No library holdings of political party development or the early political history of the nation will be complete without The Jeffersonian Persuasion.
― Choice

This revisionary study offers a convincing new interpretation of Jeffersonian Republican thought in the 1790s. Based on extensive research in the newspapers and political pamphlets of the decade as well as the public and private writings of party leaders, it traces the development of party ideology and examines the relationship of ideology to party growth and actions.

This revisionary study offers a convincing new interpretation of Jeffersonian Republican thought in the 1790s. Based on extensive research in the newspapers and political pamphlets of the decade as well as the public and private writings of party leaders, it traces the development of party ideology and examines the relationship of ideology to party growth and actions.

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Banning writes in clear, readable fashion. His chapters are compact and lucid, his arguments crisply made. He knows the Jeffersonian literature of the 1790s and the country tradition upon which the Jeffersonians drew. Most importantly, he provides the kind of perspective that makes Jeffersonian argumentation understandable in its own terms. And in the process he tells some important things about the ways in which revolutionary ideology informed political behavior in the early republic.