The presidential election leaves us all baffled, bothered and bewildered. It should be some consolation, though, that this is not the first time the Republic has endured tight elections and confusing results. Nor is it the first time the winner of the popular vote has been denied the presidency. Nor is it the first time the Electoral College has been a source of trouble.
The Electoral College, a last-minute addition to the Constitution, distorts the popular vote. It is impossible to explain to foreigners. Even most Americans don't understand it. It produced its first election crisis in our very third presidential election 200 years ago. As originally formulated, the electors were not to vote separately for President and Vice President. The presidency went to the electoral-vote winner, the vice presidency to the runner-up. It was thus conceivable that a vice-presidential nominee could be elected President.
In 1800 Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr, the presidential and vice-presidential nominees of what was then called the Republican Party (which later became the Democratic Party), ended up in an Electoral College tie, with 73 votes each. The choice devolved on the lame-duck House of Representatives, with each state's delegation voting as a unit.
The Federalist Party had lost the presidency but retained a majority in the House. Most Federalists hated Burr less than they hated Jefferson and voted accordingly. On the first ballot, with nine states necessary for election, Jefferson had eight, Burr six; two were divided. Ballot after ballot followed, day after day passed, and a sense of crisis began to spread across the country. The whole succession procedure seemed to be failing.
Finally Alexander Hamilton, who deeply distrusted Burr, persuaded enough Federalists to go to Jefferson--"I trust," he said, "the Federalists will not finally be so mad as to vote for Burr"--that the House at last elected Jefferson on the 36th ballot. (Four years later, Burr killed Hamilton in a duel.) The crisis of 1800 led to reform: the 12th Amendment required that the Electoral College must thereafter vote separately for President and Vice President.
The next election imbroglio came in 1824. General Andrew Jackson won the popular vote over John Quincy Adams. He also led Adams in the Electoral College, but with the electoral vote divided among four candidates, Jackson fell short of the necessary majority. Once again the choice went to the House. This time, with the support of Henry Clay, a contender who had dropped out of the contest, Adams won on the first ballot--and soon made Clay his Secretary of State. The 1824 crisis produced charges of a "corrupt bargain" that facilitated Jackson's election in 1828.
The next succession crisis came a half-century later, in the aftermath of the Civil War. In 1876 the Democratic candidate, Governor Samuel J. Tilden of New York, won the popular vote. It appeared he had won the electoral vote too. But Southern states were still under military occupation, and electoral boards in Florida, Louisiana and South Carolina rapidly disqualified Democratic ballots in an effort to shift the Electoral College majority to the Republican candidate, Rutherford Hayes of Ohio. In 1876 as in 2000, both parties sent into Florida a posse of top lawyers and other notables. Among the Hayes advocates was General Lew Wallace, the author of Ben-Hur.