At this writing, the United States is in the midst of a presidential election year. Due to some last-minute surprises, each of the two major parties is getting some additional press coverage, following the selection of their vice presidential nominees.

With the vice presidency being just “a heartbeat away” from the top job, one would think it would be a much sought-after job. Today, that may be true, but for most of the nation’s history, the office of vice president was not highly esteemed. It was, as one of its occupants described it, “not worth a bucket of warm spit.” The office was considered so insignificant that fully 18 U.S. presidents have served at least part of their term without a vice president. In fact, since the office was created in 1789, the United States has gone a cumulative 38 years without a sitting vice president. Join us as we explore the odd history of the office that the first vice president, John Adams, described as “the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived.”

The Constitution’s Afterthought

The office of the vice presidency, that illustrious seat of power just a heartbeat away from the presidency, has not always been the political powerhouse we might imagine today. In fact, before the 25th Amendment became the law of the land in 1967, the vice presidency was often considered irrelevant and a place to put troublesome politicians so they would stay out of trouble.

When the Founding Fathers sat down to draft the U.S. Constitution, they apparently spent about as much time on the job description for the vice president as a college student does on a term paper the night before it’s due. Article 2, which outlines the executive branch, merely mentions that a vice president shall be chosen alongside the president. When we get to Clause 6 of this article, things get a bit more interesting. There, it gives the vice president the power to step in if the president is removed from office, dies, resigns, or can’t do the job anymore. For such a pivotal role in the line of succession, the Constitution left a lot of questions unanswered for future generations to figure out.

While the Constitution lays out clear qualifications for becoming president—such as being a natural-born citizen, at least 35 years old, and having lived in the U.S. for 14 years—there was initially no such requirement for the vice president. This oversight could have led to a situation where the vice president wasn’t even eligible to be president, but no one seemed too concerned. After all, who would want the job anyway?

The “Senate Babysitter” Role

As far as actual duties, the Constitution isn’t much more helpful. Article 1, Section 3, offers the vice president a lone responsibility: to serve as president of the Senate. Don’t get too excited—it’s a job with practically no power since the vice president only gets to vote if there’s a tie. In fact, since the Senate first met in 1789, VPs have only been called upon to break ties 301 times, out of hundreds of thousands of votes. The current vice president, Kamala Harris, holds the record, having broken a tie 33 times — more than ten percent of all such votes in the nation’s history — as of the writing of this article. Twelve of the 49 vice presidents never cast a single tie-breaking vote. One vice president, Charles Dawes, missed his chance to cast a tie-breaking vote because he was taking a nap in his office.

“But my country has in its wisdom contrived for me the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived, and as I can do neither good nor evil, I must be borne away by others and meet the common fate.”

— John Adams, first vice president

John Adams, the very first vice president of the United States, was not exactly thrilled with his new gig. When he got the news of his election in 1789, he wrote to a friend that the time he spent at home before the election was “the sweetest morsel of my life; I despair of ever tasting such again.” Upon his introduction to the Senate, Adams gave a brief speech, saying, “Unaccustomed to refuse any public service, however dangerous to my reputation or disproportioned to my talents, it would have been inconsistent to adopt another maxim at this time.”

He expressed his dissatisfaction with his job when he wrote to his son, future president John Quincy Adams, in 1789. He said the vice presidency was “not quite adapted to my character, too inactive and mechanical.” A year later, his opinion was unchanged, and he wrote, “This confinement will injure my health.” As he neared the end of his first term in office, he summed up his views of his job in a letter to his wife Abigail: “But my country has in its wisdom contrived for me the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived, and as I can do neither good nor evil, I must be borne away by others and meet the common fate.”

Despite his grumbling, Adams did manage to break 29 Senate ties—the third most in U.S. history. He also used the position as a springboard to become the nation’s second president. Whether that made up for the indignities he suffered over eight years is anyone’s guess.

The Early Days: A Job for Rivals

As originally conceived, the vice presidency was less of a partnership and more of a consolation prize. The Electoral College was designed so that each elector cast two votes for president. The candidate with the most votes became president, and the runner-up became vice president, regardless of whether they were political allies or bitter enemies. This led to some awkward pairings, most notably the John Adams/Thomas Jefferson administration.

During George Washington’s presidency, Adams and Jefferson became rivals, often clashing over the scope of federal authority. By the time the 1796 election rolled around, the gloves were off. Adams narrowly defeated Jefferson with 71 electoral votes to Jefferson’s 68, making Jefferson the vice president to a man whose policies he despised.

