The First Presidential Contest

This is the first study in half a century to focus on the election of 1796. The first contested presidential election offered neither a structured campaign—the candidates did not even deign to participate—nor an analysable national vote. Not only were political parties not yet institutionalised, they were ignored by the Constitution and frowned upon by the Founders. Pasley contends, however, that 1796 set the stage for all of American politics to follow. Challenging much of the conventional understanding of this election, Pasley argues that Federalist and Democratic-Republican were deeply meaningful categories for politicians and citizens of the 1790s, even if the names could be inconsistent and the institutional presence lacking. He treats the 1796 election as a rough draft of the democratic presidential campaigns that came later rather than as the personal squabble depicted by other historians. It set the geographic pattern of New England competing with the South at the two