| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

John Ferling. Adams vs. Jefferson: The Tumultuous Election of 1800. (Pivotal Moments in American History.) New York: Oxford University Press. 2004. Pp. xx, 260. $26.00.
In this volume in the "Pivotal Moments in American History" series, John Ferling returns to a subject he has treated before, although never in such detail. Readers of his skillfully crafted biography of John Adams (1992) and fluent accounts of the American Revolution and the early republic will expect from him what they will find in this account of the election of 1800: clear exposition, careful scholarship, and a middle of the road approach to the big questions. What they will not find is skepticism about the importance of the events described.	1
Much of the book is devoted to setting up the deeper context of the election. Ferling adopts a sort of Plutarchian, parallel lives approach, giving us biographies of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson that take the two through the 1790s to the eve of the election. The narrative, which has few if any surprises, thickens when Ferling reaches the decade before the election, detailing the political divisions that began to emerge in 1790 and grew apace thereafter. The election of 1796, in many ways a prelude to what happened four years later, gets special attention, and while Ferling does not deal with the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions in as much detail as one would like, he does make clear the mounting Republican anxiety as the Federalists seemingly led the nation in the wrong direction. Thus, Ferling takes the first 134 pages of his text to get to the election itself, which is then dispatched in some seventy pages (there is also a brief epilogue).	. . .

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