The author has skillfully organized the abundant learning of those who have authored so many specialized studies of the history of the United States from 1801 to 1815 in an interesting and accessible fashion. A combination of several monographs and documents and a sampling of earlier sources—press, polemics, reports, correspondence, and memoirs—tell a coherent and illuminating story. The Thomas Jefferson portrayed in this text is no flaming radical, but instead a Whiggish moderate. Without overlooking his flaws, a sympathetic portrait is presented of the man who was more a friend to liberty than democracy and whose passion for peace provoked the contempt of Europe. James Madison is viewed as an adroit politician whose “constitutional republicanism” unfortunately hobbled his operations as a war president. In addition to these men, a whole cast of colorful individualists appears in these pages, from the deceitful Burr to the eccentric Randolph. The history of this period is examined in the disunity of the nation at the time of the War of 1812, the steps by which the nation was led into a European war and how, as a third-rate power fighting a naval colossus, the United States managed to avoid other than local disasters and emerge from the conflict with its independence vindicated and confirmed.