The Beginning of Political Parties

Nothing in Federal Constitution anticipated the emergence of political parties. James Madison had hoped that one of the chief strengths of the Constitution would be its tendency to break and control the violence of factions. Jefferson, in one of his characteristic moments of rhetorical windiness, declared that allegiance to a party was the last degradation of a free and moral agent, and that “if I could not go to heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all”. Hamilton said: “We are attempting by this Constitution to abolish factions and to unite all parties for the general welfare”. This might well have worked, but for the fact that the ideological division between Hamilton on the one side, and Jefferson on the other, quickly became so great; and the animosity between the two men so visible, that the new republic was less than a decade old before American politics had sorted itself out along two parties: the Hamiltonians or Federalists, and the Jeffersonian or Democratic Republicans, or simply Republican party.

Hamilton’s Energetic Federal Government

Federalists and Republican clubs and newspapers sprang up, candidates began presenting themselves to the voters as Federalists or Republicans. In 1804, in the most shocking demonstration of how deeply the idea of party had seized hold of political life, Alexander Hamilton was wounded and killed in a duel fought with one of Jefferson’s disciples, Aaron Burr. Everyone deplored parties, and everyone joined them. Each blaming the other for starting the process, each blaming the other for making their own party organization necessary.

Hamilton observed, during the Confederation, how easily the jealous interests of land-holders and land-speculators in Virginia, Pennsylvania and Connecticut could paralyze the very breath of the republic. Everywhere in the States Hamilton found provincialism, small-mindedness, bad habits and oligarchy. That could only be eliminated, in Hamilton’s mind, by ruthlessly subordinating the State governments to a strong central government, or even reducing the States to administrative units of the Federal government. And valorizing an economy in which the worth of an achievement could be measured in the form which is the most indifferent to hierarchies of color or inheritance: cash money.

This won, for Hamilton and his Federalist allies, the approval of city merchants, workers and most of New England. It also won him the vituperation of Jefferson and his Republican followers. It also got Hamilton a reputation for cold-blooded authoritarianism. Jefferson convinced himself that the Federalists were nothing but an alliance of the old Loyalist refugees and Tories, and American merchants who had sold their souls to the British. They wished for everything which would approach the new government to a monarchy, said Jefferson.

This was a strange set of accusations in the ears of the Federalists. Hamilton left the government in 1796, refusing to use his insider information to speculate in Western land, even mocking himself as one of those public fools who sacrifice his private interest to public interest, at the certainty of ingratitude. The major Federalist political voices were all those lawyers with no independent family wealth, who often ruined themselves financially in civil service. If the new republic had any likely candidate for being a member of an aristocracy, clearly the best offer was Thomas Jefferson.

The chief offence of Hamilton’s liberal economic program was that a debt-compelled government is no remedy to men who have lands and Negroes. As a result, Jefferson’s Democratic Republicans cried “Liberty!”, but mean, as all party leaders do, “Power”.

Jefferson’s Revolution of 1800

Power was what they got. In 1800, the Federalist John Adams run for reelection to Presidency, but lost to Jefferson. Running with Aaron Burr as his Vice-President, Jefferson beat Adams and the Federalists by 73 to 65 votes in the electoral college. Fifty-three of Jefferson’s votes came from the South, which hardly made Jefferson the uniform favorite of the nation. But that did nothing to discourage Jefferson from looking upon his election as the “revolution of 1800”, a mandate to undo everything Hamilton and the Federalists had accomplished.

He pledged in his inaugural to look above party: “We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists.” Noble, generous sentiments, but privately Jefferson hoped to sink Federalism into an abyss from which there shall be no resurrection of it.

The Federalists’ economic policies that Hamilton had helped to cement into place were already too firm for Jefferson to dislodge them. The charter for Hamilton’s National Bank run until 1811, and Jefferson had to wait until the election of his hand-picked successor and Secretary of State, James Madison, for that charter to be cancelled. With the on-going war, as the French and the British threatened to put American shipping on the North Atlantic in the crosshairs of both warring navies, Jefferson thought he could solve the problem simply with an embargo of all American trade with them, and leaving off the products of virtuous American farmers.

Instead, Jefferson’s embargo triggered the first national economic collapse. Hamilton might have said “I told you so”. The Republicans blamed this on the evil machinations of Great Britain. There was just enough mean-spirited British encouragement given to British Canada to hostile Indian tribes on the frontier to give this a coating of credibility. Enough credibility, in fact, to send Jefferson’s successor, Madison, galloping after the British by declaring war in 1812, and expecting to annex Canada as a result.

