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52 of 52 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
As Close to a Page-Turner as History Gets, November 21, 2000
This review is from: America Afire: Jefferson, Adams, and the Revolutionary Election of 1800 (Hardcover)
This is a wonderful book. It isn't a "scholarly tome", but it is reliable. The author draws on many secondary sources (scholarly tomes) to weave together this surprising story. Everybody should know this stuff. Nobody does. For example, how many Americans think that the Constitution established a "democracy?" It did not. The framers were much divided about the concept, and most were initially distrustful of it. The horrors of the French Revolution didn't help matters. American democracy emerged during the decade prior to the 1800 election as a political movement that morphed into a political party. And it wasn't even a coherent political movement. It was as much about personalities as about principles. How many Americans know that the bitter partisan politics of our own day, which culminated in the remarkable election of 2000, has been ever with us? It has. If anything, the politics of 1800 were more bilious and hateful than today's. As to that, how many Americans know that our "Founding Fathers" pretty much despised each other? They did. Adams and Washington against Jefferson and Madison. Adams was bad-tempered, jealous, and resentful. He was also brilliant, shrewd and as indispensible in his own less than conspicuous way as Washington was very publicly. Washington and Adams were personally appalled by Ben Franklin, whom they regarded as an atheist and a womanizer (which he was), and everybody hated Hamilton. Of course Hamilton was a hard man to love. Perhaps the most effectively influential of all the Founders, he had nothing but contempt for democracy, but practically invented American capitalism and almost single-handedly set the U.S. on course to its future status as international super-power. Everybody knows that Jefferson wrote "all men are created equal" in the Declaration of Independence, but what most people don't know is that almost nobody, including Jefferson, actually believed this. Still, during the 1790's a political coalition, featuring James Madison, James Monroe, and Charles Pinkney (not to be confused with Charles Cotesworth Pinkney, the former's first cousin and an avid Federalist) formed around this remarkable idea. These early democrats called themselves Republicans, Republican-Democrats and, later, just Democrats. Their willingness to ride on what Jefferson called "the boistrous sea of liberty" and what we might less colorfully call "negative" campaigning probably saved the nation from, at the very least, reverting back to another British banana republic. Their opponents, the "Federalists", on the other hand, probably saved the nation from becoming another bloodbath like France before Napoleon. The partisan clash of great men who were also ruthless politicians is the story of this book. This book portrays these events, and the men who shaped them, in a swift-paced and fascinating narrative. I highly recommend it.
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34 of 34 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
History Comes Alive in Weisberger's Hands, November 27, 2000
This review is from: America Afire: Jefferson, Adams, and the Revolutionary Election of 1800 (Hardcover)
Here's the perfect book for this election season, and one which sets our minds at ease knowing this wasn't the only closely contested election in American history. More than that, however, is the brilliant portrait Weisberger paints of our Founding Fathers. While they came together in Philadelphia to proclaim independence, they would come together later in Philadelphia to participate in political machinations against each other concerning the future direction of the young republic. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson would suffer a rupture in their friendship that would last over ten years, not only over the course the Adams presidency took, but the mud that was slung in the campaign of 1800. The capper to all this, and it should come as no surprise, was the role of the media (newspapers) in exploiting and encouraging the slander, the accusations and the tension between the Federalists of Adams and the Republicans of Jefferson. The media of today has nothing on the writers of the late Eighteenth Century who made absolutely no pretense about where their loyalties were. Weisberger makes it into a fascinating backdrop to the election, showing the passion and the tenor of the times. As to the principals of 1796 and 1800, Adams is portrayed as a brilliant man, caught in the middle between England and France, while trying to steer America on a neutral course. All the while in the background is the figure of Alexander Hamilton, pulling strings to replace Adams with a friendlier Federalist candidate and almost costing Adams the 1796 election as a result. Jefferson comes across as a consummate politican, accepting the Vice-Presidency in 1796 with a hostile Adams as President, waiting his chance in 1800 when he saw the time as being right. Adams will suffer through numerous foreign policy errors concerning France, some of his making and others the result of his Republican opponents. The Republican newspapers would cause Adams to make the biggest blunder of his Presidency over the opposition of such Federalists as John Marshall, The Alien and Sedition Acts of 1898, ostensibly designed to deport hostile foreign-born residents (mostly French) who were wont to side the Republicans and to make it a crime to criticize the Government of the United States. It was a mistake that would have disastrous consequences for him in the next election. And yet, all of this wonderful history could turn to the dullest lead in the wrong hands. Weisberger takes the facts of America's early years and makes them come alive for the reader. By employing a clear, concise style that eschews both bombast and the tendency to lose the narrative in an ocean of information, Weisberger keeps us on the edge of our seats throughout the book, even though we already know how it comes out.
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26 of 26 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A well written account of America's early political history, January 30, 2001
This review is from: America Afire: Jefferson, Adams, and the Revolutionary Election of 1800 (Hardcover)
The subtitle of "America Afire" is somewhat misleading. While it purports to be about "Jefferson, Adams, and the Revolutionary Election of 1800," not until over two-thirds of the narrative have passed does author Bernard Weisberger begin to discuss the election itself and then for only one chapter. The book is really a concise political history of the United States from the ratification of the Constitution through the end of Jefferson's first term as President. The prose is lively and highly readable. And Weisberger is correct in his assertion that the election of 1800, in which a President who was denied re-election voluntarily relenquished power for the first time, was a monumental if often overlooked event in the early history of the nation. The book actually reads like a series of magazine articles with each chapter covering a separate event. This may reflect Weisberger's longtime involvement as a contributing editor for "American Heritage" magazine. At just over 300 pages of narrative, "America Afire" reads like the work of Stephen Ambrose in the way it brings history alive for those who are not academic scholars.
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