Burr and Jefferson: Election of 1800
Burr and Jefferson: Election of 1800
The West Chooses Jefferson . The election of Aaron Burr and Thomas Jefferson in 1800 was an early political victory for the West. The United States had experienced a dramatic rise in internal migration in the years after the Revolution, with between 5 and 10 percent of the population moving each year. Not surprisingly, these major population shifts tended to be from East to West—from New England to western New York and Ohio, from New Jersey to western Pennsylvania, and from Virginia and the Carolinas into the new states of Kentucky and Tennessee. By contrast, there was little migration from North to South, or vice versa.
So Goes the Nation? The political significance of this internal migration was clear to both Federalists and their Democratic Republican opposition: the people who migrated West were among the strongest supporters of Thomas Jefferson and other Anti-Federalists. In fact, in the election of 1800 John Adams’ Federalist supporters were clustered on the Atlantic coast between eastern North Carolina and Massachusetts’ eastern counties. Jefferson won virtually every county west of central Pennsylvania.
Sources
Lance Banning, The Jeffersonian Persuasion: Evolution of a Party Ideology (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1978);
James Roger Sharp, American Politics in the Early Republic: The New Nation in Crisis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993).