Chapter 2

The Election of 1800, the Jefferson-Burr Tie, and the Transfer of Power

By The editors of the Democratic Republican PartyPublished Updated How we check facts

The short answer

Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr each received 73 electoral votes in 1800, so the House of Representatives decided the election and chose Jefferson on February 17, 1801, after 36 ballots. Power passed peacefully from the Federalist John Adams to Jefferson on March 4, 1801, and the tie led directly to the 12th Amendment.

Historical setting

By 1798, the conflict between Federalists and Republicans was no longer only about banks and debt. The United States was in an undeclared naval conflict with France, and the Federalist majority in Congress passed a series of laws aimed at foreigners and at criticism of the government.

The National Archives dates the four measures known together as the Alien and Sedition Acts: a naturalization act of June 18, 1798, which raised the residency requirement for citizenship from 5 to 14 years; the Alien Act of June 25, 1798, which let the president order the departure of noncitizens he judged dangerous; the Alien Enemies Act of July 6, 1798, which applied in wartime; and the Sedition Act of July 14, 1798 archives.gov.

The Sedition Act made it a crime to publish "false, scandalous and malicious writing" against the government, Congress, or the president, with penalties of up to $2,000 and two years in prison. It allowed truth as a defense, and it was written to expire on March 3, 1801 archives.gov. The National Archives summary states that only editors of Democratic-Republican newspapers were prosecuted under it, and that the trials drew heavy criticism and contributed to the Federalists' defeat in 1800 archives.gov.

The Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions

Republicans answered through state legislatures. The Library of Congress holds Jefferson's manuscript draft of the Kentucky Resolutions, dated November 16, 1798, and states that the resolutions were drafted in secret and that Jefferson's draft claimed states had the right to nullify federal laws that violated the Constitution loc.gov. The National Constitution Center states that Madison and Jefferson anonymously drafted the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, respectively constitutioncenter.org. The Library also notes that their role was kept secret throughout their years of public service loc.gov.

The Virginia text, as printed by the Avalon Project, was agreed to by the Virginia Senate on December 24, 1798. It declares that when the federal government exercises powers not granted to it, the states "are in duty bound, to interpose for arresting the progress of the evil," and it names the Alien and Sedition Acts avalon.law.yale.edu. Kentucky returned to the subject a year later in a resolution approved December 3, 1799, which rejected the claim "that the general government is the exclusive judge of the extent of the powers delegated to it" avalon.law.yale.edu.

The resolutions were statements of principle by two state legislatures. They did not repeal the acts. This site treats them as arguments to examine, not as simple defenses of liberty: Jefferson's draft went as far as claiming a state right to nullify federal law loc.gov.

Religion in the campaign

Federalists also attacked Jefferson's religion. The Library of Congress states that during the 1800 campaign they called him an infidel and claimed that his attachment to the religious and political extremism of the French Revolution disqualified him from office loc.gov. William Linn, a Presbyterian clergyman in New York City, argued in an anonymous 1800 pamphlet, Serious Considerations on the Election of a President, that Jefferson should be rejected for "his disbelief of the Holy Scriptures … his rejection of the Christian Religion and open profession of Deism"; DeWitt Clinton answered him under the name Grotius founders.archives.gov. The chapter on religion and the parties gives both sides in their own words.

Evidence

The electoral count

The National Archives record of the 1800 electoral vote shows archives.gov:

The record explains the problem: before the 12th Amendment, each elector had two votes and had to cast them for different people archives.gov. Because the ballots could not distinguish between the two offices, the two leading Republican candidates finished level at 73.

The House decides

The Constitution sent a tie to the House of Representatives, voting by state delegation. The House History Office records that the joint session to count the votes met on February 11, 1801, and that it took 36 ballots to break the deadlock; Jefferson was elected president and Burr vice president on February 17 history.house.gov. The National Archives adds the final distribution: 10 state delegations for Jefferson, 4 for Burr, and 2 making no choice archives.gov. The National Archives holds the official "Tally of electoral votes for the 1800 Presidential election," dated February 11, 1801 (National Archives Identifier 2668821) blogs.archives.gov.

