Historians describe the presidential race of 1800 as one of the nastiest ever. Pittsburgh's competing newspapers reflected that era of bad feeling with their owners launching personal and political attacks on each other.

The election of 1796 had resulted in Federalist John Adams becoming president and his chief rival, Democratic-Republican Thomas Jefferson, becoming vice president. (Despite its confusing name, Jefferson's party was the predecessor to the modern Democratic Party and has no link to present-day Republicans.)

The result of divided leadership was four years of feuding over foreign and domestic policy and a rematch between the two men in 1800.

John Israel's newspaper The Tree of Liberty began publication in Pittsburgh in August of that year as pro-Jefferson newspaper backed by lawyer and politician Hugh Henry Brackenridge. Its long-established rival was John Scull's The Pittsburgh Gazette.

Colonial newspapers made no pretense of objectivity and made no distinctions between news and opinion columns.

Israel, most likely with the aid of Brackenridge, a novelist and poet, took particular pleasure in crafting puns that made use of his rival's last name. When the Gazette introduced a new nameplate, Israel greeted its appearance on Sept. 20 in The Tree of Liberty with almost-rhyming couplets:

"PRAY Sap-Skull John, Why did you get
That handsome head for your Gazette;
Adorned with flourishes and flashes,
And other such outlandish dashes?
When your own head wants alteration,
As much as any in the nation --
Your thickish, sappy, dunder skull,
As hard as any ten year bull,
Demanded that it should be shaven,
As neat at least, as that engraving ..."

In its Sept. 13 issue The Tree of Liberty provided minimal information on the "federal ticket" for the upcoming U.S. congressional and state senate races. For Congress, "NO BODY!!!" the paper reported. For state Senate, "NO BODY worth mentioning."

"The REPUBLICAN Ticket Which will be supported in opposition to the above, by the great bulk of the honest and independent yeomanry of the county is for Congress ALBERT GALLATIN [and for] Senator JOHN HAMILTON of Washington cty."

The Federalists had given up on the national and state races, according to The Tree of Liberty, but hoped to hold on to country offices, including coroner and commissioner.

They failed.

"[T]his year the Republicans will carry every candidate from the Coroner to the Congressman," the Tree of Liberty crowed on Oct. 18 after the ballots were counted. "This election gives the final stroke to the aristocratic party here."

Pennsylvania's representatives to the Electoral College -- which selects the president -- were chosen by the state Legislature in 1800 and included both Federalists and Democratic-Republicans. As a result, Jefferson and Adams split the state's electoral vote 8-7. Jefferson, however, won the overall vote in the Electoral College, 73-65.

Here's where it gets really complicated. Jefferson and his vice presidential running mate, Aaron Burr, received identical numbers of electoral votes. That threw the race into the U.S. House of Representatives, which took 36 ballots before selecting Jefferson as president on Feb. 17, 1801. He was inaugurated March 4.

Following years of partisan feuding, Pittsburgh politicians from both parties came together, at least for one evening, according to the March 14 edition of The Tree of Liberty.

"ON the evening of the 4th of March a large body of Republican Citizens of Allegheny and Washington counties, joined by a number of the most respectable Federal characters in that neighborhood, met at the house of Capt. Andrew M'Farlane, near the Monongahela river, to celebrate the election and induction of THOMAS JEFFERSON, Esq. into the Presidency of the United States ..."

Following what the newspaper called "an "elegant entertainment," participants raised their glasses in tributes to Jefferson, Burr, Adams, The Constitution and the memory of George Washington. "[A]t each toast a volley of small arms were fired."

"Afterwards the Citizens with lighted Tapers, marched to the Monongahela river, and returned in the same order to the house, where they spent the remainder of the evening with the greatest hilarity ..."