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  • The Deadlocked Election of 1800: Jefferson, Burr, and the Union in the Balance
  • Douglas Bradburn
The Deadlocked Election of 1800: Jefferson, Burr, and the Union in the Balance. By James Roger Sharp (Lawrence, University of Kansas Press, 2010) 239 pp. $34.95

The United States almost had a civil war in 1801. So argues Sharp in this compelling study of Thomas Jefferson’s election to the presidency. The tie between Jefferson and his ambitious ally Aaron Burr in the electoral college vote set the stage for intrigue, corruption, and a possible usurpation of the presidency. The ultimate decision was in the hands of the Federalists, the party that had controlled national policy since the early 1790s. Both the Federalist party and the rival Democratic-Republican party had strong regional majorities, each believing that it alone represented the true interests of the American people. Sharp’s book explains the birth of this meaningful polarization. It reveals a young republic [End Page 128] struggling to find Constitutional solutions to a series of fundamental political crises. As an expert in the politics of the early republic, Sharp’s analysis is a welcome corrective to recent popular readings of the dramatic election.

Sharp is well versed in the latest social-science approaches to the period. He employs salient work to give an exceptionally well-grounded and judicious exploration of the formative politics of the United States. Although much of the history of the “Founding” era is either marred by partisan influences dating from the period, dominated by filiopietism, or engaged in contemporary debates about “original intent,” Sharp will have none of it. To contextualize the significance of that election, and the danger of the deadlock, as exhaustively as possible, Sharp gives a full account of the origins and rise of the parties. Hence, not until Chapter 8 does he arrive at the tie in the electoral college. Drawing heavily on his analysis of party politics in the 1790s and synthesizing much of the recent literature on political culture, electioneering, and political thought, Sharp gives a strong and concise picture of the politics of the decade. His work is balanced, careful, well documented, and usually convincing (though not always, as in his suggestion that Alexander Hamilton was “irresistible to women” [8]). The book serves well as a primer about the character of politics in the early republic; it also includes an excellent bibliographical essay.

After his extensive analysis of the politics of the 1790s, Sharp discusses a number of events and issues—the fight about Hamilton’s plans for national economic growth, the French Revolution, the rise of the democratic-republican societies, the Jay Treaty, the election of John Adams, the XYZ controversy, the Quasi-War with the French, and the Alien and Sedition Acts—before finally coming to the deadlocked election of 1800. Like a master storyteller, he fashions the drama around a colorful cast of characters living cheek by jowl in the swampy village of Washington, D.C., where the public buildings were scarcely more than blueprints, the food was expensive, and the men running the country were crowded into boarding houses with little to do but argue about politics and worry about rumors of conspiracy. Like his analysis of the politics of the 1790s, his narrative of the resolution of the deadlock in the House of Representatives is excellent.

Yet, although Sharp frames his book around the problem of accepting a legitimate opposition, building slowly to the climax of the deadlock in the presidential election, the book ends too abruptly. Until arriving at 1800, Sharp repeatedly explains that the differences between the parties were “intractable.” Why else would the Federalists threaten to usurp the presidency? After chronicling the election of Jefferson, however, Sharp ends the book by briefly asserting that despite stimulating democratic political development in the states, the election did not create a period of “modern” party politics or the idea of a loyal opposition. He maintains that those transformations would have to wait until the election of Andrew Jackson in 1828. But these assertions, which fly in the face of both recent and older [End Page 129] scholarship, cannot be judged on the evidence, since the book provides...

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