From Aaron Burr to Teddy Roosevelt, vice-presidential selections have mattered a lot — and many of them have been bad.
From Aaron Burr to Teddy Roosevelt, vice-presidential selections have mattered a lot — and many of them have been bad.
T he past few weeks have focused the nation’s attention on the importance of vice-presidential choices. We have Joe Biden as president because Barack Obama picked a two-time failed presidential contender out of the Senate. We have Kamala Harris as the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee entirely because Biden did the same for her after her 2020 campaign flamed out. Donald Trump narrowly avoided assassination, then selected J. D. Vance, a freshman senator who could never make a national ticket on his own. And now, Harris is auditioning potential running mates.
As our first vice president, John Adams, once complained, “my Country has in its Wisdom contrived for me, the most insignificant Office that ever the Invention of Man contrived or his Imagination conceived: and as I can do neither good nor Evil, I must be born away by Others and meet the common Fate.” John Nance Garner, who left his job as speaker of the House to be Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first vice president for eight years, more pungently complained that the job “isn’t worth a pitcher of warm piss.” But vice-presidential choices have often mattered quite a lot — and more than a few presidents and presidential candidates have screwed them up royally.
What follows is the first installment of a two-part history of the biggest and worst choices from the earliest days of the republic to 1900. Not every vice president who ascended to the presidency is covered: For example, Chester Arthur was a surprisingly good president given his background, but he really just did what would have been expected of a more qualified choice. I’ll list the running mate first, followed by the presidential candidate, party, and year. Bear in mind that many 19th-century presidents didn’t choose their running mates but were saddled with them by a party convention, so the blame for the bad choices sometimes lay elsewhere.
Aaron Burr (Thomas Jefferson, Democratic-Republican, 1800): The first and maybe the worst. Jefferson’s alliance with Burr worked at its intended purpose: the New Yorker’s innovative tactics in building an active campaign organization helped the Democratic-Republican ticket flip New York, the only state to change hands from 1796. That was enough to oust John Adams from the presidency. But the system at the time didn’t provide for separate votes for vice president; the second-place finisher became vice president, which is why Jefferson was Adams’s VP. The idea was for the running mate to have one of his electors step aside — but Burr wouldn’t yield, sending the election to the House. The resulting crisis had two major consequences. One was that it led to the adoption of the Twelfth Amendment to separate the presidential and vice-presidential elections and prevent a recurrence of 1800. The other was that Alexander Hamilton, during the crisis in the House, sided with Jefferson over Burr, and this helped catalyze the fatal Hamilton-Burr duel in July 1804, a month after the Twelfth Amendment was ratified. Burr also failed at a campaign for governor of New York while he was vice president.
Burr, unsurprisingly, was replaced on the 1804 ticket by outgoing New York governor George Clinton (who stayed on as James Madison’s vice president before dying in office during the 1812 election; Madison’s second VP, Elbridge Gerry, also died in office). Things got worse between Jefferson and Burr; an apparent plot by Burr to seize Western land, allegedly to secede and form a new country, led Jefferson to have Burr charged with treason. He was eventually acquitted after a trial presided over by Chief Justice John Marshall, in the process deepening the enmity between Jefferson and Marshall.
Jefferson was the first president who came close to getting his vice president hanged. He would not be the last.
Daniel Tompkins (James Monroe, Democratic-Republican, 1816 and 1820): Tompkins, the only vice president between Adams and 1913 to serve two full terms, looks from a distance like a winner because of the overwhelming success of the Monroe presidential tickets in eradicating all political opposition. But he’s a sad story. As governor of New York during the War of 1812, Tompkins’s personal finances were ruined by his bankrolling the state militia out of his own pocket when its legislature opposed the war, and he was mired in litigation throughout his vice presidency over his efforts to recover the funds and restore his reputation against charges of malfeasance. He, like Burr, ran an unsuccessful campaign to get elected governor again while vice president. In office, he degenerated into alcoholism and was often unable to preside over the Senate, sometimes passing out in the chair even during the crucial 1820 debates over the Missouri Compromise. He died just 99 days after leaving office, at 50, the shortest-lived vice president.
John C. Calhoun (John Quincy Adams, 1824; Andrew Jackson, 1824 and as a Democrat, 1828): The 1824 election was the only competitive presidential election held without clear political parties: The Federalists had collapsed by then, and all four candidates (including the ex-Federalist Adams) effectively identified as Democratic-Republicans. Two of the candidates were in the cabinet: Adams was secretary of state, and William Crawford was secretary of the Treasury. The two leading contenders, Adams and Andrew Jackson, both selected the same running mate, Secretary of War John C. Calhoun. The election was resolved again in the House by the so-called corrupt bargain whereby Adams won the backers of House Speaker Henry Clay and Clay became Adams’s secretary of state (the job then seen as stepping stone to the presidency).
