The April 14, 2008 issue of The New Yorker has a review by Jill Lepore of a pile of books on religion and politics in US history, especially having to do with the founding constitutional separation of church and state. The books are:

• Forrest Church, So Help Me God: The Founding Fathers and the First Great Battle Over Church and State (Harcourt)
• Frank Lambert, Religion in American Politics: A Short History (Princeton University Press)
• Martha Nussbaum, Liberty of Conscience: In Defense of America's Tradition of Religious Equality (Basic Books)
• Steven Waldman, Founding Faith: Providence, Politics, and the Birth of Religious Freedom in America (Random House)
• Garry Wills, Head and Heart: American Christianities (Penguin Books)

Lambert's book only makes a brief appearance before Lepore settles into her subtitle, "Did the Founders want us to be faithful to their faith?" (p. 73):

It's probably impossible to discover precisely what the Founders believed about God, Jesus, sin, the Bible, churches, and Hell. They changed their minds and gave different accounts to different people: Franklin said one thing to his sister Jane, and another thing to David Hume; Washington was a vestryman at his church, but, as he lay slowly dying, he never called for a clergyman. This can make them look like hypocrites, but that's unfair. THey approached religion in more or less the same way that they approached everything else that interested them: Franklin invented his own; Washington proved diplomatic; Adams grumbled about it; Jefferson could not stop tinkering with it; and Madison defended, as a natural right, the free exercise of it.

Referring to Waldman, Church, Nussbaum, and Wills ("very different books . . . but each, striving for evenhandedness, wants to save us from the errors of partisans and zealots") (pp. 73-74):

The four books achieve a kind of consensus in four related lines of argument. First, the Unitd States was founded neither as a Christian nation nor as a secular one. Second, by the standards of Evangelicals of both their day and ours, Franklin, Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Madison were not Christians; they wrestled, often profoundly, with religious questions, but, as Church points out, "they all doubted the divinity of Christ." Third, the disestablishment of religion is itself responsible for Americans' unusual religiosity, which (these writers all believe) is something to celebrate. Fourth, notwithstanding the Founders' own remarkable secularism, the liberation of religion from government as much as the reverse was their aim. "The separation of church and state has greatly benefited religion, as Madison and Jefferson predicted that it would," Wills writes. Nussbaum argues that because "the separation of church and state is, fundamentally, about equality, about the idea that no religion will be set up as the religion of our nation," in the end "separation is also about protecting religion." Waldman writes, "Madison, I suspect, would . . . be delighted by surveys showing that, compared with most developed nations, Americans believe in God more, pray more, and attend worship services more frequently."

Much of the review concerns Royall Tyler, a poet and lawyer who once dated John Adams' daughter, and wrote a novel which made some reference to Islam (pp. 74-75):

In June of 1797, just three months before Tyler's novel was published, the American captives in North Africa were freed by the Treaty of Tripoli, signed by President John Adams. The threaty's Article 11, an assurance that the United States would not engage in a vengeful holy war, read, "As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian Religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquillity, of Mussulmen; and, as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mahometan nation it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions, shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries."

I guess we can chalk that up as yet another aspect in which the Bush administration has strayed from republic's founders.

Edward J Larson: A Magnificent Catastrophe: The Tumultuous Election of 1800, America's First Presidential Campaign (2007, Free Press)

I picked Larson's book out of the library on a whim, mostly to check up on details unclear or missing from HBO's John Adams series, which I have been watching. I didn't read it through so much as pick through the index for topics I was curious about: more background on Aaron Burr, the bizarre presidential electoral system, the scheming of Alexander Hamilton and his followers. Later I thumbed through the book looking for quotes, and read quite a bit more. While it's a truism that history reflects the present as much as the past, there is quite a bit here that is recognizable today: even in its origins, the machinations of the political parties and their distorting effects on discourse and statesmanship are more than evident; the Federalists' focus on a strong executive and their eagerness to police their power through their Alien and Sedition Acts anticipates Bush by a long ways, as does their willingness to risk war for political gain, and their fancy for an extended empire. On the other hand, I have to wonder whether Jefferson's ability to translate radical political ideas into middle American platitudes, partly through his eloquence and partly through his pragmatism, isn't key to Obama's promise.

