The Failure of the Founding Fathers

This book revisits the electoral college crisis of 1800, offering a new understanding of the early plebiscitarian presidency and a Supreme Court struggling to put the presidency’s claims of a popular mandate into constitutional perspective. Ackerman shows how the early court integrated Federalist and Republican themes into the Constitution.

Just like with his magnificent We the People, Bruce Ackerman has intertwined well researched history with an unparalleled skill as a constitutional theorist. The Failure of the Founding Fathers describes the maneuvering that validated Thomas Jefferson's claim to the presidency that then created a decade-long confrontation between the Jeffersonians in the elected branches of the Federalists in the judiciary. This is constitutional history at its finest. -- Lucas A. Powe, Jr., University of Texas at Austin, and author of The Warren Court and American Politics Bruce Ackerman has written a provocative account of the impact upon America's political future of the Jeffersonian opposition to the Federalists. Completely levitating himself out of the historiography of party formation, Ackerman in The Failure of the Founding Fathers demonstrates just how powerful the vexed election of 1800 proved to be. -- Joyce Appleby, University of California, Los Angeles, and author of Inheriting the Revolution: The First Generation of Americans Many fine historians have written about the presidential election of 1800. But only Bruce Ackerman has placed all of the events surrounding the election into the context of American constitutional development. With his usual mixture of careful historical exegesis, narrative sweep, and bold interpretive imagination, Ackerman enables us to see a number of aspects of our constitutional history as if for the first time (beginning with the fact that the almost unknown case of Stuart v. Laird, was far more significant that Marbury v. Madison, decided a week earlier). Anyone interested in the development of American constitutionalism--and American political institutions--should be fascinated by this book. -- Sanford Levinson, University of Texas Law School, author of Wrestling With Diversity

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