"A casualty of those fights was the friendship between Presidents John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. In 1801, they cut off communication. After a decade of distance and silence, their mutual friend Benjamin Rush persuaded them to correspond.

In the further reaches of hopeful dreams for the future, presidential candidates would read the wonderful volume of their correspondence ("The Adams-Jefferson Letters," edited by Lester J. Cappon); moderators could begin the debates by asking rival candidates to speak to each other in the manner that Jefferson and Adams put forward for posterity's imitation"

http://www.denverpost.com/opinion/ci_21908715/limerick-explaining-this-years-election

before talking about "divisiveness" and the founders:

http://www.amazon.com/Magnificent-Catastrophe-Tumultuous-Election-Presidential/dp/0743293177/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1352062055&sr=8-1&keywords=1800+election

Remember Burr shot Hamilton. Both Adams and Jefferson had their own print organs at their disposal (and one of them was even a federal employee). Jackson's wife was attacked because she married Jackson without divorcing her first husband. Jackson blamed her death on those attacks, and he was ready to shot Henry Clay and hang John C. Calhoun. Burr and Gen. Wilkinson tried to carve off a part of America for themselves. You really don't get things to calm down until Monroe, and they we had Adams/Jackson/Clay/Calhoun. Burr contested his own presidential running mate for president in 1800. The Northeast states and their politicians were ready to secede during the War of 1812.


Adams passed the Alien and Sedition Act. Lincoln threw the Copperheads in jail. Jackson asked the Supreme Court were was their army to enforce decisions.


And all this fighting was just between white men. We could talk about what happened to the original inhabitants of this continent or those from Africa brought over in chains. Also the inferior legal rights of women. How about paying substitutes to fight for you in the Civil War (including large slave holding land owners who had the most to gain from maintaining the status quo).

Nope. No divisions at all.

But many of them realized that we must talk with each other at some point. They also knew that slavery was going to grow as a divisive issue, women voting...not so much. But Jefferson and Adams finally did reach an understanding after ten years of not communicating at all.

http://www.denverpost.com/opinion/ci_21908715/limerick-explaining-this-years-election

"In the further reaches of hopeful dreams for the future, presidential candidates would read the wonderful volume of their correspondence ("The Adams-Jefferson Letters," edited by Lester J. Cappon); moderators could begin the debates by asking rival candidates to speak to each other in the manner that Jefferson and Adams put forward for posterity's imitation.

At a more modest level of aspiration, I propose for consideration a new, day-after-the-election national ritual.

Fellow citizens, public officials, and aspiring candidates, join me in starting this Wednesday in this manner: contemplate what Adams wrote to Jefferson on July 15, 1813, and then imagine a world in which we took to heart the example that these two old men bequeathed to us:

"You and I ought not to die, before We have explained ourselves to each other."