The Disasters of the War

Without Hamilton’s National Bank, there was no money to fund an army or a navy, and so, the American army stumbled from one defeat to another, punctuated by a handful of victories in places where the victories got nothing. The American navy spent most of the war, apart from a few moral-lifting ship to ship combats, meekly bottled up in American ports by British ships-of-the-line. Without Federally funded manufacturing on the Hamiltonian model, there were no uniforms and weapons for the army, no national roads to assist them and get them from one place to another.

The war of 1812 cruelly revealed the inadequacies of Jeffersonian economic policy. “Our armies went to the frontier clothed in the fabrics of the enemy, ammunition of war was gathered as chance supplied them, and the whole struggle was marked by prodigality, waste and privation of a nation”, complained John Pendleton Kennedy.

It was this disaster of the war which Kennedy believed opened eyes to some important facts. Henry Clay, who represented Kentucky both in the House and the Senate, began his political life as an ardent Jeffersonian Democratic Republican. He helped engineer the defeat of the recharter of Hamilton’s Bank of the United States in 1811, and he was the most malevolent of the war hawks who agitated James Madison into declaring war on Britain in 1812.

Henry Clay’s Moderation and the Success of Andrew Jackson

The war left Clay a wiser Jeffersonian. In 1816, the repented Clay began singing a very different song, about the need for a National Bank, for government sponsored internal improvement projects, to build roads and canals, and for the erection of protective tariffs on imports in order to shield American manufacture from killer competition from abroad.

The embarrassments of the war of 1812 gave enough persuasiveness to this talk. Clay was able to navigate a bill for a second Bank of the United States through Congress. Madison’s successor in Presidency, James Monroe, gave a reluctant blessing to funding for a National Road, a federally financed highway. The result of this, however, was to split the old Democratic Republican party. A good deal of the split was related to the three-fifths clause.

Henry Clay himself was a slave owner. His State, Kentucky, legalized slavery. In the long run, Clay became, despite his slave holding, an ardent proponent of colonizing American slaves out of the United States, and gradually eliminating slavery from American law. Clay’s most famous disciple would be another Kentuckian who really did use the power of the national government to abolish slavery. His name was Abraham Lincoln.

For more than two decades after Jefferons’s “revolution of 1800”, the Constitution’s three-fifths clause guaranteed that the Presidency would go almost routinely to a Southerner, a Jeffersonian and a slave owner. By 1824, Jefferson’s old Democratic Republican party, with Clay at the head of one faction, had fractured so badly as a party that the presidential elections were no longer quite so predictable. John Quincy Adams, the Jeffersonian son of the last Federalist President, had served President James Monroe as Secretary of State, and that casted him as a presumptive to the Presidency in 1824.

Adams, however, was challenged by the ambitions of Henry Clay. In turn, Clay and Adams were challenged by a pure undiluted Jeffersonian, General Andrew Jackson of Tennessee, a slave owner and the commanding general in the most important victory the United States had won in the war of 1812 at New Orleans. Jackson rose from out of nowhere to win the popular vote, but he failed to capture a majority in the electoral college. So, under the rules laid down in the 12th Amendment to the Constitution, the election was thrown into the House of Representatives, where Henry Clay was the speaker of the House.

Unable to sum up enough votes to win the Presidency for himself, Clay at least preferred to stop Andrew Jackson. Clay, through his support in the House of Representatives, elected Quincy Adams President. Adams hoped to pull down the remaining resistance to what Clay was now calling his American system of banking, internal improvements and tariffs. But rumors that Quincy Adams had stroked a corrupt bargain with Henry Clay for the election robbed him of the political momentum he needed.

In 1828, Andrew Jackson was swept into the Presidency on a wave of national enthusiasm and by the united votes provided by the three-fifths clause of the South. The two terms that Andrew Jackson spent in the White House were much more successful as a revolution that Jefferson’s in 1800.

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Hamilton’s New Constitution

A nation of land owning young men might very well make for independence, but also it might very well make for stagnation. What Alexander Hamilton wanted most from life was not stagnation but mobility. Born in 1755 on the West Indian Island of Nevis, Hamilton was the illegitimate son of a Scot who abandoned the mother and the boy when he was 10 years of age.

