With so much at stake, in a contest between two men once so closely allied, now so starkly opposed, Americans made up their minds by reading the newspapers, which numbered more than two hundred and fifty. “The engine is the press,” Jefferson observed. Yet so tawdry did the candidates consider even this kind of electioneering that neither wrote a single word for the public prints. And, when Jefferson urged friends to pick up their pens, he warned, “Do not let my name be connected with the business.”

Jefferson also saw the usefulness of pamphlets like James Callender’s “The Prospect Before Us,” which advised readers, “Take your choice, between Adams, war and beggary, and Jefferson, peace, and competency.” “Such papers cannot fail to have the best effect,” Jefferson wrote. But, for “The Prospect Before Us,” Callender was convicted of sedition. Sentenced to nine months’ confinement, he wrote a second volume from jail. Thumbing his nose at his prosecutors, he titled one chapter “More Sedition.”

Callender may not have been seditious, but he was a political hack. In 1797, he had ruined Alexander Hamilton’s political career—and poisoned his marriage—by exposing an adulterous affair. (In 1802, Callender, resentful that Jefferson had never rewarded him for his election-year martyrdom, published an article in the Richmond Recorder reporting long-circulating rumors that Jefferson “keeps, and for many years past has kept, as his concubine, one of his own slaves. Her name is SALLY.”)

But James Callender’s muckraking was dwarfed by what Alexander Hamilton was willing to do. The disaffected former Secretary of the Treasury determined to persuade Federalists to drop the President and throw their support behind his unmemorable running mate, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, of South Carolina. (Pinckney, to his considerable credit, did not approve, and the plan failed.) Hamilton drafted a statement expressing his views on the “great and intrinsic defects in [Adams’s] character which unfit him for the office of chief magistrate.” It was published at the end of October, 1800, as “Letter from Alexander Hamilton, Concerning the Public Conduct and Character of John Adams.” As Larson puts it, the pamphlet “read like one long rant.” Hamilton wrote of the President, “He is a man of an imagination sublimated and eccentric; propitious neither to the regular display of sound judgment, nor to steady perseverance in a systematic plan of conduct . . . and to this defect are added the unfortunate foibles of a vanity without bounds, and a jealousy capable of discoloring every object.” If Hamilton’s portrait did Adams no good, neither did it do him much harm. The President was not running on his personality, after all, but on his record. For better and, in the end, for worse.

Meanwhile, Federalists did their best to paint Jefferson as a character entirely unsuited to hold office. (Hamilton thought him a crafty, fanatical, “contemptible hypocrite.”) From their stronghold in New England, they warned voters of Jefferson’s duplicity. We will not “learn the principles of liberty from the slave-holders of Virginia,” the Connecticut Courant declared. Or, as another Federalist editor put it, “Democracy in Virginia, therefore, is like virtue in hell.”

But the most ferocious attacks on Jefferson concerned his views on religion. Jefferson had once offered a Franklinesque statement of his passionate commitment to religious toleration: “It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” All over the country, clergymen preached that such a view could lead to nothing but unchecked vice. From New York, one minister answered Jefferson, “Let my neighbor once perceive himself that there is no God, and he will soon pick my pocket and break not only my leg but my neck.”

If Federalists would make Jefferson’s religion political, Republicans would make a religion of his politics. On March 31, 1800, the Vermont Gazette printed a Jeffersonian creed:

From a direct tax, Good Lord deliver us. . . . From a war with the French republic, Good Lord deliver us. From all old Tories; from aristocrats Good Lord deliver us. . . . From the sedition act, and from all other evil acts Good Lord deliver us.

Adams himself had little but contempt for members of his party who would make an issue of Jefferson’s religious convictions, asking, “What has that to do with the public?” And Jefferson, though he called himself a Christian, held a skeptical view of the Bible, and readily conceded that his critics were right if they expected that he would promote religious toleration: “For I have sworn upon the altar of god, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.” Yet, for all the ink spilled on the subject, one clear-eyed political observer of the day predicted that Jefferson’s religious views would probably “not deprive Jeff of a single vote.”

Whether it did is difficult to say. In 1969, in “The Idea of a Party System,” Richard Hofstadter regretted that “the definitive account of this election remains to be written.” Nearly forty years later, that’s still the case. Larson, the University Professor of History and the Darling Professor of Law at Pepperdine, and a former recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, tells the story well. His narrative is by far the best of several recent books on the subject. But his argument, that during the pivotal campaign “a popular, two-party republic was born,” though persuasive, is not exactly novel. (Hofstadter made a similar claim.) Maybe a definitive account of this election remains unwritten because its candidates loom larger than life. Larson’s book, like almost everything written about the election of 1800, has a forest-and-trees quality: we can’t see the Voters for the Founders.

“As you love your country, fly to your polls,” the Gazette of the United States urged. But there was no “Election Day” in 1800. Voting stretched from March to December, and the President wasn’t chosen until February, 1801, just weeks before he took office. To get to the polls, you may have trudged through snow; you may have sweltered in the sun.

Whatever the weather, chances are you couldn’t vote. There were sixteen states in the Union in 1800. In Maryland, black men born free could vote (until 1802, when the state’s constitution was amended to exclude them); in New Jersey, white women could vote (until 1807, when the legislature closed this loophole). All but three states—Kentucky, Vermont, and Delaware—limited the franchise to property holders or taxpayers, which works out to about sixty to seventy per cent of the adult white male population. Out of a total U.S. population of 5.3 million, roughly five hundred and fifty thousand were enfranchised.