The presidential election machinery had been tried a third time and had worked smoothly. Electors had been chosen in each State without the predicted revolution and bloodshed. They had cast seventy-one votes for John Adams and sixty-eight for Thomas Jefferson. The former, having received the highest number of votes, was declared President and the latter Vice-President. Perhaps some of those who had voted for Adams may have thought the Vice-Presidency a place of training for the higher office, and its incumbent in the line of promotion. But on examining the geographical distribution of the vote, one sees that sectionalism influenced the result of this third presidential election, as it did a majority of later ones. The vote for Adams came almost entirely from the Northern States; that for Jefferson from the Southern. Adams stood for Federalism, for centralisation, for a continuation of the policy of the present Administration. He and Hamilton were close friends. They broke only when Hamilton found that he could not influence President Adams as he had President Washington. Electors who voted for Jefferson thought he stood for principles exactly opposite to those of Adams. His antipathy to Hamilton was the best guarantee against centralisation being continued under his management. Those who had prophesied that the overwhelming majority of Washington would result in a series of re-elections during his life, or that the expiration of each term would find the country in some danger which would demand his continuance, had been silenced by a farewell address declaring his intention to retire. The pattern of two terms which he set no President has ever dared attempt to exceed. The opponents of his administration, those who had foreseen the coming royal reception in the simple levee which marked his social life, or who objected to the growing custom of celebrating his birthday as if he were a monarch, were compelled to cease their evil prophecies when he attended, as a spectator, the inauguration of his successor in the room of the House of Representatives adjacent to old Independence Hall in Philadelphia on the fourth day of March, 1797. As the incoming President wrote to his wife, the multitude was as great as the space would contain and not a dry eye but Washington's. Like the formative influence of a good parent extending from generation to generation, the precedent of Washington's voluntary retirement from the Presidency has been a rich heritage to the American people. It may be safely said that it is largely the cause of the pleasing contrast which exists between the changes of administration in the United States and those in the other American republics. CHAPTER XII SUPPRESSING THE FRENCH SYMPATHISERS