Who’s on First?

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The year Delaware made history.

May 16, 2011, Vol. 16, No. 33 • By JAMES M. BANNER JR.

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The Deadlocked Election of 1800
Jefferson, Burr, and the Union in the Balance
by James Roger Sharp
Kansas, 239 pp., $34.95

Aaron Burr, Thomas Jefferson

Getty / SuperStock

On my shelves stand six studies of the presidential election of 1800, two more than James Roger Sharp cites in this most recent and substantial of them. There may be more. Why so many? The election was, as Sharp writes, “one of the two great political and constitutional crises in our nation’s history” and, because of its cast of leading characters (Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr, and many others who fill the roster of the nation’s founders), among the most memorable. In addition, the election set the course of American development long afterwards, and we debate public affairs today in terms never entirely free of those of that era.

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