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Reviews in American History 33.1 (2005) 15-22



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The Second—and Final?—Revolution

John Ferling. Adams vs. Jefferson: The Tumultuous Election of 1800. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. xx + 215 pp. Notes, illustrations, and index. $26.00.

In September 1789, less than two months after the storming of the Bastille, Thomas Jefferson sent a letter to James Madison that helped explain the unrest. As violent as the recent upheavals were, Jefferson implied, they followed from a self-evident truth: "the earth belongs in usufruct to the living." No government, and no generation, could impose itself on the unborn, because the rights and reason of man outweighed the authority of tradition. The French monarchy had violated this truth by saddling its people with debts and feudal obligations. It had, in effect, doomed itself. Along with his more offhand remark that "a little rebellion now and then" was a good thing, Jefferson's declaration of generational sovereignty was as original and daring a concept as he, or indeed any American republican, had ever articulated. The Virginian had actually endorsed revolution as a foundation of public life—a regenerative creed for a free and enlightened society.1

One can scarcely imagine, then, what Jefferson would make of the last century and a half of American politics. Instead of periodic rebellions, the American polity has undergone a number of transformative presidential elections: 1840, 1860, 1896, 1932, 1960, 1980, and, it appears, 2004.2 Although the mean interval between these elections nears the amount of time Jefferson allotted to each generation, they have had less to do with the overthrow of corrupt power-holders than with changes in partisan organization and voter loyalty. By and large, Americans have settled their differences within the legal and ideological boundaries drawn during Jefferson's lifetime. They have foregone outright revolution in favor of scheduled competition at the polls, broadening access to public life while narrowing the range of choices within it. The birth of this democratic political culture reaches back to the election of 1800, when the Republicans deposed the Federalists and announced that the Revolution was safe at last.

In Adams vs. Jefferson: The Tumultuous Election of 1800, John Ferling provides the most clear and authoritative account to date of the "Revolution of 1800." [End Page 15] The book combines an obvious mastery of existing literature on the election with keen insights into its key players and wider legacy. Ferling begins in the autumn of 1800, as the incumbent Adams and the challenger Jefferson make their way to Washington for the December 3 election. The book then rewinds to the Revolutionary period and traces the careers of these and other founders back to 1800. Ferling reviews the growth of partisanship in the early 1790s, the solidification of party lines during George Washington's second term (1793-1797), and the rise and fall of Federalist fortunes during the crisis-filled year of 1798. He then dissects the tangled prelude to the 1800 election and the constitutional crisis that followed it, showing how a few congressmen ultimately decided the matter. He concludes by discussing the democratization of American life that followed—and followed from—Jefferson's victory.

Ferling's is a largely top-down approach, a generals' view of the political battlefields of the 1790s. His method might also be termed biographical rather than social or cultural, in that he assays the election through the careers of Jefferson, Adams, Hamilton, and Burr. In general, historians will recognize Ferling's characters: the impetuous, irascible, and incorruptibly honest Adams; the reserved, hopeful, and often hedonistic Jefferson; the haughty, frenetic, and fiercely ambitious Hamilton. This approach enables Ferling to make two important contributions to our knowledge of the election and our overall sense of early national politics. First, he helps to restore a sense of human agency, choice, and chance—in a word, contingency—to political events that often sink beneath bigger processes (democratization, western migration, market expansion). Second, he buries the wistful notion that negative campaigning and back-room real politik are modern corruptions. By following the...

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