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You don't have to buy that judgment to agree that it was an important election, not least in setting the pattern for America's distinctive party politics to the present day. Whereas John Ferling's 2004 book Adams Vs. Jefferson: The Tumultuous Election of 1800 focused on the clashing political philosophies of Federalists and Republicans, Larson—while not neglecting that theme—gives us a thorough narrative of the entire campaign. Indeed, his book is the first to do so, and we are greatly in his debt for it.
Larson, who has a law degree as well as a Ph.D. in history and holds appointments both at the University of Georgia and at Pepperdine University, is an unusually wide-ranging scholar, best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning account of the Scopes Trial, Summer for the Gods. He's also capable of prodigious hard work in the archives, having read thousands of pages of contemporary newspaper coverage of the campaign in addition to other primary sources. The result is a fast-paced chronicle that gives us the flavor of events as they unfolded, in all their messy contingency.
And what a mess it was. If in certain respects the campaign of 1800 suggests a glory that has fled (compare the field of candidates for 2008 with Adams and Jefferson!), in other respects Larson's narrative is oddly reassuring. Here was a campaign full of egregious mud-slinging on both sides, high-minded rhetoric and wily maneuvering, irony and folly and moral complexity all in a tangle, very much like American politics in the first decade of the 21st century. And here was an election that issued in a deadlock more bizarre—and potentially more destabilizing to the young nation—than Americans witnessed two hundred years later, waiting to see if their next president would be George W. Bush or Al Gore.
For the indispensable details—in particular, the role of that perplexing figure, Aaron Burr—you'll have to read Larson's book yourself. (You won't be disappointed.) But I want to highlight one of the many themes interwoven in this campaign: the rhetoric—private as well as public—employed by members of the various factions to characterize those with whom they disagreed. After unprovoked French attacks on American merchant shipping, Adams—quite reasonably, it seems—felt that a U.S. Navy was urgently needed. Republicans disagreed, but Adams had his way, and in the "Quasi-War" of 1798-99, American ships engaged the French. Larson tells us that Jefferson privately denounced Adams' policy as "insane."
This introduces a motif that runs throughout Larson's chronicle. Hamilton's father-in-law, Philip Schuyler, described Jefferson as "pervaded with the mad French philosophy." (Others called Jefferson "a howling atheist.") After Adams dismissed his secretary of war, James McHenry (who had been a tool of Hamilton), McHenry wrote in a letter to his nephew that Adams "would speak in such a manner of certain men and things as to persuade one that he was actually insane." Adams, in turn, describing the High Federalists' fury when he sought peace negotiations with France, wrote that the "rage of the Hamilton faction upon that occasion appeared to me then, and has appeared to me ever since, an absolute delirium."
When Hamilton—convinced on the eve of the election that his behind-the-scenes undermining of Adams had been ineffective—decided to publish a letter (running to 54 pages!) which would make his dissatisfaction all too apparent, one of Hamilton's friends, treasury secretary Oliver Wolcott, advised him against it: "There was no need to detail Adams's erratic character in a public letter, Wolcott added, because 'the people believe that their president is crazy.'"
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