Thomas McKean

***Thomas McKean***

**Thomas McKean** (pronounced Mc-Kane) was a Governor of two states, Delaware and Pennsylvania, as well as a member of the Continental Congress and a state-level judge before his tenure as the 9th Vice President of the United States in March of 1809.

### Pennsylvania Politics

McKean started his long tenure as chief justice of Pennsylvania on July 28, 1777, and served in that capacity until 1799. There, he largely set the rules of justice for revolutionary Pennsylvania. According to the biographer John Coleman, "only the historiographical difficulty of reviewing court records and other scattered documents prevents recognition that McKean, rather than John Marshall, did more than anyone else to establish an independent judiciary in the United States. As chief justice under a Pennsylvania constitution he considered flawed, he assumed it the right of the court to strike down legislative acts it deemed unconstitutional, preceding by ten years the U.S. Supreme Court's establishment of the doctrine of judicial review. He augmented the rights of defendants and sought penal reform, but on the other hand was slow to recognize expansion of the legal rights of women and the processes in the state's gradual elimination of slavery."

He was a member of the convention of Pennsylvania that ratified the Constitution of the United States. In the Pennsylvania State Constitutional Convention of 1789/90, he argued for a strong executive and was himself a Federalist. Nevertheless, in 1796, dissatisfied with the Federalists' domestic policies and compromises with Great Britain, he became an outspoken Jeffersonian Republican, or Democratic-Republican.

McKean was elected Governor of Pennsylvania and served three terms from March 4, 1799, to March 4, 1809. In the 1798 election, he defeated the Federalist Party nominee James Ross and again more easily in the 1802 election. At first, McKean ousted Federalists and Constitutional Democrats from state government positions and so he has been called the father of the spoils system. However, in seeking a third term in 1806, McKean was at odds with factions of his own Democratic Union Party, and the Pennsylvania General Assembly instead nominated Speaker Simon Snyder for governor. McKean then forged a party of moderates, called "the Quids," and defeated Snyder. Afterwards, he began removing Jeffersonians from state positions.

The governor's beliefs in stronger executive and judicial powers were bitterly denounced by the influential *Aurora* newspaper publisher William P. Duane and the Philadelphia populist Michael Leib. After they led public attacks calling for his impeachment, McKean filed a partially successful libel suit against Duane in 1805. The Pennsylvania House of Representatives impeached the governor in 1807, but, for the rest of his term, his friends prevented an impeachment trial from being held, and the matter was dropped. When the suit was settled after McKean left office, his son Joseph angrily criticized Duane's attorney for alleging out of context that McKean referred to the people of Pennsylvania as "clodpoles" (clodhoppers).

### Vice President

McKean would be seen as a moderate going into 1808 with Constitutional Democrats especially holding a favorable opinion of him. McKean himself was not a huge supporter of either side, but would coalition with the Constitutional Democrats and their candidate Governor Amo Gus to stop William Aubrey and the People's Labour Party which was gaining popularity in the north. Though no side gained an absolute majority, McKean and Gus were chosen by Congress to serve. Under the Gus administration several government reforms would be passed, and McKean himself would be mostly passive with his rapidly aging self.

McKean was 79 in 1812, and wouldn't be nominated for Vice President by the Constitutional Democrats, but his own party of the Tertium Quid Party with John Taylor. The Constitutional Democratic Party hadn't nominated anyone for Vice President, but most of their electors decided to re-select McKean, putting him in position for the Congressional Contingent Election, where he would win as a moderate candidate, going into his second term.