(pp. 18-19):

The differences dividing Adams and Jefferson reflected a deepening ideological rift that divided mainstream Americans into factions. As the nascent government took shape under the Constitution, the people and their chosen representatives vigorously debated various issues regarding the authority of the national government and the balance of power among its branches and between it and the states. Whether the national government could charter a bank and thus create a national banking system became especially heated, for example. Many doubted if the new national government would long survive. Adams and those calling themselves Federalists saw a strong central government led by a powerful president as vital for a prosperous, secure nation. Extremists in this camp, like Alexander Hamilton, who favored transferring virtually all power to the national government and consolidating it in a strong executive and aristocratic Senate, became known as the ultra or High Federalists. At the Constitutional Convention, Hamilton had unabashedly depicted the monarchical British government as "the best in the world" and famously proposed life tenure for the United States President and senators.

Jefferson and his emerging Republican faction viewed such thinking as inimical to freedom. A devotee of enlightenment science, which emphasized reason and natural law over revelation and authoritarian regimes, Jefferson trusted popular rule and distrusted elite institutions. Indeed, like the French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau, Jefferson instinctively revered man in nature. "Those who labor in the earth," such as farmers and frontiersmen, possess "substantial and genuine virtue," he wrote in his 1787 book, Notes on the State of Virginia. "The will of the majority, the natural law of every society, is the only sure guardian of the rights of men," Jefferson affirmed three years later. He instinctively favored the people over any institution.

(p. 19):

Although more moderate in his Federalism than Hamilton, but still unlike the Republican Jefferson, Adams thought that every nation needed a single, strong leader who could rise above and control self-interested factions of all classes and types. Neither an aristocratic Senate nor a democratic House of Representatives would safeguard individual rights, he believed. Indeed, Adams once complained to Jefferson about "the avarice, the unbounded ambition, [and] the unfeeling cruelty of a majority of those (in all nations) who are allowed an aristocratic influence; and . . . the stupidity with which the more numerous multitude not only become their dupes but even love to be taken in by their tricks." Only a disinterested chief executive -- the fabled philosopher-king of old -- would protect liberty and justice for all. Adams thus combined a Calvinist view of humanity's innate sinfulness with an Old Testament faith that a Moses-like leader could guide even such a fallen people through the wilderness into the promised land of freedom.

(pp. 20-21):

The differences between Adams and Jefferson became clear in their responses to Shays's Rebellion, a widely publicized antigovernment protest in Adams's home state of Massachusetts. In 1786, hundreds of western Massachusetts farmers led by Revolutionary War officer Daniel Shays briefly took arms against high taxes and strict foreclosure laws during the economic recession that followed the American Revolution. Massive deflation threatened these protesters with the loss of their property and jobs, while the state government only made matters worse for them by raising taxes to repay bondholders for Revolutionary Era debts.

When news of the uprising reached him in Paris, Jefferson used a metaphor from science to convey his reaction in a letter to Abigail Adams, who was then in London with her husband. "I like a little revolution now and then. It is like a storm in the atmosphere," Jefferson wrote. She was horrified. Speaking for herself and probably her husband, she told Jefferson her views on Shays's Rebellion in no uncertain terms: "Ignorant, restless desperados, without conscience or principles, have led a deluded multitude to follow their standard under pretense of grievances which have no existence but in their indignations."

Jefferson came to see the episode as significant. From his post in London, John Adams did not sufficiently appreciate the protesters' dire plight, Jefferson later wrote. He feared that Adams took the uprising to mean that even "the absence of want and oppression was not a sufficient guarantee of order" against popular revolts stirred by a demagogue. This disagreement over Shays's Rebellion, however mild it seemed at the time, begin to fray the relationship between Jefferson and the Adamses; it was a foretaste of the bitter divisions to come.

On the original electoral college scheme for electing the president (pp. 41-42):

The Framers' vision of how the process would work now seems quaint: independent electors meeting in collegiate settings and using their own judgment in casting their ballots for two individuals whom they deemed best qualified to lead the nation. But the process actually operated much as the Framers intended in 1789 and 1792, when Washington was the clear favorite among all the electors. Aside from Franklin, who died in 1790, Washington was America's only truly national hero: the one indispensable person in forming the new government. No party nominated him for President and he never campaigned for the office. Every elector cast one vote for him on both occasions, and he tried to assemble a nonpartisan administration. In both of those elections, John Adams obtained the second-highest number of electoral votes -- despite Hamilton's efforts to suppress votes for him in 1789 -- giving him the vice presidency.

