In 1819 Thomas Jefferson called his ascent to the presidency the “revolution of 1800.” Historians have been quarreling ever since over Jefferson's self-aggrandizing characterization. If this was a “revolution,” what exactly changed? Skeptics emphasize continuities: if the new Republican administration eschewed “energetic” initiatives at home and abroad, it did not dismantle the fiscal-military state that the Federalists had constructed. Certainly anxious Federalists had predicted a disastrous descent into chaos with Jefferson's election, but their exaggerated fears only underscored the peaceful transfer of power: perhaps partisan divisions did not jeopardize the new nation's experiment in republican government after all. James Roger Sharp's important new book challenges this complacent, generally accepted interpretation. The election of 1800, he writes, was “one of the two most critical elections in American history,” second in significance only to 1860, when Abraham Lincoln's victory led to the collapse of the union. The danger in 1800 was that Federalist machinations would deny Jefferson the presidency, thus unleashing “the potential for violence, secession, and armed conflict” (xii). If the union did not collapse, it very easily could have done so.

Historians’ interpretations turn on periodization. Sharp focuses narrowly on the election of 1800—actually a series of elections over an extended period for state legislators and, in five states, for presidential electors—and the subsequent deadlock in the Federalist-controlled Sixth Congress where representatives, voting by states, ultimately broke the tie between the two leading candidates, Jefferson and Aaron Burr, each recipient of 73 votes in the Electoral College. Such a focus necessarily emphasizes contingencies, drawing attention to alternative outcomes as key actors understood them and thus to the very real possibility that the federal Constitution would cease to function and the union it had created—and clearly had not perfected—would disintegrate. From this perspective, the continuities that resolution of the election crisis made possible themselves look “revolutionary.” Skeptics take the longer view, arguing that a peaceful transfer of power was inevitable: surely good Americans, regardless of partisan hysteria, would not betray their common Revolutionary heritage or glorious future prospects? But history happens in particular, contingent moments, not according to the retrospective logic that myth-making historians—and political scientists—find so appealing. “That the stalemate was resolved peacefully,” Sharp rightly concludes, “does not mean that it did not have the real potential for violence and the possible disintegration of the Union” (4). The protagonists were well aware that their responses to the crisis would determine the future. The Framers called the Constitution a “miracle,” recognizing a wide array of frighteningly plausible outcomes; Jefferson said much the same thing about his own election. The constitutional “clock” had “run down,” he told Joseph Priestley, but the “mighty wave of public opinion” that finally, belatedly swept Jefferson into office had wound the Constitution up again, giving it new life (Merrill Peterson, Thomas Jefferson: Writings [Literary Classics of the US, 1984], 1086).

The “Revolution of 1800” story is Jefferson's, of course, and deserves to be treated with some skepticism. Sharp is at his best when showing how quarreling Federalists wrote the script for the election crisis. Jefferson could imagine that the “mighty wave” had given him a mandate precisely because he and his coadjutors had done so little to bring on the electoral impasse or then to resolve it. During the “Quasi-War” with France (1798–1800), public opinion was in fact moving in the other direction. Federalists exploited war fever to gain solid control of the Sixth Congress, and despite the Adams administration's misguided attempts to muzzle the Republican opposition with the Alien and Sedition Acts and levy unpopular new taxes to support a military buildup—and despite the president's betrayal of Alexander Hamilton and fellow warmongers in his party when he negotiated peace with France—the Federalists nonetheless had very good chances in the 1800 presidential canvass. The closeness in the Electoral College vote—with Jefferson and Burr tallying 73 each, Adams 65, and Charles Cotesworth Pinckney 64—was indicative of a broadly equal division in the electorate. Making good use of new voting data assembled by Philip J. Lampi at the American Antiquarian Society, Sharp shows how well Federalists did in 1800, despite their internal bloodletting and unpopular policies and despite the supposed advantage Republicans enjoyed in their popular, protodemocratic appeals to voters: the combined returns for state, congressional, and presidential elections gave Federalists a 52 percent to 48 percent advantage (150,778 to 138,685 votes) (128).

Republican passivity in the election crisis was tactically sound. The effort to mobilize state resistance to administration war measures in the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions had apparently fizzled, leaving Federalists with the initiative. And when the rift between Hamilton and Adams went public, Republicans recognized that their best hopes lay in their opponents’ penchant for self-destruction. Federalists’ flirtation with Burr during the electoral impasse demolished their future prospects—and in doing so, justified Jefferson's hyperbole, for it was the persistence of the close, competitive balance between Federalists and Republicans with their “exclusionary, self-righteous views of themselves” and their “countervailing, competing, and antithetical political philosophies” that threatened the future of the republic (58, 17). In early 1801, Burr came to embody that danger: both parties saw him as “the instrument through which they might be able to retain or gain power” testified to their desperation (165). Burr did not publicly renounce the presidency, despite private assurances to fellow Republicans, making him available for a Federalist coup. Though Burr and the Federalists did not consummate this unholy alliance, the perception that they had even contemplated “stealing” the election by doing so proved disastrous. The politically astute New Yorker, the mastermind of the Republican victory in New York City elections for the state legislature that made Jefferson's election possible, destroyed himself politically. Jefferson may have exaggerated the rapid descent of the Federalists, but Republicans would now mobilize effectively in New England, building on strength in the middle states and consolidating their position as the national governing party.

Sharp's study succeeds brilliantly in reconstructing the great crisis of the union that the deadlocked election of 1800 precipitated. He is less successful in integrating the story of that crisis into longer-term developments. As he steps back from the election itself, the familiar old story of democratization comes into view. “The 1800 election,” he concludes, “was a pivotal milestone in the process of transforming national politics from deferential, elitist, and narrowly based to what would eventually become a more democratic, mass-based, two-party system.” In ideological terms, this was the transition from the “anti-party, civic humanist” ethos of “classical republicanism” to modern American democracy (175). Somewhat confusingly, however, the two national parties that vied for supremacy in 1800, despite their deep philosophical differences, were both “classical republican,” though Republicans certainly gestured toward a democratic future. Sharp recognizes that the related democratization and republicanism-to-liberalism narratives do not have much to do with the compelling story he tells here. His story focuses on the survival of the federal union. Without that union there would be no national history, and therefore no “democracy in America,” Tocqueville to the contrary notwithstanding.