The Books: “Adams Vs. Jefferson: The Tumultuous Election of 1800″ (John Ferling)

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Next book in my American history section is Adams vs. Jefferson: The Tumultuous Election of 1800 (Pivotal Moments in American History) by John Ferling

So whoo-hoo American Revolution, right? I’ll be studying it forever – it’s an endless topic, I love it all. But the election of 1800 … John Adams the incumbent, with Thomas Jefferson “campaigning” (ahem – sitting on his hilltop in Virginia pretending he wasn’t campaigning – oh no, politics are disgusting – who, me? I’m just a farmer … Move along without me …) is where things REALLY get interesting. I think it’s so funny and kind of cute how some people think politcs are played so DIRTY now … that in one glorious time in the past, campaigns weren’t so ugly and so personal. I really wonder what glorious time in the past these people are referring to. They have no idea what they are talking about, frankly. The election of 1800 has to be one of the dirtiest elections (in terms of how both candidates played it) EVER in the history of our country. And it was the THIRD ELECTION. Mkay? Politcs have ALWAYS been personal. The media has ALWAYS been biased. Yay for you if you want to live in some fantasy utopia world where things USED to be great and NOW they suck – but it’s not true.

I think the election of 1800 is one of the most pivotal moments in our nation’s history – up there with the American Revolution and the Civil War. Well, and also – George Washington “stepping down” from the Presidency – with a peaceful handover of power to the next guy coming in. I think THAT is one of the most important moments in our collective history as well. John Adams became the second President. And nobody on the opposing side was lined up against the wall and shot. Nobody was run out of town on a rail. An unprecedented event in human history. But then we come to the election of 1800 – and the real birth of party politics in this country. I wrote a couple of posts about it, if you’re interested. Here’s one. Here’s another one.

It was exciting for me because last year a book came out which focused ONLY on the election of 1800 – which was very exciting, because normally that election is just folded into a larger story – part of John Adams’ long life-story, or told as part of the life story of Thomas Jefferson – but Ferling’s book honed in on that one event. (There was another book that came out at around the same time – by Susan Dunn – and I read that as well, but I don’t think she’s a good writer. Ferling is much better, although he does use the word “Indeed” too much. Just stop with the “Indeed”. The same could be said of Glenn Reynolds. Enough. Find another word. Otherwise: YAWN.)

Here’s an excerpt about the clash between Jefferson and Hamilton.

From Adams vs. Jefferson: The Tumultuous Election of 1800 (Pivotal Moments in American History) by John Ferling

Hamilton caused Jefferson the greatest concern. By late 1790 Jefferson suspected a concurrence of Hamiltonianism and royalism. Madison surely had filled him in on what he had gleaned of Hamilton’s private thinking during the Nationalist battles in the 1780s, including a recapitulation of a remarkably unabashed pro-monarchist speech that the New Yorker had given at the Constitutional Convention. In addition, Jefferson leanred some things at first hand, ahving personally heard Hamilton extol the merits of the British system. Jefferson was coming to believe that the “ultimate object” of Hamilton and his followers was to “prepare the way for a change, from the present republican form of government, to that of a monarchy, of which the English constitution is to be the model.” Indeed, he had grown certain that the Hamiltonians were “panting after … [and] itching for crowns, coronets and mitres,” and that the economic revolution that the Treasury Secretary envisioned was part and parcel of a transformation to the British way of things. Jefferson saw too that funding had unleashed a speculative craze in New York and other commercial hubs. A hot mass of feelings, Jefferson exclaimed that America was being transformed into a “gaming table”. Already, he contended, the new national government was imperiled by the financial mania. A “corrupt squadron of paper dealers,” whom he labeled as “stockjobbers” driven solely by pecuniary interests, had surfaced within Congress, and the day was coming when they and their kind would have the resources to sway a congressional majority. Furthermore, Jefferson cautioned, their gamester ethic would corrode the traditional frugality and industry that had defined the American character. Jefferson believed Hamilton and his compatriots were taking America for a ride along the same sordid path that adulterated Europe had traveled. During 1790 the notion took shape in Jefferson’s mind that unless Hamilton was stopped, America would someday be dominated by huge financial institutions. Commercial avarice would dominate the national mores, and ever larger chunks of the American population would become the propertyless denizens of vast, squalid cities. This, Jefferson believed to the very marrow of his bones, was no way for free people to live. Indeed, those who lived in such a checkered society would not be free, and as they lost their independence, republicanism would be relegated to the scrap heap of the past.

Jefferson never wavered in his judgment of Hamiltonianism. The conclusions that he reached in 1790 presaged the decade of fiery partisanship that lay ahead, for Jefferson saw his disagreement with Hamilton not merely as a difference between men or a clash over policy but as a deep ideological rift. This was a view with which Hamilton concurred. Indeed, it was this sense of a titanic struggle between rival ideologies that in large measure brought to the politics of the 1790s a passion only occasionally equalled in America’s political history. What loomed, virtually all activists understood, was a political war to shape the American future, possibly for all time, as it was widely presumed that what was put in place in the first days of the new Republica would not be easily changed by subsequent generations. Perhaps too, as the historians Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick theorized, the politics of the 1790s took on a supercharged quality because those who participated were revolutionaries. It was not just that Hamilton, Jefferson, Madison, and those in Congress and the state governments had played active roles in the American Revolution. They had a revolutionary mentality. Not only were they audacious, they were visionaries. They beheld an American vista for which they had been willing to die after 1775. For them, the politics of the 1790s was about the ultimate realization of their often grandiose dreams, and it meant that the politics battles of the decade were almost literally fought on a battlefield.