kentucky. And so the Union, the United States, consisted of 16 states in 1800, not the 50 we know today. And if you have a look at the map, you'll see that those states were divided between free and slave states. So there were about 5.3 million people in the United States in 1800, of whom almost 900,000 were enslaved. And as you can see from the map, slavery was becoming confined, it wasn't entirely confined yet, to the southern states. So as you can see, in 1800, and this often surprises people, slavery was still legal in the state of New Jersey. However, there was a regional focus to slavery and to the places where slavery and slave labor was practiced within the United States. And this would have implications for American politics, as we'll see in the course of this session. So the United States was smaller than it is today. The population was much smaller, 5.3 million people is slightly more than the current population of Scotland. It's slightly less than the current population of Massachusetts. So although we're talking about places that are familiar to us, New York, Virginia, Massachusetts, for example, these places were much more lightly populated than they are today of course. It was also an overwhelmingly rural country. Approximately 94% of Americans lived in the countryside in 1800, and only 6% lived in cities and towns. And so the, as I said, the names on the map are very familiar to us, but the way people lived was quite different than what we're familiar with today. The country had quite interesting and complex politics in 1800. And this is a product of the first decade of life under the new Constitution. The federal Constitution, and I'll say more about that in a few minutes. The federal Constitution was adopted, was ratified I should say, was drafted in 1787 and it was ratified in 1787 and 88, and then the new government under George Washington took office in 1789. And during the 1790s American politics evolved in quite unexpected ways, or ways I should say that were unexpected to the framers of the Constitution. The men, and I use that word deliberately because politics was dominated by men at this point, and political power was wielded, at least overt political power was wielded by men in the 1790s. The men who framed the American Constitution believed that there would be no political parties in the United States, or at least they hoped there would be no political parties in the United States. However, partisan divisions, not quite full-fledged political parties as we would understand them today, but partisan divisions emerge almost immediately. They start with the debate over the Constitution itself. The supporters of the Constitution, who called themselves Federalists form one political grouping. Their opponents, who they denominate anti-Federalists, who are opposed to the Constitution and opposed to creating a federal Constitution will become the antecedents to another political faction. And so what happens is after Washington's elected President in 1789 and takes office, very soon after that, two political, again, factions might be a better word than parties, but two groupings emerge. And for the purposes of my comments today, we'll call one of these the Federalists, and that's the name by which they're generally remembered, and the Federalists are the party of George Washington and subsequently John Adams, and I'll say more about Adams in a second. The opposition will be known by a variety of names. As I said, the initial opposition to the Federalists were the anti-Federalists. But in the 1790s after the Washington administration comes to power, there'll be different names attached to the men in Congress who opposed the Federalist policies of Washington and his Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton. And these are called Democratic-Republicans, sometimes called Republicans alone. For the purposes of our examination of the election of 1800, we'll call them Republicans. So we have the Federalist and the Republicans. Two qualifiers I think have to be stated. As I've already said, we shouldn't see these as full-fledged political parties in the modern sense yet. So these are smaller, more fluid groupings. They're not fully-fledged party organizations as we would know them today. The other qualifier is that the boundaries between them could be quite fluid. So some men might oppose the administration on certain things but not others. These aren't kind of firm allegiances yet. What we see during the 1790s is that these two groupings will become more firmly rooted in both the political culture of the United States and in the United States more generally, and will start to gain traction among the general population.
