Reviewed by Sarah J. Purcell | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 61.1

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Reviewed by Sarah J. Purcell | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 61.1 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

The Revolution of 1800: Democracy, Race, and the New Republic. Edited by James Horn, Jan Ellen Lewis , and Peter S. Onuf . Jeffersonian America. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002. Pp. xx, 431. $59.50 cloth, $22.50 paper.) Reviewed by Sarah J. Purcell , Grinnell College
The editors of this volume, based on papers presented at a December 2000 conference on "Thomas Jefferson and the Revolution of 1800," found themselves "grateful for one of those rare moments when historical and contemporary events converge, informing one another in a peculiarly dramatic way" (p. ix). Occurring in the midst of the bitterly disputed presidential election of 2000, the conference seemed more than a fitting commemoration of the similarly heated election of 1800. It is too bad that, for the most part, the reader of the resulting essays is left to draw her own conclusions about what 1800 and 2000 might have to do with one another. Instead, the clearer lesson of this volume concerns the current state of scholarship on the political history of the early republic. The Revolution of 1800 shows the work in this field to be incisive, thought provoking, and important, but also frustrating at times. Many of the individual essays in the book are excellent, yet the total effect is much like that of some conferences: one hears a lot of thought-provoking ideas in individual sessions but is left wanting someone to draw larger conclusions and to encourage participants to speak to one another's findings more directly.	1
The Revolution of 1800 is designed to showcase "the broadest possible interpretive framework for Jefferson's election" (p. xv). Divided into three sections, the essays address the question of "how 'revolutionary' was Jefferson's 'revolution of 1800?'" from almost every conceivable angle. Articles in part 1, "The Revolution of 1800," analyze the straightforward political history of Jefferson's election; those in part 2, "Jeffersonian America," take a broader social and cultural view; and those in part 3, "Revolutionary World," seek to put American political developments of 1800 in an international context. Interesting insights emerge from each section, but the overall thematic clarity of the book suffers, not because the book is too broad, but simply because no editorial voice guides the reader through the maze of approaches. Including a variety of approaches to the "revolution of 1800" does provide more insight than a volume that presents old-fashioned political history alone, but the editors need to help the readers see how and why this is the case.	2
In part 1, both traditional political history and the "new" political history are represented. James E. Lewis, Jr., writes about the extreme uncertainty engendered by the 1800 election, but his argument that the actors weighed all their political options so carefully precisely because they could not foresee the outcome of the election seems to add little to the interpretation put forward by James Roger Sharp in American Politics in the Early Republic (New Haven, 1993). Jack N. Rakove argues that the election of 1800 brought to fruition trends in party politics and constitutional thought from the previous decade and confirmed the politicized nature of the office of the presidency.	. . .

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