In most places and at most times, an unsuccessful rival for political power could expect to receive harsh treatment, including expropriation, exile, imprisonment, or death at the hands of the winner.  Conversely, the impulse that drives a political leader to seek power can descend into an atavistic desire to inflict pain on those who would take it away.

Harry Jaffa identifies the US election of 1800 as one place and time when that desire was suspended:

[W]e know of no example before 1800 of a government in which the instruments of political power passed from one set of hands to those of their most uncompromisingly hostile political rivals and opponents because of a free vote.  The electoral contest of 1800 climaxed a decade of party warfare.  The election of 1796, the first following the retirement of Washington (whose election had been virtually uncontested), was bitterly fought, but the incumbent party retained office.  The political conflict intensified in the next four years, and its rhetoric exceeded in acrimony any in subsequent American political history, including that of the elections preceding the Civil War.  Yet when the votes of 1800 (and 1801) had been counted and the election decided according to the forms of the Constitution, the offices were peacefully vacated by the losers and peacefully occupied by those who had prevailed.  Nor were any of the defeated incumbents executed, imprisoned, expropriated, or driven into exile, as were the losers in the English civil wars and in the political contests of the Rome of Cicero and Caesar.  The defeated Federalists went about their lawful occupations unmolested and for the most part engaged in the same kind of political activity in which their opponents had previously engaged.  Again, to the best of our knowledge, this was the first time in the history of the world that such a thing had happened.

Harry V. Jaffa, A New Birth of Freedom, p. 3, Rowan & Littlefield, 2000.

— Gerry Bresslour