THE SECOND AMERICAN REVOLUTION

A historian reexamines the legacy of Thomas Jefferson in this second installment of a four-part series.

“Like the Wizard of Oz,” writes author Thompson, Jefferson “concealed himself beyond a veil, which prevented all but a diligent few from noticing the levers he was constantly pulling.” And while many contemporary historians have emphasized Jefferson’s failings in his private life and his hypocritical stances on freedom as one engaged in the trafficking of enslaved people, Thompson’s critique is of an entirely different sort. Many Jefferson defenders, he suggests, have been duped by a “progressive fog” that characterized the 20th-century’s liberal-consensus historiography, which idealized Jefferson as the personification of democracy. To Thompson, Jefferson, along with his partner, James Madison, actually “undermined the fragile new union of states” as they “purposefully divided the American people and subverted their common good.” Rather than ushering in a new era of democracy, as many historians have claimed, the election of 1800 in which Jefferson’s Democratic-Republican Party swept into power gave America a partisan system that “weaponized the nation’s enlightened new political system” by dividing its citizens into competing partisan factions. This so-called “Second American Revolution,” per Thompson, instituted a new partisan political system in which parties’ aims were focused on seizing “control of the nation’s government” rather than pursuing common good.

The book, comprising three parts, begins with a contextual overview of the Constitution and early political debates on the nature of the nascent American Republic. Part 2 examines the rise of Jefferson’s faction that culminated in the “Revolution of 1800.” Even prior to his ascendance to the presidency, the book argues, Jefferson led a “harebrained coup d’état” as vice president as he actively sabotaged and undermined President John Adams (his rival from the Federalist Party). The book’s final section examines Jefferson’s presidency, including his hostility toward Aaron Burr and his lasting legacy of partisan division. Erudite yet accessible, the book makes a convincing case against Jefferson that draws on both a rich body of historical literature and primary source material. Its grounding in solid research is reflected in the extensive bibliography and the 500-plus footnotes. Part of a series that examines how America’s “bureaucracy formed and grew,” this book’s critiques of an expansive federal government “that is now destroying the nation” constitute an important subtext. Jefferson’s “natural aristoi,” the book argues, are the forbearers of later technocrats who rose to power during the New Deal. With his presentist critique of American bureaucratization at the core of his interpretative framework, it’s curious that Thompson attacks other historians for distorting history through contemporary ideological frameworks. Many readers may also bristle at the book’s proposal to correct “ideological imbalances in the material they present” by calculating “minute to minute” historical commentary disseminated through public airwaves. It similarly calls for the creation of a review board tasked with ensuring that public colleges and universities “maintain a similarity neutral ideological value.” This idea is particularly striking given the work’s disdain for government bureaucracies. But, if there is any lesson to be learned from Thomas Jefferson, it is that humanity is rife with paradox and self-contradiction.

A well-researched reevaluation of Jefferson undermined by its ideological take on contemporary politics.