A constitutional crisis

On 4 March 1801, in the city of Washington – then just a half-built, muddy encampment on the banks of the Potomac – a living head of state gave up power peacefully and a new one took over. The outgoing president, John Adams, had lost a bitter election – the first presidential contest in the short history of the United States in which a sitting president had been defeated – and he was not a happy man. Once, Adams had regarded the incoming head of state, Thomas Jefferson, as a friend. But the election had pushed the bond between the two founding fathers to breaking point.

Jefferson’s supporters, with the complicity of the candidate himself, charged that Adams was a quasimonarchist. If he won a second term, with his centralising, authoritarian instincts, it would be tantamount to a repudiation of the Revolution, which had seen the 13 colonies of the