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Essay on Adams vs. Jefferson: The Tumultuous Election of 1800
To begin with, Ferling gives us interesting biographical sketches of the main players, taking them up to about 1789. As we know that the climax comes with the election of 1800, we can enjoy all the details and incidents of the previous years as contributing to the final event, and taking significance from that. This is a story, in other words, not just a recitation of historical fact. Moreover, it is gracefully written for a lay audience, with notes tucked at the end of the book. It is written as part of the series Pivotal Moments in American History. As that name suggests, it is not discursive, but focused. It accomplishes its object of illuminating one of those important turning points in our history fully, with interest, but with economy, too.
This book is subtitled, "The Tumultuous Election of 1800," but the main title's resemblance to a boxing card, "Adams vs. Jefferson," is more appropriate. Ferling demonstrates that presidential elections of the past could be just as mean, vicious, and full of mud slinging as anything we've seen in our more contemporary presidential campaigns. Maybe more contentious, especially in the race between President John Adams and his contender Thomas Jefferson. Especially, again, since Jefferson was Adams' vice president and this is the race, too, that later changed the way we elect presidents and vice presidents.
Jefferson and Adams had been good friends, once, even serving on the same committee 24 years earlier to draft the Declaration of Independence. But following the Revolution, the Constitutional Convention, and the establishment of the first constitutional government, Adams and Jefferson drifted apart and then dramatically split as the government split into the fledgling concepts of what became our two-party political system. Adams, as President George Washington's vice president, became an administrative federalist, wanting centralized power in the national government, along with Alexander Hamilton and many others in Washington's administration.......
