The Jeffersonian Crisis: Courts

This is an extremely ambitious book, for in its relatively brief compass it undertakes to discuss three aspects of the Jeffersonian era: (1) the contest for control of the national judiciary, usually personified as a struggle of the titans, Thomas Jefferson and John Marshall; (2) the battle for reform of the judiciary at the state and local level; and (3) the meaning of Jeffersonian democracy as a whole, as it may be inferred from the judicial controversy. Of his three objectives, Mr. Ellis achieves the first most successfully. He has more difficulty with the second and raises more questions than he answers with respect to the last. Despite its limitations, the book is interesting and challengingand, at times, irritating and frustrating. Legal scholars should be forewarned, however, that Ellis is writing neither legal history nor even judicial history. Rather, his emphasis is on the politics of the judicial controversy, as much within the Republican and Federalist parties as between them. In short, Ellis has written a history of the politics of the judicial conflicts during Jefferson's administration. The story of the Republican assault on the federal judiciary under Jefferson is a tale more than thrice-told. It occupies an honored place, of course, in every American constitutional history and has been treated by every biographer of Jefferson. Henry Adams, in his classic history of the first two Republican administrations, described the confrontation between Jefferson and the courts as a less-than-heroic struggle, with the President emerging as a paper tiger, longer on rhetoric than on action, and a traitor to his own principles for failing to curb judicial power in any significant way when he had the chance.' Albert J. Beveridge, in his extensive biography of John Marshall,2 provided, with a moderately Federalist bias, the fullest account of the judicial controversy. The effort to repeal the Judiciary Act of 1801-usually described as a last-ditch Federalist move to retain control of at least one branch of the federal government-was, in Beveridge's view, essential to Republican efforts to demolish Federalist power. If the Federalists could not be swept from