The House that voted was the Sixth Congress, whose term ended in March 1801 history.house.gov. The detailed maneuvering among its members, including who abstained and why, is documented in letters and later accounts that this chapter has not yet reviewed at the passage level, so it is not narrated here.

The 12th Amendment

Congress responded quickly. The Miller Center records that Congress passed the 12th Amendment on December 9, 1803 millercenter.org. The official House Manual records that it was proposed to the states by the Eighth Congress on December 12, 1803, that ratification was completed on June 15, 1804, and that the Secretary of State proclaimed it ratified on September 25, 1804 govinfo.gov. The House History Office summarizes the change: electors now cast separate votes for president and vice president history.house.gov.

The transfer of power

Jefferson was inaugurated on March 4, 1801, the first president inaugurated in Washington, with Burr as vice president millercenter.org. The Sedition Act expired the day before archives.gov. The Senate Historical Office notes that after the elections of 1800, Democratic Republicans gained the majority in the Senate, with Federalists holding only a small number of seats senate.gov.

The significance of that day is easy to state and easy to overstate. A sitting president lost, his party lost its Senate majority, and the winners took office through the constitutional process. That outcome was not guaranteed by the document alone. It depended on the decisions of the outgoing House, the willingness of Adams and Federalist officials to leave office, and the acceptance of the result by both sides. Jefferson used his inaugural address to speak directly to the defeated party; our article on his line "We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists" examines what he meant avalon.law.yale.edu.

Jefferson himself later described the election as a revolution. The Library of Congress displays his letter to Spencer Roane of September 6, 1819, and summarizes it as Jefferson's view of 1800 as a second American Revolution loc.gov. That is Jefferson's retrospective judgment, written nearly two decades later by the winner, and it should be read as such.

The three-fifths clause and the electoral count

Any account of 1800 has to address how the Constitution counted enslaved people.

Article I, Section 2 apportioned House seats by adding to the free population, "excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons," meaning enslaved people archives.gov. Article II, Section 1 gave each state a number of electors "equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives" archives.gov. Enslaved people could not vote, but three-fifths of them were counted when seats and electors were assigned. That added electoral votes to slaveholding states.

Scholars agree on the mechanism. They disagree about the counterfactual.

The argument that it decided the election. Paul Finkelman, quoted by PBS NewsHour in 2016, argued that the three-fifths clause allowed Jefferson, a slaveholder, to defeat Adams pbs.org. Akhil Reed Amar of Yale Law School wrote in 2019 that "Without the extra electoral votes generated by its enormous slave population, the South would have lost the election of 1800, which Jefferson won" akhilamar.com.

The argument that this is less certain. Michael L. Rosin, in a 2018 article in the University of St. Thomas Law Journal, accepts as a matter of actual history the estimate that Jefferson owed "a dozen or so" of his 73 electoral votes to the three-fifths rule, compared with "only two or so" for Adams researchonline.stthomas.edu. He argues that claiming Adams would have won is different: it requires reconstructing how House apportionment and state elector choices would have worked under a different rule. His modeling produces outcomes in which Jefferson wins and others in which Adams wins researchonline.stthomas.edu. He also notes that Earl Maltz disputed Finkelman's claim about 1800 researchonline.stthomas.edu.

What can be said with confidence. The three-fifths clause gave the slaveholding states more electoral votes than their free populations alone would have produced, and Jefferson's electoral strength was concentrated in those states. Whether Adams would have won under a different constitutional rule is a counterfactual question on which careful scholars disagree. This chapter states the mechanism as fact and the outcome as contested.

What the evidence does not show

It does not show that the 1800 election was a vote of "the people" in the modern sense. States chose electors by different methods, and eligibility to vote varied by state; see the chapter on participation and exclusion.

It does not show that Burr conspired to take the presidency. Whether he sought the office during the House balloting is a long-running historical dispute, and the sources reviewed for this chapter do not settle it, so no motive is assigned here.

