The Open Question

IS Thomas Jefferson finally getting his comeuppance? Forrest McDonald, reviewing Conor Cruise O’Brien’s The Long Affair [NR, Nov. 25], seems to think so. The third President was a fellow-traveler of the French Revolution, and a racist. Besides, there is the story of Sally Hemings—only alluded to by McDonald, but recounted by O’Brien. After Merchant and Ivory’s Jefferson in Paris, Jefferson and his putative slave mistress have become the most famous interracial couple in America, next to O.J. and Nicole. The rural vote in the election of 1800 is finally coming in.

Are the winners overplaying their hand? First, some context. The 1790s have been called the Age of Passion—an era of intense political struggle, exacerbated in America by the imported passions of revolutionary Europe. Jefferson wasn’t the only American who caught the bug. Alexander Hamilton was not above using the language of religion to castigate enemies. “You ought to spurn from you,” he wrote in 1795, “. . . the fatal heresy of a close alliance with France.” Other Federalists were far more extreme. Federalist clerics preached the Masonic conspiracy theories that decorate the thought of Pat Robertson today. Some Federalist politicians schemed to postpone the election of 1800 or throw it to Aaron Burr; when that failed, they plotted secession.

About the Author

Richard Brookhiser

Historian Richard Brookhiser is a senior editor of National Review and a senior fellow at the National Review Institute.

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IS Thomas Jefferson finally getting his comeuppance? Forrest McDonald, reviewing Conor Cruise O’Brien’s The Long Affair [NR, Nov. 25], seems to think so. The third President was a fellow-traveler of the French Revolution, and a racist. Besides, there is the story of Sally Hemings—only alluded to by McDonald, but recounted by O’Brien. After Merchant and Ivory’s Jefferson in Paris, Jefferson and his putative slave mistress have become the most famous interracial couple in America, next to O.J. and Nicole. The rural vote in the election of 1800 is finally coming in.

Are the winners overplaying their hand? First, some context. The 1790s have been called the Age of Passion—an era of intense political struggle, exacerbated in America by the imported passions of revolutionary Europe. Jefferson wasn’t the only American who caught the bug. Alexander Hamilton was not above using the language of religion to castigate enemies. “You ought to spurn from you,” he wrote in 1795, “. . . the fatal heresy of a close alliance with France.” Other Federalists were far more extreme. Federalist clerics preached the Masonic conspiracy theories that decorate the thought of Pat Robertson today. Some Federalist politicians schemed to postpone the election of 1800 or throw it to Aaron Burr; when that failed, they plotted secession.