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This Day in History
Feb 9
Presidential
William Henry Harrison is born, 1773
On this day in 1773, future President William Henry Harrison is born on the Berkeley Plantation in Virginia. Harrison went on to serve as the ninth U.S.…
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1792 Election
As in 1789, persuading George Washington to run was the major difficulty in selecting a president in 1792.
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1796 Election
The 1796 election, which took place against a background of increasingly harsh partisanship between Federalists and Republicans, was the first contested presidential race.
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1800 Election
The significance of the 1800 election lay in the fact that it entailed the first peaceful transfer of power between parties under the U.
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1804 Election
The 1804 presidential election was a landslide victory for the incumbent Thomas Jefferson.
The first presidential election was held on the first Wednesday of January in 1789. No one contested the election of George Washington, but he remained reluctant to run until the last minute, in part because he believed seeking the office would be dishonorable. Only when Alexander Hamilton and others convinced him that it would be dishonorable to refuse did he agree to run.
The Constitution allowed each state to decide how to choose its presidential electors. In 1789, only Pennsylvania and Maryland held elections for this purpose; elsewhere, the state legislatures chose the electors. This method caused some problems in New York, which was so divided between Federalists who supported the new Constitution and Antifederalists who opposed it that the legislature failed to choose either presidential electors or U.S. senators.
Before the adoption of the Twelfth Amendment, each elector cast two votes for president. The candidate with a majority won the presidency, and the runner-up became vice president.
Most Federalists agreed that John Adams should be vice president. But Hamilton feared that if Adams was the unanimous choice, he would end in a tie with Washington and might even become president, an outcome that would be highly embarrassing for both Washington and the new electoral system. Hamilton therefore arranged that a number of votes be deflected, so that Adams was elected by less than half the number of Washington's expected unanimous vote. The final results were Washington, 69 electoral votes; Adams, 34; John Jay, 9; John Hancock, 4; and others, 22.
The Reader's Companion to American History. Eric Foner and John A. Garraty, Editors. Copyright © 1991 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
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