CHAPTER I.

THE OFFICE OF VICE-PRESIDENT.

"Gentlemen, I do not know whether the framers of the Constitution had in view the two Kings of Sparta, the two Consuls of Rome, or the two Suffetes of Carthage when they formed it-the one to have all the power while he held it, and the other to be nothing. Gentlemen, I feel great difficulty how to act. I am possessed of two separate powers-the one in esse, the other in posse. I am Vice-President. In this I am nothing, but I may be everything. But I am President also of the Senate. When the President comes into the Senate what shall I be? I wish, gentlemen, to think what I shall be."-John Adams, First Vice-President, to the Senate.

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HERE have been Vice-Presidents and

Vice-Presidents. John Adams held second place to Washington and succeeded him in the Executive Chair. Thomas Jefferson followed Adams' succession. Aaron Burr's treacherous abuse of the generous confidence which made him the choice of Jefferson's friends for the Vice-Presidency did not secure for him the end of his ambition; neither could it be punished by his exclusion from the next place of prominence in the Federal Government. But it led to that change of the fundamental law which, in the enactment and adoption of the Twelfth Amendment, empowered the electors to choose directly the Vice-President instead of bestowing that office upon the second highest candidate for President. The differences arising out of the bitter quarrel

that ensued between Burr and the Jeffersonians were the beginning of that downward career which culminated in Burr's crime and ended in his

poverty, neglect, and death. Under Jefferson's

second Administration and the first of Madison's terms, George Clinton brought to the Vice-Presidency an honored name, worth and fit dignity; Elbridge Gerry, elected Vice-President to Madison, died suddenly in the second year of his term ; Daniel D. Tompkins, who went into office and out of it with Monroe, in the uneventful era of good feeling, was a more conspicuous statesman before than after he became Vice-President; John C. Calhoun, previously distinguished as a Representative and by brilliant cabinet service, became Vice-President by the mutual consent of the fierce Adams and Jackson factions in the electoral struggle of 1824, but differed almost throughout his Administration from the President, and was an active party to the combination which defeated him. Personal and political alienation and a revival of the old troubles between Monroe's War Secretary and the chief captain of the Seminole War soon produced a far more violent rupture between Jackson and Calhoun than had ever occurred between Adams and Calhoun, ensuing in the latter's antagonism of Van Buren, followed with Van Buren's own political ascendency, first as Vice-President, then as President, to be followed with his defeat, even after Calhoun had become

Richard M. Johnson,

reconciled to his support. the Van Buren candidate for Vice-President, failed of election in the Electoral College, but was chosen by the House. It was not until 1841 that John Tyler realized to the country the importance of the Vice-Presidential succession, and by his estrangement from the party which had made Harrison President taught the politicians that they had not, by the policy pursued in the selections they made for Vice-President, avoided the dangers which it had been sought to obviate by the constitutional amendment of 1803.

Since then it has happened, within a period no longer than the space of a generation, that three Vice-Presidents have succeeded to vacancies caused by death, and none of them has attained, by election, the office to which he came by accident, though all aspired to it. Fillmore was chosen Vice-President by the same electors who made Taylor President, but his signature to the Fugitive Slave Law, approved by a vote of 227 to 60, in the next National Convention of his party, lost him a renomination. William R. King's long career of usefulness and distinction was crowned with election to the Vice-Presidency; and a graceful grant by Congress gave him permission to take the oath of office in Cuba, where, on March 4th, 1853, he was sojourning for his health.

John C. Breckenridge's name was a fit one to be associated with any Democratic candidate and to