In 1796, Adams and Jefferson continued the tradition of non campaigning for President, but much else changed. The nation's two ideological factions had been evolving steadily into more organized political parties, and their leaders were working ever more assiduously to induce electors aligned with their party to vote for what amounted to a partisan "ticket" of two candidates designated by the party's caucus in Congress. Presumably, electors would cast their "first" vote for the party's preferred presidential candidate and their "second" vote for its suggested vice presidential pick, even though they could not designate their votes as such. In 1796, the Federalists had agreed on Adams for President and South Carolinian Thomas Pinckney for Vice President. In their caucus, the Republicans in Congress, while uniformly for Jefferson as President, apparently discussed four candidates for Vice President without settling on one of them for the post.

The Federalist electors wound up, contrary to Hamilton's scheme, splitting their votes, with enough voting for either Oliver Ellsworth or John Jay to drop Pinckney to third place, giving Jefferson second place and the vice presidency. This system broke down in 1800, when Jefferson and his Republican vice presidential candidate Aaron Burr got the same number of votes, throwing the election to the House of Representatives, which the Federalists deadlocked by voting for Burr. After thirty-some ballots a couple of Federalists abstained, enough to tilt the election to Jefferson. The constitution was amended after that so that electors could specify votes for president and vice president.

Following the French Revolution, war broke out between England and France, which threatened to drag the US in. The High Federalists around Hamilton favored England, while the Jefferson's Republicans favored France. Washington and Adams tried to steer a neutral course, but in response to a treaty negotiated by John Jay with the English, France interfered with US shipping, threatening war. An Adams peace mission to France was rebuffed in what was called the XYZ Affair. Federalists wanted to prepare for war with France, toward which (over Adams' objections) they passed legislation establishing what was called the Additional Army (p. 53):

Privately, Washington agreed with Adams's assessment of the military situation but nevertheless accepted the commission as the Army's leader. He insisted on appointing his own officers corps and, over Adams's strenuous objections, named Hamilton as his Inspector General, the second in command. Two other Federalist politicians with wartime experience, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney and Henry Lee, became major generals, but Hamilton largely organized and led the troops while Washington remained at home.

Republicans had vehemently criticized the domestic military buildup -- fearing with some justification that Hamilton might turn the new Army against them. Jefferson in particular worried about a military coup to maintain Federalist hegemony. Even Adams became concerned about Hamilton's intentions when shown private letters from the Inspector General suggesting that he might use the Army to suppress antigovernment "resistance" in Virginia and "take possession" of Florida and Louisiana from France's ally, Spain. "This man is stark mad or I am," Adams later claimed to have said about Hamilton upon reading these and other confidential letters outlining his plans.

After Washington died, the Additional Army under Hamilton, was increasingly attacked by the Republicans, until in May 1800 Adams ordered it disbanded, much to Hamilton's chagrin. During the war crisis with France the Federalists also passed (and Adams signed) the Alien and Sedition Acts (pp. 74-75):

Each of these three [Republican] papers had become the subject of multiple prosecutions under the Sedition Act or related laws. In all, federal attorneys brought at least seventeen indictments against Republican newspapers between 1798 and 1800, with most of these cases intended to shut down presses during the run-up to critical elections. Some succeeded in that objective, but new Republican papers quickly replaced shuttered ones. "The most vigorous and undisguised efforts are making to crush the republican presses, and stifle enquiry as it may respect the ensuing election," one Republican senator privately advised Madison in April 1800.

With Adams's full knowledge, Secretary of State Timothy Pickering coordinated the legal assault. According to Pickering, the Sedition Act could not possibly violate the Constitution because it punished only "pests of society and disturbers of order." Partisan attacks on the Additional Army particularly incensed Pickering, Hamilton loyalist.

Simply referring to the federal troops as a "standing army" could serve as grounds for an indictment. To the Revolutionary War generation in the United States, including both Federalists and Republicans, the term carried a sinister meaning. Under popular rule, Americans then commonly believed that citizen soldiers would turn out in sufficient numbers to defend their country in times of foreign invasion or domestic insurrection, and then return home after the danger passed. State militias acted in this manner and provided the bulk of American forces at the time. The citizen-soldier ideal was personified by George Washington. In contrast, Americans saw foreign tyrants using professional "standing armies" to usurp or maintain power against the popular will. In this respect, among the despotic "abuses and usurpations" of power listed to justify the American Revolution, the Declaration of Independence specifically charged George III with having "kept among us in times of peace standing armies." Even if not used to subdue popular rule, Americans at the time tended to view soldiers in a peacetime standing army as armed and potentially dangerous idle young men living well at taxpayer expense.

