The Immigration-Obsessed, Polarized, Garbage-Fire Election of 1800 | Hacker News Reader

The Immigration-Obsessed, Polarized, Garbage-Fire Election of 1800

longreads.com

48 pointsDiabloD322 comments

Sorry to be a lazy HN member but that article is HUGE! Does anyone have a TLDR / are there any insights of note that are worth discussing / learning? No problem if no one can be bothered to answer!

Well, it is longreads.com.

I find this subtitle, trying to draw the parallel with the current election, quite distasteful: "A madman versus a crook? Unexpected twists? Fake news? Welcome to the election of 1800."

These were the very people that fought for our freedoms and independence. Neither party in the current election has even an iota of such an accomplishment. Even the purported civil nature of private communications between the two is at a level of cordiality not seen these days.

It sounds like you're making the mistake of looking at the 1800 election through our modern lens. At the time, there was no promise that the U.S. would succeed to the degree it has today. The "founding fathers" were not deified quite to the degree we hold them in our culture (assuming you're in the US).

As such, the subtitle isn't a literally calling Jefferson and Adams a madman and a crook. If that was the case, then yes I agree it would be distasteful and a difficult argument. Of course there are major differences. It's pointing out that someone at the turn of that century might have experienced something similar to what we saw this past year and that maybe we could learn something from knowing that.

By historical standards, the recent election was relatively tame.

Their contemporaries were certainly able to call them such and worse. However, I do not see that we can compare these figures to Clinton and Trump. Neither has the accomplishments or the potential for accomplishments that could compare.

Yeah, it sounds like we're talking past eachother a bit then. I agree that you can't compare the four figures. That is not what the author is attempting to do, however.

The argument isn't that IF there are similarities between political rhetoric now and in 1800 THEN you may make a comparison between historical figures. It's that IF there are similarities between political rhetoric now and in 1800 THEN similar political problems may have existed in the year 1800 that we are facing today. The author is highlighting his premise, not making a character comparison.

Not sure how that precludes me from finding the comparison to be offensive. In the end, that is a personal view and an emotional reaction at that.

I agree. It is an offensive comparison, and being offended is a personal view.

Misunderstanding what the author wrote is not a personal view or opinion, it's just ignoring the facts. Ironically, that "facts as a personal view" argument was heavily used by both candidates in the 2017 election which you have decried.

That is what I was addressing with my previous comments. Sorry if you thought I was challenging your personal/political/emotional views in some way. I think you are correct, you're just using poor argumentation.

Note that we don't actually know the nature of any private communication between our recent candidates. Further, the standards of communication between men of a certain rank were more formal at the time.

On the other hand, Mr. Jefferson was accused of being an atheist and of wanting to destroy the country à la the Reign of Terror. And Mr. Adams was painted as tolerating straight up acts of war.

It sounds like you're romanticizing American history to a great extent. As a reminder, the founders wanted to create a class based empire resting largely on forced labor, both through slavery and indentured servitude. They certainly didn't intend the rights they granted themselves to trickle down to lower segments of society.

This isn't completely fair to the founders.

Empire was not what all of them wanted, and Jefferson is an example of a founder who spoke against slavery in his early career and then accepted it because essentially the time to fight that battle hadn't yet occurred (his statement against it in the Declaration of Independence was overruled in light of national unity). He did keep slaves until his death, but he also freed his descendants and was involved in drafting the Rights of Man which says a lot about his more egalitarian views. That is remarkable for a gentleman planter from Virginia. Of course some of the founders in the north despised slavery anyway.

Jefferson was a bit of an outlier but make no mistake what they did was radical for the time. We can't romanticize history nor try and analyze it in light of today's values.

Jefferson also conceived of the lower classes as literal waste, that needed to be bred and put to productive use, just like the animals and slaves he owned. He wanted to import Germans to improve the breeding of the poor whites, because he, along with the other elites, considered them as inferior creatures.

Again, the founders idea of America was based on importing forced labor - the majority of early Americans weren't people 'fleeing religious persecution', they were slaves, indentured servants, convicts, and the rest of England's 'trash' that could either be forced or deceived into getting on a boat.

Do you have any sources? I don't doubt you just unaware of those statements.

Here's a more complex look at Jefferson's views:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1997/03/what-je...

The book "White Trash" by Nancy Isenberg explores the class views of all the founders, she excerpts a small portion of her work here: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/...

This is only tangentially related, but can you determine what was the highest percentage of the U.S. that was enslaved at a given point? My best approximation is the slave pop. topped out at 10% ~1861, which sounds like a lot less than "the majority."

My assumption would be around there.

Who said slaves were "the majority" of the country?

...Of course a revolutionary war had just been won, and civil war would later be fought, so maybe this isn't terribly comforting.

The time of the incident was a generation on from the American revolution and the war that was brewing over the issues of citizenship and British naval practice was the War of 1812. The US Civil War was predicated on internal 'international relations' between states and the citizenship of native born persons and the conundrum of the 3/5ths clause in the US constitution and the political power it provided agricultural interests.

I'm not claiming a causal relationship, I'm pointing out just how fresh and unstable the country was, by bracketing the period in question.

What is interesting is that a bit more than a decade later, the US entered the "Era of Good Feelings" where bitter partisanship went down and people worked mostly together for the common good, at least on surface. Let's just hope it happens again.

and then we killed a whole pile of cherokee. good times.

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