The First Presidential Contest: 1796 and the Founding of American Democracy by Jeffrey L. Pasley (review)

The Founding Fathers, who opposed political parties as self-serving factions that endangered the public good, designed the Electoral College in hopes of avoiding partisan presidential campaigns. By 1796, it had already become clear that the Founders had failed to achieve this goal. In The First Presidential Contest, Pasley argues that 1796 was a transitional election in which elite-dominated politics began to give way to an ideologically charged democracy.

Unlike previous historians and political scientists who largely ignored the 1796 election because it lacked fully developed parties with formal organizations, Pasley shows that the contest played an “absolutely seminal” role in establishing patterns for subsequent American canvasses, especially by pitting liberalism against conservatism (10). Far from being an election in which elite Founders orchestrated the outcome from the top down, the 1796 vote was instead shaped by lesser-known newspaper editors and Electoral College candidates who crafted the images of the presidential contenders. These mid-level figures included men like Benjamin Franklin Bache, editor of the Philadelphia Aurora, and Leven Powell, Federalist elector candidate from Loudoun County, Virginia. Not a “Founders Study,” this work is an example of “history from the middle out” that focuses more on how the Founders’ images were shaped than on the Founders themselves because the political culture required candidates to remain silent and seemingly disinterested in the outcome (14). In addition to primary sources from countless national, state, and local politicians, as well as secondary sources from a variety of disciplines, Pasley relies heavily on the American Antiquarian Society’s New Nation Votes project.

The Republicans, with whom Pasley sympathizes, believed in the radical Enlightenment ideal that policy should result from a vigorous but rational public debate. They favored an “active democracy” in which the federal government would respond to public opinion about specific policy issues (93). The Federalists, in contrast, were social conservatives who believed that after an election ended, the public should defer to the presumably elite leaders that it had chosen.

The emergence of the Democratic-Republican Societies in 1793 brought “politics out of the newspapers and into the streets and meeting halls” (80). Two years later, explains Pasley, Republicans tried to persuade the Washington administration to reject the Jay Treaty with Great Britain through public meetings. Federalists had little choice but to defend the treaty with popular appeals of their own. Having failed to defeat the treaty, Republicans again took their case to the people, this time seeking a change of administration in the 1796 election.

The campaign consisted of a culture war of “competing public narratives” about the candidates (225). Resorting to the “rhetoric of reaction” and anti-intellectualism, Federalists portrayed Thomas Jefferson as an “egghead,” an atheist, and a dangerous social experimenter who lacked the manliness, strength, and courage to contend with the radical influences of the French Revolution (242, 248). Not to be outdone, Republicans pounced on statements praising the British form of government in John Adams’ political writings to paint him as a monarchist.

The campaign was visible mainly in the states—especially Pennsylvania—where the voters rather than the state legislatures chose electors. Despite losing Pennsylvania, Adams won the presidency by three electoral votes. Jefferson, the runner-up, became Adams’ vice president. Attempts to tamper with the Electoral College system (most notably Alexander Hamilton’s scheme to elect Adams’ “running mate” Thomas Pinckney as president) all failed.

Carefully researched and engagingly written, Pasley’s volume is the definitive work on this underappreciated election.