The Republicans picked Aaron Burr as Jefferson's running mate in hopes of carrying Burr's home state of New York (p. 98):

Burr laid the foundation for victory in 1799 when, as a state legislator, he had secured the charter for the Manhattan Company, which broke the Federalist banking monopoly in New York City. By the spring of 1800, artisans and owners of small businesses could openly support Republican candidates without fear of losing access to credit. Indeed, bank records suggest that the Manhattan Company significantly stepped up operations to coincide with the election. "The [Federalist] bank influence is now totally destroyed," Burr protégé Matthew Davis boasted in a preelection letter to Republican congressional leader Albert Gallatin, "the Manhattan Company will, in all probability, operate much in our favor." Other partisans made similar comments at the time, and some later historians have seen the bank's role in the city election as decisive.

Burr was able to beat Hamilton's slate in New York, a major turn in the slowly unfolding 1800 election. Hamilton, meanwhile was still scheming against Adams, as he had in past elections. The idea was to saddle Adams with a running mate loyal to Hamilton, then short Adams' votes in the electoral college, throwing the presidency to the vice presidential candidate (pp. 121-122):

The scheme might succeed in 1800 where it had failed in 1796, Hamilton reasoned, because Adams had lost so much High Federalist support by then due to the resumption of peace negotiations with France. Although moderates within the party welcomed the peace mission, High Federalists hated it. Enough electors from New England might now knowingly go along with his scheme for it to work, in contrast to those who had scuttled it last time. "It is therefore essential that the Federalists should not separate without coming to a distinct and solemn concert to pursue this course bona fide," he wrote to Sedgwick.

The strategy behind the caucus agreement was clear to all astute political observers. Jefferson immediately dubbed it a "hocus-pocus maneuver," presumably referring to the substitution of the popular candidate, Adams, by the High Federalists' choice, Pinckney. Adams guessed Hamilton's game as soon as he heard what the caucus had done, and he was livid.

Adams responded by purging two Hamilton loyalists, James McHenry and Timothy Pickering, from his cabinet. (Adams retained a third, Oliver Walcott, whom he regarded as more competent.) Adams went on to discharge Hamilton's Additional Army (p. 152):

Making the most of the short time remaining in his tenure as Inspector General of the Additional Army, Hamilton set out in June to bolster Pinckney and undermine Adams among potential Federalist electors in New England during a four-state tour ostensibly designed to bid farewell to the disbanding troops. Traveling in full military regalia, Hamilton planned to meet with Federalist leaders throughout the region. Surely they still deferred to him, he believed, even if Adams did not.

Any military purposes for Hamilton's trip took a backseat to political ones. "The General did not come to disband the troops," Abigail Adams explained in a letter to her son, Thomas. "His visit was merely an electioneering business, to feel the pulse of the New England states, and to impress those upon whom he could have any influence to vote for Pinckney and bring him on as president." Her husband had heard as much from several of those subjected to Hamilton's pleas.

During the campaign Jefferson was repeatedly attacked for his insufficient religion (pp. 172-173):

In their public attacks, Christian critics drew on evidence from Jefferson's private and public life to complete their picture of him as an infidel. Jefferson rarely attended church services, they noted. He desecrated the Sabbath by working and entertaining on Sunday. He did not invoke biblical authority or acknowledge Christ in the Declaration of Independence. When a foreign visitor to Virginia commented on the shabby condition of local churches, Jefferson reportedly replied, "It is good enough for him that was born in a manger!" Federalists eagerly repeated the visitor's conclusion: "Such a contemptuous fling at the blessed Jesus could issue from the lips of no other than a deadly foe to his name and his glory."

A campaign tract addressed to Delaware voters by a self-proclaimed "Christian Federalist" put the issue in blunt terms. "If Jefferson is elected and the Jacobins get into authority," it declared, "those morals which protect our lives from the knife of the assassin, which guard the chastity of our wives and daughters from seduction and violence, defend our property from plunder and devaluation, and shield our religion from contempt and profanation, will be trampled upon and exploded." With Republicans in power, this Christian warned, America would follow France into the moral and political abyss where the people turned "more ferocious than savages, more bloody than tigers, more impious than demons."

