The Revolution of 1800: Democracy, Race, and the New Republic

Abstract

The Revolution of 1800: Democracy, Race, and the New Republic. Edited by James Horn, Jan Ellen Lewis, and Peter S. Onuf. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002, Pp. xix, 431. Cloth, $59.50; paper, $22.50.)Well-tilled subjects in the history of the early republic can still be rewarding. This is the conclusion reached on reading The Revolution of 1800: Democracy, Race, and the New Republic, a collection of sixteen essays presented in 2000 at a conference held at the International Center for Jefferson Studies commemorating the disputed 1800-01 election. The election itself and its domestic and international consequences form the two pivots around which these essays revolve. Although they vary in quality and significance, most of the essays advance our understanding, offer new insights, and point to subjects of future inquiry.Surprisingly, none of the essays offer much that is new about the actual conduct of the election or about its contested aftermath, which finally was resolved when the House of Representatives ended the stalemate between Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr in Jefferson's favor after thirty-six ballots. James E. Lewis Jr. deftly summarizes the familiar steps that led to this resolution as well as how the crisis appeared to participants. Whether military usurpation, secession, or civil war were ever the real possibilities that many feared, both Federalists and Jeffersonians, as Michael A. Bellesiles persuasively contends, had powerful logistical, political, and psychological reasons not to take up arms. Most of all, as Lewis emphasizes, respect for the constitutional process by the participants helped break the deadlock. Addressing why this crisis over the election of a president developed in the first place, Jack N. Rakove expertly describes how, in the 1790s, the presidency developed from a non-controversial patriot-king like model into a repository of political power bitterly contested by emergent, nationally organized Federalist and Republican parties. Rakove emphasizes the unexpected growth of presidential primacy over foreign policy as the driving force in this process, but surely the president's constitutional powers over appointments, legislation, and law enforcement placed a high premium on control of the presidency as well.Other essays address the impact Jefferson's installation as president made on subsequent U. S. history. (Jefferson claimed the change of administrations had profound consequences and amounted to a revolution.) Here, Jeffrey L. Pasley's superb discussion of changes in political culture is most instructive. Especially valuable is his account of improvised popular traditions and practices in the service of partisan politics and of the creation of an informal national network of Republican party newspapers that functioned as a de facto party organization. Drawing heavily on previous scholarship and on First Democracy Project data, Pasley reaffirms that the new popular conduct of politics helped spur an unprecedented participation in the political process by ordinary white male voters. This conclusion is complemented by Joyce Appleby's thesis that Jefferson as president consciously fostered a psychology of democracy. This is a familiar idea, but her further claim that Jefferson, by de-formalizing presidential ritual, jumped-started democracy in the U.S., and by extension, the world (171), seems inflated. White male democracy in the United States, as other scholars have shown, was as much a bottom-up as a top-down process and had many grassroots sources.As other essays make clear, Jeffersonian democracy also had major limitations. …