Jefferson, for his part, wasn’t put out by having a job with few responsibilities. When he finally got the top job, he described it as “splendid misery.” The VP position was more to his liking, apparently, since he called it “honorable and easy” and spent most of his time at his Viriginia home rather than in the capital. The easy job allowed him ample opportunity to plot against Adams on several political fronts—a strategy that contributed to Adams’s defeat in the 1800 election.

The 1800 Election: Chaos, Burr, and the Birth of the 12th Amendment

The 1800 election was the first real crisis of the vice presidency. Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans defeated Adams and the Federalists in the Electoral College 73 to 65, but there was a problem: Jefferson and his running mate, Aaron Burr, ended up with the same number of electoral votes. Back then, electors didn’t specify which vote was for president and which was for vice president, so the tie had to be resolved by the House of Representatives.

What ensued was a political drama worthy of a Netflix series. The House, still controlled by bitter Federalists, took 36 ballots to finally choose Jefferson as president. Meanwhile, there were rumors that Burr, always the opportunist, had been quietly campaigning to snatch the presidency away from Jefferson. Delaware Representative James Bayard wrote to Alexander Hamilton that Burr was “willing to consider the Federalists as his friends and to accept the office of President as their gift.” Jefferson never fully trusted Burr after that and dropped him from the ticket in 1804.

Burr, feeling snubbed, decided to run for governor of New York. In July 1804, while still serving as vice president, Burr killed Hamilton in a duel, making him the only sitting vice president to ever be charged with murder in not one but two states: New York and New Jersey. Burr’s misadventures didn’t stop there; he was later charged with treason, earning his place as one of the most controversial VPs in history — as well as a place in a catchy hit musical about his arch-nemesis.

The chaos of the 1800 election led to the 12th Amendment in 1804. It required electors to cast separate ballots for president and vice president. It also ensured that no one constitutionally ineligible to be president could be vice president—a small but significant tweak to the original system.

The 19th Century: More Mediocrity

As the 19th century rolled on, the vice presidency remained a position of dubious honor. Elbridge Gerry, the man behind the infamous “gerrymandering” term, sought the VP job under James Madison in 1812 mainly because he was broke and needed a federal paycheck. He died two years into his term and wasn’t replaced, setting what would become a common theme for the next few vice presidents.

Daniel Tompkins, who served under James Monroe, was such a disaster that he was described as a “drunken embezzler” who barely showed up to work. Congress even docked his salary. The office was such a joke that when William Henry Harrison, a Whig, was putting together his 1840 ticket, Daniel Webster flat-out refused the VP slot, saying, “I do not propose to be buried until I am dead.”

Martin Van Buren decided he didn’t need a vice presidential running mate in his re-election bid. The decision was pure political calculus, especially considering his previous running mate, Richard Mentor Johnson. Johnson had made quite the name for himself by taking down the Native American leader Tecumseh in battle. That earned him some serious street cred, or at least battlefield cred. He was also a bit of an odd duck. This is the guy who once proposed a bill to drill into the polar ice caps to see if the Earth was hollow and livable inside. Spoiler alert: it’s not. His eccentricities didn’t stop there; as vice president, he really got under the skin of the Washington elite by openly living with a Black enslaved woman as his common-law wife—a move that was, to put it mildly, not well-received in the conservative circles of the 1830s.

Johnson’s fortunes took a nosedive in the financial panic of 1837. Johnson was so swamped by debt that he packed his bags for Kentucky, where he ran a hotel and tavern while looking increasingly like a man who had let life take the wheel. An English visitor even quipped, “If he should become president, he will be as strange-looking a potentate as ever ruled.” Realizing his VP was dead weight, Van Buren opted to fly solo for his campaign. The Democratic Party chose not to nominate anyone for the vice presidency, leaving it to the states to choose whomever they liked. Since Van Buren lost the election to Andrew Jackson, it all became moot, anyway.

“The office forms no part of the government; he enters into no administrative sphere; he has practically no legislative, executive, or judicial functions; he doesn’t debate or vote. Where is he to go? What is he to do? Nowhere. Nothing.”

— George M. Dallas, 11th vice president

Harrison’s eventual running mate, John Tyler, would cast his shadow over the office, helping to clearly establish a principle that we now take for granted. Harrison died just 31 days into his term. What did that mean for Tyler? The Constitution didn’t specifically state that the vice president would become president; it merely said, “In case of the removal of the president from office, or of his death, resignation, or inability to discharge the powers and duties of the said office, the same shall devolve on the vice president…” Tyler claimed that the presidency, not just the duties, had “devolved” upon him, but the Constitution was vague on whether he actually became president or just an acting placeholder. Tyler set a precedent by finishing Harrison’s term as president, though this wouldn’t be codified into law until the 25th Amendment over a century later.

