There are countless books on Thomas Jefferson, and yet his presidency remains understudied. This is because Jefferson was perhaps our most philosophic president and yet one of our most partisan ones. As the founder and figurehead of the first political party, Jefferson embodied a principle: a commitment to limited government organized by the strict reading of a written constitution. This principle preferred consent over unlimited power, and yet Jefferson understood that all constitutions needed an executive who would have to act outside the constitution when required by emergencies or even opportunities. Rather than undermining the constitution, these actions by the executive would in fact strengthen it by creating the conditions by which consent would be possible. Jefferson’s executive would create a “union of sentiment” by harnessing public opinion. This was itself a partisan idea, because the question of the legitimacy of public opinion was one of the most important political questions of the 1790s and would divide the parties through the nineteenth century. It was also an act of founding in its own right: before that public opinion could be harnessed, it would have to be created. Unlike his predecessors, then, Jefferson saw the presidency as a chance to embody public opinion.

In Informing a Nation: The Newspaper Presidency of Thomas Jefferson, Mel Laracey offers a new way to see just how Jefferson managed this partisan and philosophic enterprise. Laracey focuses on Jefferson’s relationship with the National Intelligencer and National Advisor, a Washington, DC, newspaper that was published “three days a week for all eight years of his presidency and circulated throughout the country” (p. 2). In its first issue published on October 31, 1800, editor Samuel Smith explained, “The design of the National Intelligencer is to diffuse correct information throughout the whole extent of the union” (p. 8). By correct information Smith explained that he meant “unperverted facts and correct political ideas” (p. 8). This was all partisan, of course, because the paper was meant to be a way for “Jefferson, Madison, and their Republican allies” to place information in it and thus send it throughout the country so that other Republicans would know the position of the presidential administration.

To his credit, Laracey does not reach for the low-hanging fruit here by reflecting on comparisons to the partisan nature of claims of “misinformation” and “fake news” so common in our own environment of partisan media. Instead, Laracey reminds us that newspapers were a practical way that elites in the period could advance the Enlightenment project of educating the public. Universities took time to educate their students and would serve a small number of people; in contrast, newspapers could spread ideas quickly and their impact could be broad (pp. 6–7). For democracy to work, Enlightenment would have to be taken to the streets.

Laracey’s book will prove to be an important resource to scholars like me who are trying to understand the world of Thomas Jefferson by tracing the connection—or the lack of it— between his thoughts and his actions. By my count, the book considers six important events: the election of 1800, Jefferson’s appointment and removal policies, judicial review and Marbury v. Madison, the impeachment of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase, the Louisiana Purchase, and the election of 1804. The central contribution of the book is that it places the arguments published in the National Intelligencer into the current scholarly understanding of these events in Jefferson’s presidency. For anyone who has thought a great deal about each of these events—or rather has thought a great deal about what Jefferson thought about these events—this book will provide new material simply by showing what the National Intelligencer was saying at the time. Although Laracey’s command of the literature is uneven at times, he appropriately tries to place his findings in the context of the larger literature on Jefferson’s presidency.

There is much to be learned here. For example, scholars have long wrestled over the question whether Jefferson in the end wanted the Senate to convict and remove Justice Samuel Chase from the Supreme Court. Although it is clear that Jefferson was an enthusiastic supporter of impeachment in the beginning, his position grew murkier during the Senate trial. Some scholars have speculated that his feud with impeachment manager John Randolph or perhaps his principled concern that Randolph’s case for impeachment was too broad gave Jefferson pause in the end. Laracey concludes that this scholarly position is wrong, because the newspaper, which was Jefferson’s “mouthpiece,” remained focused throughout the trial on removing Chase.

But the running assumption that the newspaper was Jefferson’s mouthpiece is more assertion than demonstration. As the example of John Randolph shows, Jefferson had his disagreements with those in his coalition. These disagreements were over policy (who gets what?) and principle (how strictly must we interpret the Constitution?), and Jefferson’s correspondence is filled with negotiations over the one and admonitions over the other. If the National Intelligencer can indeed be read as the extension of Thomas Jefferson, then that would make reading Jefferson more accessible than it is today. It would also be in character, because Jefferson the partisan famously made others do his dirty work. But that would require testing the Intelligencer against known debates within Jefferson’s party and especially within his inner circle, and Laracey’s book does not do that. The better starting point would be to assume that the Intelligencer speaks for Smith, not Jefferson, and then to determine the location of Smith’s Intelligencer within the famous triad of Jefferson, Madison, and Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin.

This limitation notwithstanding, Informing a Nation will no doubt prove valuable for students of the period. It includes several important corrections of the historical record. For example, Laracey shows that someone in the National Intelligencer argued that the election crisis of 1800 should be settled by an appeal to public opinion, presumably a new constitutional convention, and other writers threatened chaos if the House chose someone—perhaps John Marshall—other than Jefferson or Aaron Burr (pp. 49–63). Likewise, Laracey finds evidence that Jefferson’s decision to submit his annual messages in writing rather than in person was defended on grounds of practicality, expediency, and clarity, rather than deference to a constitutional norm. Ironically, Federalists argued that, in fact, Jefferson was out of line with the Constitution because he was illegitimately shielding himself from congressional oversight (pp. 90–95). Further, Laracey reveals that, contrary to the standard accounts, Justice Chase actually mounted a vigorous defense of himself in an appeal published in the National Intelligencer in April 1804, after being refused an opportunity in the House to make that case in person (pp. 139–141). All these are useful corrections to the record, and scholars should take note.