When the Constitution Backfired
PASLEY, JEFFREY L.
When the Constitution Backfired Jefferson's Second Revolution: The Election Crisis of 1800 and the Triumph of Republicanism By Susan Dunn Houghton Mifflin. 372 pp. $25.00. Reviewed...
...Speaking of the enmity between President Adams and Hamilton, for example, Dunn laments their failure "when confronted with the ultimate goal of a politician: winning elections...
...as that of 1776," but observances during 2000 were limited to a hastily arranged private conference at Monti cello and a single book (Bernard Weisberger's America Afire) that stayed clear of the bestseller lists...
...By the late 1790s,acold war with postrevolutionary France had broken out, and it provided an opportunity for the Federalists to suppress the scattered but pesky opposition press...
...Peaceful...
...It was understood that Jefferson had won the election, but the Constitution was not written with parties in mind...
...The document was intended to consolidate the harmonious rule of the educated elite we call the Founding Fathers...
...Another tie resulted there when Federalist-controlled states threw their votes to Burr, hoping he would come over to their side...
...DUNN DRAWS a vivid portrait of the political battles that culminated in Jefferson and Aaron Burr's victory over Adams and Thomas Pinckney, but the book becomes sketchier once it reaches what ought to be its most compelling section, the story of the Electoral College tie that could easily have plunged the young nation into civil war...
...Many of Jefferson's supporters in places like Virginia and Pennsylvania were prepared to mobilize their state militias and resist if his victory was snatched away by Congress, while the Federalist-controlled states in New England would have fought on the other side...
...Dunn is more engaged with 18001801, when political parties came into their own...
...Dunn rightly notes the problem with the traditional story of the "astonishing, peaceful transfer of power" so often cited as a chief American exception to the rules of world history...
...Not until the 35th ballot did the deadlock end...
...This was evident in the shift in leadership style from George Washington, the stern, distant "Father of His Country," to the casual Thomas Jefferson, celebrated in song as "the People's Friend...
...Because the enemies in this case were considerably less alien than the Communists and Muslims of later scares—Irish Catholics and village freethinkers were about as foreign as they got—the Alien and Sedition Acts boomeranged on their authors...
...He was depicted as roaming in "a storm of anarchy and confusion," and as having "never yet been able to agree to a fixed form or shape for anything...
...Reviewed by Jeffrey L. Pasley Associate professor of history, University of Missouri...
...The Adams-Hamilton split was largely sparked by Adams' decision to break with the prevailing Federalist preference and make peace with France...
...Federalist speakers, editors and pamphleteers painted Jefferson as a flighty, muddleheaded radical who would destroy the country—along with Christianity and morality—by implementing his pet theories...
...The firstplace finisher would assume the Presidency, and the runner-up would become Vice President, a practice that had resulted in Jefferson serving as his opponent Adams' Vice President after the 1796 election...
...Faced with a suddenly powerful opponent as the 1800 election drew near, the Federalists launched the first fullscale political culture war in U.S...
...coeditor, "Beyond the Founders: New Approaches to the Political History of the Early American Republic" Perhaps the least celebratedbicentennial of recent times was the 200th anniversary of Thomas Jefferson's "Revolution of 1800," his election to the Presidency in the first peaceful democratic transfer of power in world history...
...At the time, electors chosen by state legislatures cast their votes for two candidates without differentiating between President and Vice President...
...Without much prompting from Dunn, it is almost impossible not to hear echoes of the previous and present Presidential campaigns in the Federalist attacks on Jefferson as a "chaotic" soul whose every aspect—not excluding his home improvements at Monticello—revealed his flip-flopping, Gallic lack of moral clarity...
...In 1800, with the Electoral College tied between Jefferson and Burr, the decision passed into the House of Representatives, where each state's delegation received one vote...
...Bon mots and brickbats are handed out to her cast of characters according to whether they seemed to grasp where the future was headed...
...It is safe to say that relatively few Americans realized how much was at stake in the George W. Bush-AI Gore deadlock...
...Dunn also shows the Federalists taking the direct, Jerry Falwellesque approach of stating repeatedly that the Presidential race was between Jefferson and God himself...