Adams and Calhoun would become an odder pairing in retrospect, but before the 1830s, Adams was not as ardent an abolitionist, and Calhoun’s politics were not yet as consumed with the defense of slavery. At the time, the prickly Calhoun hated Crawford and Clay more than he liked Adams or Jackson. Nonetheless, Adams and Calhoun had a series of fallings out over the Clay appointment, tariffs, foreign policy, and Adams’s plans for internal improvements — all of which led to the formation of the new two-party system, with the Whig party assembling around Adams and Clay and the Democrats around Jackson, Calhoun, and Martin Van Buren.
By 1826, Calhoun was supporting Jackson against Adams. The Jackson-Calhoun political marriage ended even more poorly than that of Calhoun and Adams. A split in Jackson’s cabinet that started in a dispute among the wives ended with Jackson’s firing the cabinet members allied with Calhoun. In 1832, Calhoun led South Carolina’s effort to nullify a tariff that Jackson grudgingly supported. The crisis nearly rent the Union, and Calhoun resigned the vice presidency to stand against Jackson in the Senate. Jackson’s nationalism trumped his Southern states-rights sympathies, and he told a visitor from South Carolina, “Please give my compliments to my friends in your State and say to them, that if a single drop of blood shall be shed there in opposition to the laws of the United States, I will hang the first man I can lay my hand on engaged in such treasonable conduct, upon the first tree I can reach.” When asked, upon leaving office in 1837, if he had any regrets, Jackson is said to have remarked, “I regret I was unable to shoot Henry Clay or to hang John C. Calhoun.”
Martin Van Buren (Andrew Jackson, Democrat, 1832): Jackson’s second vice president was a huge upgrade. It was Van Buren as much as anyone who invented American political parties in their modern form and built the Democrats into the first of the type. As a New Yorker, he helped forge the alliance between urban immigrant machines in the North and slave plantations in the South, a strange-bedfellows marriage that would endure until the 1950s and half of which is still embedded in the party’s DNA. Van Buren also became the first VP to succeed a president in the system created by the Twelfth Amendment, and he remained an important enough figure after his presidency that he bid for the Democratic nomination in 1844. His third-party Free Soil campaign in 1848 fractured the Democrats in New York and helped hand the presidency to the Whigs. He remained an active participant in national debates all the way to the outbreak of the Civil War.
Richard Johnson (Martin Van Buren, Democrat, 1836): Van Buren’s own choice was a fiasco. Seeking to counter William Henry Harrison, who had famously defeated the Native American warrior Tecumseh at Tippecanoe, Van Buren picked the man who claimed to have killed Tecumseh. (Johnson’s virtues as a statesman were summarized in the campaign chant, “Rumpsey Dumpsey, Rumpsey Dumpsey, Colonel Johnson killed Tecumseh.” I guess you had to be there.)
Johnson was trouble from the start: Virginia’s Van Buren electors refused to vote for him, requiring the Senate to elect him (the only time that has happened). Johnson was an indolent senator who had never bothered to learn the body’s rules; while he apologized for this when he became VP, he also avoided presiding whenever possible. His boozy, philandering personal life especially scandalized fellow Southerners because he was openly in a common-law marriage to a slave woman, Julia Chinn, who ran his plantation and with whom he had two children. In the world of 1836, this was a huge liability. Chinn was dead of cholera by the time Johnson joined the national ticket, but Van Buren soured on him so thoroughly that (in another event unprecedented in our history) he ran for reelection in 1840 without a running mate at all when the Democratic convention couldn’t agree on a replacement.
John Tyler (William Henry Harrison, Whig, 1840): Few political parties have suffered more from a single poor choice of running mate than the Whigs have from Tyler. Harrison was not just a military man; he was deeply invested in his party’s ambitious agenda for policy and for taming the executive branch. He entered office with big Whig majorities in both houses of Congress, a trifecta the party would never have again. Harrison’s infamously lengthy inaugural address, at which he caught the chill that may have led to his death, laid out this agenda. No president had ever died in office before, and the selection of Tyler — a former Jacksonian turned Jackson critic who was only a Whig in the most nominal sense — was simply for ticket balance. When Harrison died on April 4, 1841, a month into his term, his reported last words, intended for Tyler, were, “Sir, I wish you to understand the true principles of the government. I wish them carried out. I ask nothing more.”
