Jefferson's Call for Nationhood: the First Inaugural Address.

Jefferson's Call for Nationhood: The First Inaugural Address. By Stephen Howard Browne. Library of Presidential Rhetoric. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2003. Pp. xviii, 155. Paper, $14.95, ISBN 1-58544-252-6; cloth, $29.95, ISBN 1-58544-251-8.)

Thomas Jefferson's inaugural address, marking one of the few times in the history of the world that a ruling party has voluntarily handed over power to its political opponents, was equal to the momentous event that it commemorated. In a few eloquent words he noted the triumph of his party, mollified his enemies, and laid out the principles that would guide him and the nation in the years ahead.

Jefferson's speech is the subject of Stephen Howard Browne's book, Jefferson's Call for Nationhood, the newest publication from the Program in Presidential Rhetoric at Texas A&M University. This program uses the study of rhetoric to interpret the presidency and the study of the presidency to illuminate the function of rhetoric. Such a cross-fertilization of disciplines has the potential to open significant new interpretations of some frequently examined work.

Browne divides the book into three sections. He looks at the speech as a partisan document, as political theory, and as a purely rhetorical exercise. Throughout, Browne focuses on some of the many dichotomies that surround any study of Jefferson and the inaugural address. Was Jefferson's famous statement, "We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists," a conciliatory olive branch to his opponents or an exercise in triumphal chest-pounding (p. xiv)? Was he a practical politician or a philosophical idealist? Were his politics grounded in a nationalist or a states' rights philosophy? Was he a classical republican or a Lockean liberal? Browne's answer to all of these questions is both.

Browne discusses the historical and intellectual background to the speech: the tumultuous partisan conflicts of the era, the eighteenth-century argument over political factions, Scottish moral sense philosophy, and classical republicanism. He has read the relevant secondary sources, but there is much missing from his study. He does not discuss the eighteenth-century battles over the English language, Jefferson's long essay on English prosody, or his ideas on the sublime. How did Browne miss Jefferson's 1821 comparison, in a letter to Francis Eppes, of Thomas Paine's and Lord Bolingbroke's styles?

The famous "felicity of expression" that John Adams accorded Jefferson's use of language was the result, Browne writes, of a perfect balance of substance and style, allowing Jefferson to say a great deal with a few words. By this standard, this book is the antithesis of Jefferson's style. The work is much too long, poorly organized, and very repetitive. Using rhetoric to illuminate presidential speeches and vice versa, while a promising idea, risks producing work that lacks focus. Such is the case here. In the final analysis, the book fails to shed any new light on either Jefferson or on eighteenth-century rhetoric.

Villa Julie College 

ALEXANDER O. BOULTON