e land nearly doubled the size of the fledging country. Furthermore, the later expedition of Lewis and Clark proved the feasibility of overland travel to the far west and provided much needed information of the territory. After their expedition, western commerce and settlement surged.Another important legacy of Thomas Jefferson’s presidency was the Twelfth Amendment to the Constitution, which was ratified in September1804; the only states that rejected the amendment were Delaware, Massachusetts, and Connecticut.. In the election of 1800, both Jefferson and Aaron Burr received an equal number of electoral votes. Section One of the Constitution declared that the person who garnered the most votes would be the President, and the man who received the second most votes would be the Vice President. And that a tie could only be broken by the House of Representatives. At this time, the Federalists, who vehemently opposed Thomas Jefferson, controlled the House. Because of a stalemate in the tie breaking voting in the House of Representatives, several Federalists gave up and refrained from voting in the 36th round. This resulted in Thomas Jefferson securing the presidency, which was what the electors wanted. The Twelfth Amendment was adopted so that the situation in the 1800 election would not happen again. Since this sort of bargaining over the presidency was the very thing the Electoral College was supposed to prevent, the Congress and the States quickly adopted the Twelfth Amendment to the Constitution by September of 1804. The difference between the procedure which the Twelfth Amendment defines and that which was laid down in Section One of the Constitution is in the provision that it makes for separate designation by the electors of their choices for President and Vice President.Thomas Jefferson is most noted as being the author of the Declaration of Independence as well as our third president. He was also a diplomat, an architect, a ...