They weren’t. Tyler vetoed much of the Whig agenda, and the party formally and publicly expelled him on September 13, 1841. He spent the rest of his tenure as a man without a party, which is why the Senate repeatedly thwarted his Supreme Court nominations during his final year in office. His legacy, opposed by many Whigs, was the annexation of Texas that led not long after to the Mexican War. The Whigs would never recover their one opportunity to put the stamp of their philosophy on American government. Tyler, for his part, ended his days as a member of the Confederate Congress and was buried in 1862 with a Confederate flag draping his coffin.
Millard Fillmore (Zachary Taylor, Whig, 1848): The Whigs were unfortunate in their presidential tickets. Taylor, a Southerner who owned hundreds of slaves, was balanced on the ticket by Fillmore, a New Yorker who disapproved of slavery. Yet, in office, it was Taylor (backed by New York senator William Seward, the leading anti-slavery Whig) who took a harder line against the interests of slavery and Fillmore (Seward’s intrastate rival, aligned with Daniel Webster and with the Southern Whigs) who was more accommodating. Thus, it was Taylor’s death and replacement by Fillmore in July 1850 in the midst of the crisis over California’s admission as a free state that paved the way for the Compromise of 1850, backed and enforced vigorously by Fillmore. The Compromise put off for a decade the crisis of the Civil War, but the enforcement of its strengthened Fugitive Slave Act by Fillmore and Webster radicalized many in the North and led Harriet Beecher Stowe to write Uncle Tom’s Cabin. It also cost Fillmore renomination, as the 1852 Whig convention rejected both him and Webster in favor of Winfield Scott, another general with Seward in his corner. The Whig party collapsed entirely two years later. Regardless of whether one thinks the Compromise of 1850 was a good or a bad thing, the whole history of the sectional conflict over slavery was altered by how Fillmore differed from Taylor.
William King (Franklin Pierce, Democrat, 1852): When Pierce, a little-known New Hampshirite who’d been absent from Washington for a decade, bested four better-known Democrats (including James Buchanan) for the nomination at the 1852 Democratic convention, he was saddled with a running mate who was both Southern and close to Buchanan. King and Buchanan, both unmarried, were roommates and inseparable friends, and rumors even then suggested that they were lovers (this remains disputed among historians and will probably never be resolved). Jackson, never one to pull his punches, used to refer to the pair as “Miss Nancy” and “Aunt Fancy.” At any rate, King was our most absent vice president: He was dying of tuberculosis by the time he was sworn in and took the oath of office in Cuba (where it was hoped that the climate would save him) before returning home to die on his Alabama plantation six weeks into his term. That killed any prospect of King’s brokering an alliance between Pierce and Buchanan, who was packed off to England as ambassador but returned in 1856 to replace Pierce as the party’s presidential nominee.
John Breckenridge (James Buchanan, Democrat, 1856): The youngest vice-presidential nominee — Breckenridge was just 35 years old when elected — deserves a dishonorable mention of his own for his part in the Civil War. First, he fell out with Buchanan; the president never forgave him for supporting Pierce and then Stephen Douglas at the 1856 convention. Breckenridge chafed at being told he needed the permission of Buchanan’s niece to get a meeting with the president. He won a Senate seat in 1859, which he assumed as soon as his vice-presidential term ended. When the Southern Democrats walked out of the 1860 convention rather than accept Douglas — a choice that reflected the preference for pro-slavery extremism and secession over continuing engagement in American politics — they chose the sitting vice president as their nominee. Buchanan refused to support him, and Breckenridge refused to mention Buchanan. Breckenridge said that he opposed secession — Alexander Stephens remarked that he “would probably be the first man the dis-unionists would have to hang” — but after the war started, he quit the Senate to become a Confederate general and later the Confederate secretary of war. He lived abroad as a fugitive until pardoned by Andrew Johnson, and he died at 54.
Andrew Johnson (Abraham Lincoln, Republican/National Union, 1864): Undoubtedly the most damaging vice-presidential choice in our history was the result of a political miscalculation. Republicans, fearing that a possible loss in the 1864 election would doom the prosecution of the Civil War and the survival of the nation, dumped Vice President Hannibal Hamlin (a staunch abolitionist from Maine) in exchange for the Tennessee Democrat Johnson and a rebranding as the “National Union” ticket. The decision doesn’t seem to have been engineered by Lincoln, who wasn’t present at the convention, but he wasn’t fond of Hamlin, and he could have stopped it if he had been strongly opposed.
Johnson’s conduct during the war was admirable, even heroic. He was the only Southern senator not to leave when his state seceded, and he faced great risk to himself and his family as wartime governor of Tennessee. On paper, he looked like an asset — but the ticket didn’t need him. Battlefield successes (notably Sherman’s taking Atlanta) and Democratic infighting gave Lincoln and Johnson a double-digit popular-vote margin and a 212–21 Electoral College landslide.
