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Samuel Miles: Presidential elector
Samuel Miles is noted in many sources as the first “faithless” presidential elector. Although he had run as a Federalist, he voted for Thomas Jefferson instead of John Adams. A famous angry letter to the editor, written in the American Gazette in 1796, records one outraged Federalist voter’s sentiments:
Do I chuse Samuel Miles to determine for me whether John Adams or Thomas Jefferson shall be President? No! I chuse him to act, not to think!
A little more background is warranted. Samuel Miles was an officer in the Revolutionary War who had previously fought in the French and Indian Wars. After the Revolutionary War, he lived in Philadelphia; he was appointed a Court of Appeals judge in 1783 and elected to the city’s Council of Censors in 1787.
Following his election to the Council of Censors, he was charged (almost certainly falsely) with fraud and perjury by John Nicholson, then Controller-General of Pennsylvania. The courts settled decisively in favor of Miles, who then went on to say that Nicholson had made the accusation in order to cover up his own misdeeds.
Miles threatened to resign from office if Nicholson wasn’t removed; when the Assembly tabled the motion and didn’t continue working on it the next day, Miles followed through and resigned immediately.
Against his own expressed wishes, he was elected to the Philadelphia city council in 1788, advanced to alderman in 1789, and elected mayor in 1790. He was re-elected as mayor in 1791, and at that point finally escalated his reluctance to the point of outright refusal, declining to serve an additional term as mayor. In 1793 he retired with his family to a farm.
In 1794, the Pennsylvania state legislature impeached Controller-General John Nicholson for a variety of crimes. While the Pennsylvania Senate came up short of the two-thirds majority necessary to convict Nicholson, the controller-general resigned.
From what we know of Samuel Miles today, he seems to have been a man known for integrity, a strict sense of honor, and a desire not to be seen putting himself forward. You may notice some parallels at this point to a more prominent public figure of his time: George Washington.
