Revolution or More of the Same?

The American Revolution of 1800

Daniel Sisson, 1974

This was originally a PhD dissertation, apparently for Douglass Adair, who Sisson said inspired his research. It began well and I was impressed enough after 30 pages to want a copy of this for my library. The reviewers almost unanimously hated it and the book did bog down pretty quickly, while at the same time not going deep enough into unpublished primary material. Most of Sisson’s primary quotes seemed to be lifted from secondary sources or from selections of his subjects’ published papers.

Even so, Sisson’s thesis was provocative. He challenged historians with finding the modern two party system too soon in post-Revolutionary America, insisting that this type of partisanship was emphatically NOT the goal of anyone in the 1790s. Instead, he built a definition of revolution based on Jefferson’s understanding of the classics.  Following the Gracchi brothers of the Roman Republic, Sisson said, Jefferson and his Republican associates built a “second city” revolutionary movement to take power away from the Federalists they believed had betrayed the spirit of ’76 by moving toward monarchy. 

Sisson quoted Jefferson’s claim that “The Revolution of 1800 was as real a revolution in the principles of our government as that of 1776 was in its form.” One of his reviewers pointed out that this quote came from a private letter and was taken out of context. Regardless, it might suggest Jefferson’s understanding of what he was doing in the 1790s. Sisson opened an interesting train of thought here. Why did the ’76 revolution apparently fail to produce the changes Jefferson had hoped for, requiring a second “revolution” in 1800? What did the 1790s teach Americans about the operation of democracy, in a world lacking the unanimity they may have expected? Did the Republicans think they were wiping out the monarchists and finishing the revolution, while at the same time they were showing Americans how to operate their democracy? Did Henry Adams undermine Jefferson’s own interpretation of his campaign and presidency? 

Sisson claimed “During the period of High Federalist ascendancy Jefferson noted again and again the Federalists’ lack of faith in the meaning of the first American Revolution.” There’s a wide range of ways to examine the real intentions of the diverse group that united to produce the revolution, and no reason to suppose that Jefferson’s interpretation of its “meaning” was the true or legitimate one. It succeeded because he rallied the people to it in 1800, but was he following or shaping public opinion?  Sisson also observed that Jefferson “adopted a posture of philosophical vagueness that allowed his opponents to read into his intentions a positive view of the future.”  Jefferson’s ability to clothe (disguise?) his program to create a mass movement for it is interesting, but isn’t precisely the idea of partisanship that Sisson was arguing against? Sisson mentioned Bernard Bailyn and Douglass Adair repeatedly; the best things I got out of this book may have been merely echoes of them and the references to their work.

Sisson portrayed John Adams’ firing of Pickering from his cabinet as his moment of clarity, when he realized the High Federalists had betrayed the revolution and “plunged a sword” into his own administration. It was interesting that he refused to throw Adams under the bus; but he needed to sustain his argument that the original revolution lived on in the minds of the founders, so how could Adams have betrayed it?  Even though this argument was weak, I came away from it with new interest in both Jefferson and Adams. 

Jefferson’s remark that “The same political parties which now agitate the U.S. have existed through all time,” pretty much destroyed Sisson’s argument that the politicians of 1790 were unaware of partisanship. His point that they abhorred the idea of parties and factions in their writing begged questions about the purposes of the writings he quotes. Could Jefferson and his contemporaries have desired a one-party state in the same way current politicians desire “bipartisanship”? As a code for “us getting our way and the other guys seeing the errors of their ways? Were the Republicans and Federalists REALLY scared it was going to come down to war again? Or were they using popular reaction to the French Revolution for political purposes? Maybe we don’t like to see the “founding fathers” using all these tawdry political devices to achieve what we consider our historic destiny?

To the extent that the standard histories see the 1790s as the beginning of a completely modern 2 party system, I think Sisson made a compelling counter-argument. He opened some space around (what he claimed is) the standard interpretation and stirred things up, as did Jefferson’s observation that the same parties have always existed. If this is truly the case, then what did the founders EXPECT to happen after they won? And if the binary, two-party, winner-take-all choice continually reproduces these poles, is this really the way to go? If the only choices are blue and red, then people will choose the pole they think is closest to their real color, even though it’s a poor match. Maybe the mistake is in mobilizing campaigns around these poles (or believing that’s what the founders were about), rather than changing the game so that everyone gets more of what they want. If Sisson’s point was that the founders thought they were doing that, then it was an interesting one.