It does not show that the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions were adopted nationally or that they ended the Sedition Act. The act expired on its own terms on March 3, 1801 archives.gov.

It does not show that the peaceful transfer of power ended partisan conflict. The Federalists remained a party for more than a decade, and Republicans themselves divided over later questions, as the next chapter describes.

Sources

  1. National Archives, "Alien and Sedition Acts (1798)," Milestone Documents. archives.gov (locator: summary and transcripts, Sedition Act Secs. 1 to 4). Accessed 2026-10-28.
  2. Library of Congress, "Establishing a Federal Republic," Thomas Jefferson exhibition. loc.gov (locator: exhibit text; items 135 and 137). Accessed 2026-10-28.
  3. National Constitution Center, "The Virginia Resolutions (1798)," Historic Document Library. constitutioncenter.org (locator: introduction). Accessed 2026-10-28.
  4. Virginia Resolution, Alien and Sedition Acts, December 24, 1798, Avalon Project, Yale Law School. avalon.law.yale.edu (locator: third paragraph and date line). Accessed 2026-10-28.
  5. Kentucky Resolution, Alien and Sedition Acts, approved December 3, 1799, Avalon Project, Yale Law School. avalon.law.yale.edu (locator: first resolution). Accessed 2026-10-28.
  6. National Archives, Electoral College results, 1800. archives.gov (locator: results table and notes). Accessed 2026-10-28.
  7. U.S. House of Representatives, History, Art and Archives, "Electoral College Fast Facts." history.house.gov (locator: contingent elections, 6th Congress; Twelfth Amendment). Accessed 2026-10-28.
  8. Jessie Kratz, "The Election of 1800," Pieces of History, National Archives, November 7, 2016, updated March 3, 2023. blogs.archives.gov (locator: full post and image credits). Accessed 2026-10-28.
  9. Miller Center, University of Virginia, "Thomas Jefferson: Key Events." millercenter.org (locator: March 4, 1801; December 9, 1803). Accessed 2026-10-28.
  10. Constitution, Jefferson's Manual, and Rules of the House of Representatives, 104th Congress, Amendment XII note, GovInfo. govinfo.gov (locator: ratification note). Accessed 2026-10-28.
  11. U.S. Senate, "Parties and Leadership: Overview." senate.gov (locator: section on the 1790s and early 1800s). Accessed 2026-10-28.
  12. Thomas Jefferson, First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1801, Avalon Project, Yale Law School. avalon.law.yale.edu (locator: paragraph 2). Accessed 2026-10-28.
  13. National Archives, "The Constitution of the United States: A Transcription." archives.gov (locator: Art. I, Sec. 2; Art. II, Sec. 1). Accessed 2026-10-28.
  14. Kamala Kelkar, "Electoral College is 'vestige' of slavery, say some Constitutional scholars," PBS NewsHour, November 6, 2016. pbs.org (locator: section quoting Paul Finkelman). Accessed 2026-10-28.
  15. Akhil Reed Amar, "Actually, the Electoral College Was a Pro-Slavery Ploy," New York Times, April 6, 2019, as archived on the author's site. akhilamar.com (locator: p. 2, para. 3). Accessed 2026-10-28.
  16. Michael L. Rosin, "The Three-Fifths Rule and the Presidential Elections of 1800 and 1824," University of St. Thomas Law Journal 15 (2018): 159. researchonline.stthomas.edu (locator: pp. 160 to 161, 224 to 225). Accessed 2026-10-28.
  17. Library of Congress, "Religion and the Federal Government, Part 2," Religion and the Founding of the American Republic exhibition. loc.gov (locator: item 159 and accompanying text). Accessed 2026-10-30.
  18. "Thomas Jefferson to William Linn, 31 July 1791," editorial note, Founders Online, National Archives; original source: The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 20 (Princeton University Press, 1982), pp. 706 to 707. founders.archives.gov (locator: editorial note, second paragraph). Accessed 2026-10-30.

Last checked against its sources on October 30, 2026. Report a correction.