...Obviously, democracy was a big part of the change...
...The first half of Jefferson's Second Revolution focuses on the way the Constitution, far from an immediate success, backfired in its early years...
...According to Bayard, the Federalists concluded it was "neither safe nor politic" to stand against "the current of public sentiment...
...Using Jefferson's biography and writings as their text, they especially targeted his Revolutionary War service, his personal life, his sympathy for the French Revolution, and his "deep commitment to religious tolerance" that had spurred the separation of church and state in Virginia...
...But disagreements over foreign policy, public finance and democracy itself tore the consensus Administration of George Washington apart and produced exactly what the Constitution was designed to prevent, a battle for power between national political parties...
...Beginning with the 2001 bestsellers John Adams by David McCullough and Founding Brothers by Joseph J. Ellis, each entry in the recent wave has tended to downgrade Jefferson in order to glamorize his ideological opponents among the Founders—particularly Adams and Hamilton...
...only a single page is devoted to a potentially more serious crisis developing in the rest of the country...
...Dunn quotes Delaware Federalist James A. Bayard's explanations for why he chose to stop casting Delaware's vote for Burr and break the deadlock: "The step was not taken until it was admitted on all hands that we must risk the Constitution and a civil war or take Mr...
...Jefferson believed this was "as real a revolution...
...The air will be rent with cries of distress, the soil will be soaked with blood, and the nation black with crimes...
...The Federalists liked to point out Jefferson's hypocrisy, Dunn observes, but it was not as if "the Federalists were proposing liberty and equality for all" when they denounced the mass of voting citizens as "rabble and refuse, 'dross and dregs.'" The "Revolution of 1800" took hold because both sides ultimately refrained from pursuing every legally possible measure to contest the outcome, precisely because they understood just how much was at stake...
...history...
...The occasion might have passed completely unnoticed by the general public if not for the unexpected reminder provided by the 2000 Electoral College crisis, a snafu worse than the one that nearly denied Jefferson the Presidency 200 years ago...
...The author concentrates on the machinations in and around Congress...
...No wonder he was "the man of choice of France...
...Astonishing, yes...
...the actual content of Jefferson's "second revolution" is left fairly vague...
...Still, Jefferson's Second Revolution is a tonic, coming as it does on the heels of a spate of books about the Founders that treats them as celebrities significant for who they were rather than what they accomplished...
...Jefferson's status as a slaveholding Southerner allows a touch of pious PC gilding to soften what are basically reactionary takedowns of American liberalism's patron saint...
...She explains the Founders' opposition to parties, but pretty much accepts it as given that the modern American form of party politics "was just how the system was supposed to work...
...But she stops short of confronting the social origins or implications of the divide she describes, and herself celebrates the exceptionalist story she sometimes questions...
...one day the parlor is in front, the next day in the rear of the building...
...Susan Dunn, a professor of humanities at Williams College, shows that underestimating the stakes was not one of the errors made by the Federalists and Democratic Republicans of Jefferson's day...
...She opens by quoting Federalist supporters of President John Adams and party leader Alexander Hamilton imagining the results of a Jefferson victory: "Murder, robbery, rape, adultery, and incest will be openly taught and practiced...
...Dunn pays appropriate attention to slavery, but rightly paints Jefferson as a flawed yet genuine avatar of democracy, religious tolerance and freedom of expression...
...The last third of the book is devoted to familiar incidents like the Louisiana Purchase and the Burr-Hamilton duel...
...Now there is a thought some modern American politicians might wish to ponder...
...No," she writes...
...Turning Jefferson's liberationist, egalitarian ideals against him to promote his competitors, who held no such ideals to contradict, also characterizes another trend in Founder Studies, the anti-Jefferson screeds exemplified by Garry Wills' Negro President...
...A party that seemed to openly consider itself an elite class, and had little use for active citizenparticipation, had been rejected...
...This may be the ultimate goal of a certain type of politician, but Adams and Hamilton put patriotic duty and policy goals ahead of victory at the polls...
Vol. 87 • September 2004 • No. 5