George M. Dallas, vice president from 1845 to 1849 under James K. Polk, found the demands of his office so light that he maintained his law practice throughout. He complained that “the office forms no part of the government; he enters into no administrative sphere; he has practically no legislative, executive, or judicial functions; he doesn’t debate or vote. Where is he to go? What is he to do? Nowhere. Nothing.” The office was so irrelevant that when Vice President William Rufus King died of tuberculosis in April of 1853, just 25 days after being sworn in, he wasn’t replaced during the term of Franklin Pierce. Pierce did mark the occasion, however, in a speech, but only in passing, after addressing other more important matters.

As the country approached its 80th birthday, it elected its youngest vice president. James Buchanan’s VP, John C. Breckinridge, was 36 years, 47 days old when he took office in 1857. Unfortunately, his other key distinctions weren’t nearly as positive. A split in the Democratic Party in 1860 resulted in Breckinridge receiving the presidential nomination from the southern faction of the party. He received a respectable 72 votes in the Electoral College but came in second place to the winner, Abraham Lincoln (who, coincidentally, was married to Breckinridge’s cousin, Mary Todd Lincoln). All was not lost, however. While still serving as vice president and campaigning for the presidency, he was elected as U.S. senator from Kentucky. On March 4, 1861, the last day of the session, Breckinridge swore in Hannibal Hamlin as his successor as vice president. Hamlin, in turn, swore in the newly elected senators, including Breckinridge.

If Breckinridge’s story ended here, it would have concluded on a positive note. Unfortunately, the start of his career as a senator corresponded with the outbreak of the Civil War. He chose to give up his Senate seat in exchange for a commission in the Confederate army, declaring, “I exchange with proud satisfaction a term of six years in the Senate of the United States for the musket of a soldier.” For his actions, he was indicted for treason on November 6, 1861. On December 2, 1861, he was declared a traitor by the U.S. Senate. Two days later, by a vote of 36-0, the Senate expelled him with a resolution stating “Whereas John C. Breckinridge, a member of this body from the State of Kentucky, has joined the enemies of his country, and is now in arms against the government he had sworn to support: Therefore—Resolved, That said John C. Breckinridge, the traitor, be, and he hereby is, expelled from the Senate.”

“Not yet, but there’s still a few weeks of my term remaining.”

Adlai Stevenson I, 23rd vice president, when asked toward the end of his term if the president ever consulted with him about anything.

Joining the dubious ranks of Aaron Burr, Breckinridge became the second former VP to be charged with treason. He fled to Canada after the war, where he lived until President Andrew Johnson granted amnesty to all former Confederates in 1868.

Meanwhile, Abraham Lincoln’s first VP, Hannibal Hamlin, spent most of the Civil War at home in Maine, complaining that he was “the most unimportant man in Washington.” Lincoln replaced him on the 1864 ticket with Andrew Johnson, who made quite the impression at his inauguration by showing up “shamefully drunk.” When Lincoln was assassinated in 1865, Johnson became president, leaving the vice presidency vacant for the rest of Johnson’s term.

Ulysses S. Grant was elected in 1868, and his vice president, Schuyler Colfax, became embroiled in a railroad bribery scandal. The House moved to impeach him, but the vote failed because there were only a few weeks remaining in his term. Grant replaced him with Massachusetts senator Henry Wilson for the election of 1872, despite the fact that Wilson was also implicated in the same bribery scandal. Wilson died of a stroke in 1875, and the office went unfilled for two years.

The office continued its streak of irrelevance well into the 19th century. Grover Cleveland’s VP from 1893 to 1897, Adlai Stevenson I, was asked toward the end of his term if Cleveland ever consulted him about anything of consequence. Stevenson replied, “Not yet, but there’s still a few weeks of my term remaining.”

The 20th Century: The “Bucket of Warm Spit” Era

Theodore Roosevelt was named as William McKinley’s VP for the election of 1900, not as a reward for exceptional service but as a convenient way to move him to the sidelines. Roosevelt’s demeanor and progressive ideas troubled the Republican establishment. They reasoned that the best way to make him irrelevant would be to give him the country’s most irrelevant office. Even so, there were some who worried that they were gambling on McKinley’s health keeping Roosevelt out of the mix. Party chairman Mark Hanna warned, “Don’t any of you realize there’s only one life between that madman and the presidency?”

Hanna’s words were prescient. Six months into his term, McKinley was assassinated. Suddenly “that madman” was president. Roosevelt served his first term — three and a half years — without a vice president. When he was elected in his own right in 1904, he must have concluded that he did well enough in his first term without consulting with a VP. His interaction with Vice President Charles Fairbanks was practically nonexistent. When the GOP came knocking again in 1916, Fairbanks left no doubt about his feelings concerning his former office. He practically ran the other way, insisting, “My name must not be considered for vice president. Please withdraw it.”