Johnson was still, however, a Jacksonian Democrat and a committed racist. The trouble started almost immediately, when Johnson showed up drunk for the inauguration. Maybe Johnson’s presence didn’t encourage John Wilkes Booth to assassinate Lincoln — the conspiracy included a failed plan to kill Johnson — but his being next in line changed American history.
Hamlin, had he replaced Lincoln, would have pursued a harsher Reconstruction policy than Lincoln intended. Johnson did the opposite, and the truculent, resentful temperament that had served him well during the war now accentuated his failures. It took at least a century to undo the damage wrought by Johnson’s sabotage of Reconstruction, and his bitter tug-of-war with Congress (which led to his impeachment and to Congress’s shrinking the Supreme Court to block him from appointing justices as vacancies arose) weakened the presidency for a generation.
Schuyler Colfax (Ulysses S. Grant, Republican, 1868) and Henry Wilson (Grant, Republican, 1872): Republicans hoped to avoid a repeat of the Johnson error when their next ticket paired Grant with Colfax, the amiable and reliable “radical Republican” speaker of the House. (Colfax and John Nance Garner are the only two people to have served as VP and speaker.) The Grant (46)–Colfax (45) ticket is one of just two winning tickets (the other is Bill Clinton–Al Gore) to have paired two candidates under 50 years old.
Lincoln had considered Colfax “a little intriguer” not to be trusted, and, as usual, Honest Abe was a shrewder judge of character than Grant. In 1872, as Grant was running for reelection, the sensational Crédit Mobilier scandal came to light. Massachusetts congressman Oakes Ames had paid off various Republican politicians with Union Pacific Railroad stock and cash to win favors for one of the two lines building the transcontinental railroad. Colfax was caught red-handed, lied about his involvement, and stepped away from the ticket, ending his once-promising political career. He was replaced by Wilson, a distinguished 60-year-old anti-slavery crusader — but then it came out that Wilson was ensnared in the same scandal, in addition to which he suffered a debilitating stroke just two months into his tenure as vice president. A second stroke two years later killed him.
Theodore Roosevelt (William McKinley, Republican, 1900): Few vice-presidential choices have had the impact that McKinley’s choosing Roosevelt had, after his first vice president, Garret Hobart, died in office. McKinley was popular, in good health at age 57, and facing a rematch with his 1896 opponent, William Jennings Bryan, so it was widely believed that his choice would select an heir to be groomed rather than someone McKinley needed to help him win reelection. Mark Hanna, McKinley’s political guru, was skeptical of the 42-year-old Teddy but bowed to his boss’s decision.
Roosevelt, whose only political experience before 1896 was as a one-term state assemblyman and New York City police commissioner, distinguished himself in the 1896 campaign as an acid critic of Bryan; he warned that Bryan’s campaign stood for “a government of the mob, by the demagogue, for the shiftless, the disorderly, and the semi-criminal” and represented “fundamentally an attack on civilization.” His willingness to go on a vigorous speaking tour marked him as a rival to Bryan in the new kind of mass politics that contrasted with McKinley’s staid front-porch campaign. McKinley rewarded TR by making him assistant secretary of the Navy on the eve of the Spanish-American War. Teddy became a folk hero within a year and a half: He wired orders to Admiral George Dewey (without McKinley’s approval) to seize Manila Bay in the spring of 1898, resigned to lead the “Rough Riders” in battle in Cuba, and returned home in the fall of 1898 just in time to be elected governor of New York.
If McKinley hoped that experience and Roosevelt’s anti-Bryanism would make him an appropriate heir to McKinley’s big-business conservatism, he was wildly mistaken, and McKinley’s assassination six months into his second term vaulted Roosevelt to power. He would revolutionize the American presidency by his use of the “bully pulpit,” build the Panama Canal, revolutionize environmental conservation, win the Nobel Peace Prize, become the namesake of the teddy bear, win a place on Mount Rushmore, drag the Republican Party leftward until he bolted it and wrecked the McKinley coalition in 1912, and generally dominate American politics with his personality until his death in 1919.
TR still compels us today. He has been a hero to such disparate American figures as John McCain, Barack Obama, and Josh Hawley. After Donald Trump was shot, his supporters compared him to Teddy, who finished a campaign speech in 1912 after taking a bullet in the chest.
He also made the Roosevelt name such a byword in American politics that, a year after his death, Democrats would put another assistant secretary of the Navy named Roosevelt on their national ticket. But that’s a story for our second installment.
In part two, I’ll cover the past century of veepstakes and their consequences.
Correction: This article has been edited to note that Tompkins was the second vice president to serve two terms.