VOICE ONE:
At last, the day arrived for counting the votes. The Federalists were shocked by the results. Seventy-one electors voted for John Adams. Sixty-eight voted for Republican Thomas Jefferson. Only sixty voted for Hamilton's choice, Thomas Pinckney.
Under the electoral system used at that time, the candidate with the most votes became president. The candidate with the next largest number of votes became vice president. So America's second president would be John Adams. Its second vice president would be Thomas Jefferson.
VOICE TWO:
Jefferson had resigned from public service a few years earlier. But he decided to accept his election as vice president. He wrote to his friend James Madison: "I am willing to serve under President Adams. I believe Adams is the only man who can stop Alexander Hamilton from becoming president in eighteen hundred."
To Adams himself, Jefferson wrote that he valued their long friendship and hoped it would continue. Republican newspapers carried articles that were friendly to Federalist John Adams -- the first time they had done so.
(MUSIC)
VOICE ONE:
When Adams and Jefferson took office in March, seventeen ninety-seven, some Federalists believed their political power had come to an end. But Alexander Hamilton, sitting in his law office in New York City, did not lose hope. He knew he still controlled the top Federalist leaders in Congress.
More than that, he believed he knew how to control John Adams.
The new president made Hamilton's job easy. Adams kept President Washington's cabinet. The three men who were Washington's chief government officials would now advise President Adams. Washington had appointed them at Hamilton's request. And they always did what Hamilton told them to do.
VOICE TWO:
Historians still cannot explain why John Adams -- a man who did not like or trust Alexander Hamilton -- kept the three cabinet secretaries. If the secretaries had been men of great ability, then that might be an explanation. But they were not.
One was a secretary of state who knew very little about foreign relations. The second was a secretary of the treasury who knew less about finance. The third was a secretary of war who knew nothing about military matters and defense.
Adams may have kept these men as an act of party unity. Or he may have kept them because he could not get anyone else.
VOICE ONE:
Whatever his reason, the decision was politically costly, for the three men worked together against him. President Adams told his cabinet secretaries what he wanted. Then they went to Alexander Hamilton for orders.
In the end, these secret activities helped destroy the Federalist Party. And so, they made the administration of John Adams one of the most exciting and important periods in the political history of the United States.

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