(p. 199):

Despite their partisan wrangling over the causes and handling of the Virginia slave conspiracy, during the campaign of 1800, neither Federalists nor Republicans spoke substantively to the underlying issue of slavery. Even though most northern states had abolished slavery by 1800, it remained deeply entrenched in the South. Neither party could hope to win the presidency if it took a strong stand on slavery, so they both equivocated on what was already emerging as the most divisive topic in American politics.

Both parties were deeply split by the issue. Slavery disgusted Adams -- he once called it "an evil of colossal magnitude" -- yet, he included three slave owners in his five-member cabinet, and his hope for reelection rode on winning electoral votes from three slave states: Maryland, Delaware, and South Carolina. Many Northern High Federalists opposed slavery on moral or religious grounds, yet their faction's favored candidate for President, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, possessed vast slave plantations and, as a delegate to the Constitutional Convention, led the successful effort to ensure that the Constitution protected the right of states to maintain slavery. If the Constitution "should fail to insure some security to the southern states against an emancipation of slaves," Pinckney told his fellow delegates, he "would be bound by this duty to his state to vote against [it]."

The Republican Party encompassed a similar diversity of views on slavery, from the ardent support for it expressed by many party leaders in the Deep South through Jefferson's tortured acquiescence of the practice to the fevered abolitionism of such prominent Northern Republicans as Albert Gallatin. "Slavery is inconsistent with every principle of humanity, justice, and right," Gallatin had written in a 1793 legislative report, yet he served as Jefferson's point man in Congress during the 1800 election.

Hamilton wrote a vicious broadside attacking Adams, presumably meant to be closely held in confidence by the Federalists it was addressed to, but a copy was quickly leaked (pp. 219-221):

As news of Hamilton's letter and its contents spread across the country, it became a factor in the presidential campaign. The public now knew that the once unified Federalists were rent into factions with its best-known leaders locked in mortal combat. People seemed less interested in debating the merits of the letter's charges than in speculating about who came off worse in the episode, Hamilton or Adams. While the contents of the letter gave new currency to old doubts about Adams's leadership, its style, substance, and timing raised even graver misgivings about Hamilton's judgment. [ . . . ]

Adams's supporters rallied to his defense in pamphlets and published letters. Federalist lexicographer Noah Webster took the lead in a widely reprinted open letter to Hamilton. "Admitting all your charges against Mr. Adams, they amount to too small a sum to balance the immense hazard of the game you are playing," Webster wrote of Hamilton's scheme to elect Pinckney. "It avails little that you accuse the President of vanity for as to this . . . were it an issue between Mr. Adams and yourself, which has the most, you could not rely on an unanimous verdict in your favor," he charged. "That the President is unmanageable is, in a degree true: that is, you and your supporters can not manage him; but this will not pass in this country as a crime. That he is unstable is alleged -- pray sir . . . did he waver during the Revolutionary War?"

Occasional ill humor and hasty declarations do not equal lunacy, Webster argued. Adams was neither mad nor mentally unfit for office. Webster admonished Hamilton that, by asserting otherwise about the party's candidate for President on the even of a critical election, "Your conduct on this occasion will be deemed little short of insanity." Given the risk that the letter would either divide the Federalist Party or destroy it. Webster asked, "Will not Federal men, as well as anti-Federal, believe that your ambition, pride, and overbearing temper have destined you to be the evil genius of this country?"

The election was won by the Republican ticket, but with votes for president and vice president undistinguished, the result was a tie between Jefferson and Burr. (The Federalists, had they won, would have avoided this problem as one elector voted for John Jay instead of Pinckney, giving Adams a one vote margin over his vice presidential running mate -- the opposite of Hamilton's scheme.) The tie threw the election to the House of Representatives, where Federalists could influence the outcome by picking between the two Republicans (pp. 248-249):

Virtually all Federalists in Congress viewed Burr as grasping, selfish, and unprincipled. "A profligate without character and without property -- a bankrupt in both," Sedgwick called him at the time. These very traits made him all the more likely, though, to cooperate with them in maintaining a strong national government, Federalists believed. "By persons friendly to Mr. Burr, it is distinctly stated that he is willing to consider the Federalists as his friends and to accept the office of President as their gift," Delaware Representative James A. Bayard asserted on the basis of some contacts apparently not authorized by Burr. "He must lean on those who bring him to the chair, or he must fall to never rise again," Virginia Congressman Henry Lee added. In short, by electing him President, Federalists hoped to turn Burr into their creature. "I believe," Maryland Representative William Hindman noted, "that he would support the Federal[ist] cause as the Jeffersonians would become his bitter implacable enemies."