Roosevelt’s successor, William Howard Taft, chose James S. Sherman as his running mate. Sherman’s contributions to the Taft administration can be seen in the way the Republican Party handled the election of 1912. Sherman inconveniently died just a week before the election. The GOP, in a move that can only be described as macabre efficiency, didn’t bother finding a replacement and simply ran a dead man on the ticket.

Since the primary role of the vice president is to step in in the event of “the removal of the president from office, or of his death, resignation, or inability to discharge the powers and duties of the said office,” it is surprising that we don’t hear more about the 28th vice president, Thomas Marshall. He served for eight years under Woodrow Wilson. When Wilson suffered a debilitating stroke in 1919, it would seem that would have been Marshall’s opportunity to shine. Instead, he was so out of the loop that he only made it to one cabinet meeting, leaving the First Lady, Edith Wilson, as the de facto president.

Marshall’s successor as vice president was Calvin Coolidge. We can glean some clues about how Marshall viewed his eight years in office by the fact that he sent Coolidge a note expressing his condolences. Coolidge had no illusions about the job, either. When his wife asked if he’d accept the VP nomination, he shrugged and said, “I suppose I’ll have to.”

Coolidge did not have to spend all of his time twiddling his thumbs. President Warren G. Harding died in 1923, promoting Coolidge to the top spot. Coolidge served the rest of that term without a vice president. When he ran in 1924, finding a running mate was like pulling teeth. Ohio governor Frank Lowden and Idaho senator William Borah both took a hard pass. Eventually, Charles G. Dawes, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, agreed to the role, only to find that being Coolidge’s VP was about as thrilling as watching paint dry. As one historian rather harshly (and unfairly) observed, Dawes was left “to wither as VP to do-nothing Calvin Coolidge.”

Franklin D. Roosevelt not only holds the record for the longest tenure as president but he also claims the most vice presidents. He cycled through three VPs during his four terms. The first, John Nance Garner, was the one who famously described the job as “not worth a bucket of warm spit.” Garner was replaced by Henry Wallace in 1940, but Wallace was dumped for being too liberal in favor of Missouri Senator Harry S. Truman in 1944.

Truman only served as VP for 82 days before FDR’s death thrust him into the presidency. He served almost four years without a vice president. Given all that was going on in the world at the time, folks started to realize that something was broken in the plan of succession that could be disastrous if not fixed.

The Modern VP: Finally, Some Respect (Kind Of)

Despite the warning signs, it took the assassination of John F. Kennedy to highlight just how precarious things had become. His VP, Lyndon B. Johnson, was a comparatively-young 55 years old, but he had already suffered what he described as “the worst heart attack a man can have and still live” when he was 47 years old. Immediately after JFK’s assassination and before being sworn in as president, LBJ was examined at the emergency room because of chest pains. The ER doctor thought it was a heart attack, and many historians believe he was correct. Officially, the public was told that it was merely a case of angina.

Johnson served his first term without a vice president. Next in line to the presidency was House Speaker John W. McCormack, who was one month shy of his 72nd birthday when he became one heartbeat away. The days were long past when matters of national security could be pondered for weeks or even months at a time. The nuclear age brought closer scrutiny to the position that increasingly did not seem to be quite so irrelevant.

It was, therefore, the Cold War, with its growing threat of nuclear annihilation, more than anything else that finally made people realize how important a clear line of succession was. The 25th Amendment, ratified in 1967, clarified that the vice president would indeed become president if the office became vacant and established a process for filling the VP slot if it became empty. For the first time, the vice presidency began to be taken seriously.

Six years after the 25th Amendment was ratified, it was invoked. Spiro T. Agnew, the 39th vice president, resigned on October 10, 1973. For the first time, there was a provision for naming a replacement. Two months later, Gerald R. Ford was confirmed as the 40th vice president, becoming the first to be appointed due to a vacancy in the office. He did not have long to get adjusted to the job, however. Nine months later, on August 8, 1974, Richard Nixon resigned the presidency, making Ford the first president who was not elected to that office or the vice presidency.

Since the passage of the 25th Amendment, the vice presidency has evolved into a more significant role. Modern VPs have been given more responsibilities and even got their very own official residence in 1974. The days of it being “the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived” seem to be gone, but it still derives most of its responsibilities at the pleasure of whoever is holding the top job at the moment.

The time you think of the VP as just the president’s backup singer, remember the long, strange history of the office. From its roots as a seat for political rivals and underachievers to its modern-day importance, the vice presidency has always been a little weird, a little wacky, and a whole lot of fascinating. Who knows what the future holds for this once-insignificant office? Maybe the next VP will be the one to finally make John Adams eat his words.

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