The Slatest

Lin-Manuel Miranda Explains Why the 2016 Election Is a Lot Like 1800

Lin-Manuel Miranda has some very wise words about the 2016 election.

Photo by Theo Wargo/Getty Images

Rolling Stone’s terrific interview with Lin-Manuel Miranda—the infuriatingly talented, Pulitzer Prize–winning genius behind the universally acclaimed Broadway smash Hamilton—includes one soliloquy sure to grab the interest of election-watchers. Comparing the politics of America’s founding generation to this year’s horrifyingly acrimonious presidential contest, Miranda sees a parallel: “ ’Twas ever thus.”

I think the notion of our Founders being these perfect men who got these stone tablets from the sky that became our Constitution and Bill of Rights is bullshit. They did a remarkable thing in sticking the landing from revolution to government. That’s the hardest thing to do. You can go across the ocean to France, where they totally fucked it up and then got stuck in a cycle of revolution and tyranny. So that’s not nothing.

Indeed, the American Revolution continues to stand out as one of the few revolutions throughout history to “stick the landing,” in Miranda’s words. Much of the revolution’s success can be attributed to the Founders’ relatively swift adoption of a constitution, which is, today, the world’s oldest working written charter of government. Miranda, however, notes that America’s founding documents did not always bind the nation together; on one occasion, it drove the country apart:

[T]here’s compromise in our founding documents. There’s compromise between North and South. There’s compromise between manufacture and agriculture. The same fights we have over the role of our government now and the size of our government now are the fights they were having. Add the brutality of slavery to that mix as an undercurrent in all of those decisions.

Miranda, of course, is absolutely right about this: Many of the Constitution’s most critical provisions were the result of fundamentally political compromises, and their vagueness continues to drive debate today. The constitutional rule governing the limits of Congress’ regulatory authority, for instance, is almost Delphic in its taciturn ambiguity—a result, in part, of the Framers’ inability to arrive at a consensus regarding the eternal dispute over centralized power. But no issue divided the Framers as sharply as slavery, a word that doesn’t appear in the Constitution. (It’s substituted for a euphemism: persons “held to Service or Labour.”) America fought a war to scrub slavery from its founding documents, and the resulting amendments are still being used today to expand liberty for minorities.

But Miranda’s greatest insight draws a striking parallel between previous presidential elections—especially that of 1800, which he brings to life in Hamilton—and 2016’s brawl:

I guess the biggest takeaway is, yes, this election cycle is bizarre. But it’s no more bizarre than the election in 1800, wherein Jefferson accused Adams of being a hermaphrodite and Adams responded by [spreading rumors] that Jefferson died, so Adams would be the only viable candidate. He was counting on news to travel slow! That, weirdly, gives me hope.

Actually, presidential candidates themselves did not actively campaign in 1800, relying instead on proxies and allies to canvass and barnstorm. (As Hamilton illustrates, Aaron Burr was an early defector from this rule, which Franklin Delano Roosevelt finally buried for good with his radio-and-crowd-oriented campaigns.) But Jefferson’s camp did accuse Adams of having a “hideous hermaphroditical character, which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman.” And Adams’ Federalist allies did intentionally spread rumors of Jefferson’s death—as well as his purported relationship with an enslaved woman, which happened to be true.

Similar sexual mud-slinging arose in the 1828 election, when John Quincy Adams’ allies accused Andrew Jackson’s wife of being a “dirty black wench,” a “convicted adulteress” prone to “open and notorious lewdness.” And they cropped up yet again in the 1884 election, when James G. Blaine accused Grover Cleveland of fathering a child out of wedlock. (This was true.) Blaine’s supporters chanted “Ma, ma, where’s my pa?” to mock Cleveland. So Cleveland’s supporters struck back, alleging that Blaine’s first son, who died as a toddler, was also conceived out of wedlock. This was false, but Cleveland allies actually chiseled the toddler’s birth date from his grave to make it look suspicious.

In short, the 2016 election may be disgusting, vitriolic, obscene, and execrable—but it is not unprecedented. And as Miranda points out, a little historical awareness about past presidential contests goes a long way toward soothing the modern mind.