On the positive side, Federalists also viewed Burr as more vigorous and pragmatic than Jefferson, whom they scorned as a cowardly, misguided visionary. Hindman wrote to Burr, "He is a soldier and a man of energy and decision." "To courage he joins generosity," New York Senator Gouverneur Morris added. "If Mr. Burr succeeds, we may flatter ourselves that he will not suffer the executive power to be frittered into insignificance," James McHenry stated. "Either will be bad," Connecticut Senator Uriah Tracy conceded, but "I am . . . in favor of Burr principally because I think a paralytic complaint is most to be shunned by a popular government." Federalists also anticipated that Burr, as a New York commercial lawyer, would support Federalist business interests more than Jefferson, a Virginia agrarian. "His very selfishness," Sedgwick wryly noted about Burr and the business interests, "will afford some security that he will not only patronize their support but their invigoration." [ . . . ]

By some manner of twisted reasoning, by the beginning of 1801, Burr had become the Federalists' white knight. No solid evidence exists that he ever promised anything in exchange for their support. Faced with the prospect of losing power for the first time, they simply gave it to him on faith.

The House remained deadlocked through 35 ballots before a couple of Federalists backed off and abstained, ceding the election to Jefferson. Many Federalists blamed Adams for cooling the war fever against France (p. 250):

Many Federalists blamed Adams for the party's losses. By "sending the last mission to France," McHenry observed in words that gave voice to the party line, "Mr. Adams had taken . . . a course which has lost to him the presidency and led to his utter debasement." Pickering soon added, "The President, I am told, is in a state of deep dejection. His feelings are not to be envied. To his UNADVISED (to use a mild term) measures are traced the evils with which the whole of our country is now perplexed and depressed." The truth is, though, that although he lost the election, Adams did better than his party as a whole. Outside New York, he received more electoral votes in 1800 than in 1796, when he won. The Republicans' narrow victory in the New York City elections had indeed turned the tide. [ . . . ] Meanwhile, Federalists lost control of Congress for the first time in the nation's history, dropping more than ten seats in the Senate and more than twice that number in the House.

Inauguration day, which found Adams slipping away from the White House on the 4AM stage for Baltimore (pp. 271-273):

Thomas Jefferson surely rose before the sun that day too; he always did. He still roomed in a small suite at Conrad and McMunn's boardinghouse near the Capitol, and would stay there for two more weeks as work progressed on the Executive Mansion. After other boarders got up and dressed, Jefferson ate breakfast with them at the common table and reportedly declined their invitation to sit at its head. Escorted by soldiers of the Virginia militia and flanked by various members of Congress and other dignitaries, Jefferson then walked to the Senate chamber for his inauguration. His predecessors had ridden in a coach with liveried attendants on such occasions. Jefferson wore a plain suit and, unlike Washington and Adams at their inaugurals, he neither powdered his hair nor carried a sword. He wanted to set a democratic tone for his administration, and continued doing so by curtailing official levees, accepting a handshake rather than a bow, and otherwise introducing an informal style to state functions. A better writer than speaker, Jefferson sent his messages to Congress rather than deliver them to assembled lawmakers. Before taking the oath of office, however, in a shy, small voice all but lost in the ornate, crowded Senate chamber, Jefferson gave the greatest speech of his political career. He beautifully crafted it to claim the middle ground after the bitter, divisive campaign. Newspapers carried it to the nation.

"During the contest of opinion through which we have passed, the animation of discussion and of exertions has sometimes worn an aspect which might impose on strangers unused to think freely," Jefferson began. "But this being now decided by the voice of the people . . . let us restore to social intercourse that harmony and affection without which liberty, and even life itself, are but dreary things." Among the causes of these differences, he stressed the divided opinion "as to measures of safety" against the widening European war. "Every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle," Jefferson cautioned in a statement calculated to reach out to moderates. "We are all Republicans: We are all Federalists. If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union, or to challenge its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free." He then restated his political principles in centrist terms: neutrality abroad, the freedom of religion and the press at home, full payment of the national debt, and equal justice with impartial juries. No Federalist could have expected more from a Republican; many expected much less from Jefferson. In an apparent answer to those who questioned his belief in God, he closed with a prayer: "May that Infinite Power which rules the destines of the universe lead our councils to what is best, and give them a favorable issue for your peace and prosperity."