The Failure of the Founding Fathers: Jefferson, Marshall, and the Rise of Presidential Democracy

Extract

The Failure of the Founding Fathers: Jefferson, Marshall, and the Rise of Presidential Democracy. By Bruce Ackerman. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005. 266p. $29.95 cloth, $18.95 paper.

As the title of this book indicates, Bruce Ackerman does not believe that the Founding Fathers produced a finished, or flawless, frame of government in 1787. In particular, their method for selecting the president of the United States was ill-conceived and left critical questions of procedure unanswered and open to contestation. These failures aggravated the controversy surrounding the presidential election of 1800, when neither John Adams nor Thomas Jefferson won a majority in the Electoral College and Federalists in the outgoing House of Representatives nearly threw the election to Aaron Burr. As the House deliberated, the governors of Massachusetts and Virginia readied their militias to prevent each other's favorite son from stealing the election. Ackerman suggests that a civil war was avoided only by the statesmanship of Adams and Jefferson and the unraveling of a plot to install John Marshall as acting president.