"Carefully researched and engagingly written, Pasley’s volume is the definitive work on this underappreciated election."—Journal of Interdisciplinary History
"A superb, important book. Likely to become the definitive study of the 1796 election."—Journal of American History
"Presents a compelling and forward-moving narrative."—Register of the Kentucky Historical Society
"The Presidential election of 1796, memorialized in history tomes for the bitter divisions the campaign mirrored among citizens in the fledgling Republic, receives innovative and refreshing analytical consideration in this eminently readable and clever account of the Adams-Jefferson contest."—Political Science Quarterly
“Vivid and precise, compelling and even funny, this is political history as it needs to be written, as its best practitioners are writing it today. The election year narrative may never be the same—just better for Pasley’s patient unpacking of where it all began. Neither students nor fans of the presidency, of democracy, or of the founding should miss it.”—David Waldstreicher, author of Slavery’s Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification and Runaway America: Benjamin Franklin, Slavery, and the American Revolution
“Rich in lively characters, fiery rhetoric, dark intrigue, and cunning spin, the presidential election of 1796 helped to create American partisan politics on a national scale. With wry humor and a keen sense of political reality, both past and present, Pasley offers the closest and best examination of our Founders as politicians who slyly practiced what they piously preached against.”—Alan Taylor, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of William Cooper’s Town
“Few historians tell a good political story better than Jeffrey Pasley. Here he provides a wonderful account of the presidential election of 1796, which finally gets the full attention it deserves. Pasley shows how much political innovation was already occurring across the country, and how quickly politics became an active concern of citizens and their outspoken press. This first contested presidential election was no mere prequel to the dramatic contest of 1800. It was instead the critical experiment upon which Federalists and Republicans built four years later.”—Jack Rakove, author of Revolutionaries: A New History of the Invention of America
“Jeffrey Pasley, one of America’s premier students of popular politics, has written a superb study of a crucial but oft-neglected election. Filled with imaginative research and brilliant vignettes involving the great and not-so-great, The First Presidential Contest, is a major study of one of the landmarks in the early history of democracy in the United States.”—Sean Wilentz, author of The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln
“Thoroughly researched, vividly written, and persuasively argued, Pasley’s book explores critically how the framers’ fantasy of ‘Patriot Kings’ mysteriously rising to the presidency quickly transformed into ‘local notables’ attempting to control presidential elections in their separate states. Anyone interested in understanding the inevitable genesis of political parties, the rise of public opinion as a check on government, and the first stirrings of the slow transformation from a Republic to a Democracy will find this book enormously helpful.”—Richard K. Matthews, author of The Radical Politics of Thomas Jefferson
Pasley (history, Univ. of Missouri; The Tyranny of Printers) presents new analysis of the first contested U.S. presidential election, largely neglected by recent historians and overshadowed by that of 1800. He asserts that incipient regional lineups (New England vs. the South, often mediated by New York) as well as ideological and partisan patterns marked the competition between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson rather than disputes between the men themselves. Readers learn that the electoral college was a compromise rather than a deliberate design to prevent partisan maneuvering. Pasley's is a character-driven narrative, amply using primary sources from the founders as well as from lesser-known congressmen, local luminaries, and, perhaps most important, newspaper editors of the time, who served as independent historical agents rather than as passive mouthpieces. He also draws on the insights of other professional historians. The author's enterprising employment of speeches, celebrations, parades, and other popular cultural manifestations helps to focus on the public images of the 1796 candidates devised by both supporters and opponents, rather than on the noncampaigning central figures themselves. VERDICT This monograph will appeal to both academicians and serious general readers of print and political history of the post-Colonial, early national period.—Frederick J. Augustyn Jr., Lib. of Congress, Washington, DC