Young Hamilton’s quickness and vividness made so great an impression on a local Presbyterian missionary, Hugh Knox, that he sent the boy to New York City for education. Hamilton entered King’s College, now of course Columbia University. Hamilton took the lead in student protest against Birtain in 1775, and was commisioned in 1776 as captain of an artillery company. He saw action in one Continental defeat after another, and suffered with the army through one humilating delay of supply after another caused by the quarreling among the States’ Continental Congress. He ended the war as one of George Wahington’s aides, and was permitted to practice law in New York in 1782.

The Lessons of War

The war taught Hamilton a number of lessons, the first of which was not to put too much trust in the virtue of people. It is not safe to trust the virtue of any people, Hamilton discovered, since the same stock of passions which generates a hatred of oppresion, can just as easily lead people to a contempt and disregard of all authority. It is not virue, said Hamilton, but power what motivates people. Men always loved power, Hamilton wrote. That might not be ideal, and, in fact, that might not be a compliment to Republicans.

The question in the Republic was not about identifying and protecting virtue, or about identifying and protecting that livelihood which automatically promotes virtue, but rather about identifying and blunting power.

Unlike Jefferson, Hamilton inherited no wealth and no land. Quite the opposite. His rise to fame began in commerce as a clerc, and continued that way as a New York City lawyer. Not surprisingly, he dimissed the Classical Republican’s paranoia about commerce, cities and manufacuring out of hand. The prosperity of commerce, Hamiton said, is not perceived and acknowledged to be the most useful, as well as the most productive source of national wealth.

The often agitated question, said Hamilton, between agriculture and commerce, has from indubitable experience received the decision which has silenced the rivalships. The decision of experience has proven, to the satisfaction of their friends, that their interests, the interest of agriculture and commerce, are intimatelly blended and interwoven. So, what if commerce did not produce virtue. Let’s face it, Hamilton said, neither really did agriculture.

The solution was not to be found in suppresing one or the other, but in harnessing them both to become a great national team. The trick, of course, was in the harnessing, because that implied a harnesser. The one thing which was clear was that the Confederation Government was incapable of harnessing together anything. On the other hand, a government strong enough to harness together agriculture and commerce appaled with Jeffersonians. That not only meant putting agriculture and commerce on the same plane, but it would require preciselly the kind and level of taxes which would corrupt the virtuous farmer.

However, to Hamilton, the mechanic and manufacturing arts furnished the materials of mercantile enterprise and industry. That, in turn, would arm the American Republic as a whole with the kind of economic power which would permit it to resist the encroachments of the English and the Spanish. For that reason, Hamilton belongs pretty firmly in the Liberal Republican current. And also for that reason, Jefferson and Hamilton became the ying and yang of the revolutionary generation.

If men were angels...

Between Jefferson and Hamilton stood James Madison. Born in 1751, Madison graduated from Princeton in 1771. Madison served in the Virginia legislature, and from 1780 to 1783 in the Continental Congress. Most of his early efforts were aimed at serving Virginia state interests, and he always remained uneasy at the prospect of a powerful national government. His hope was for a government of Classical Republican virtue. He was frank about his desire for a Constitution whose first aim would be to obtain rulers men who possess wisdom to discern and virtue to pursue the common good of society.

But Madison had learned enough at the hands of his Calvinist mentors at Presbyterian Princeton. He learned not to put too much trust in spontaneous appearence of virtue in politics. If men were angels, Madison remarked, no government would be necessary. But men were not angels, even if they were farmers. Next in importance to recruiting the virtuous to serve as rulers, a Constitution was needed to take the precautions for keeping them virtuous while they continue to hold the public trust. There is, Madison admitted, a degree of depravity in mankind which requires a certain degree of circumpensction and mistrust.

Nowhere was the need for that mistrust more evident on display than in the Confederation Congres, where the States obstructed the taxes of even the most modest import duties and defeated treaties with foreign powers on little more than whims. Without being a Liberal Republican at heart, Madison had a Liberal Republican’s head; that head told him in the 1780’s that something drastic needed to be done about the articles of the Confederation, or else the American union would dissolve and it would not matter how virtuous American farmers might actually be.

Madison and Hamilton got their chance in 1786, when a convention called to settle disputes over river rights between Virginia and Maryland broke down and forced the commissioners, including, Madison and Hamilton, to blame the brake down on the articles of Confederation, and to call for a convention of the States to rewrite them. The convention, however, when it met in Philadelphia in May of 1787, took the bit in its teeth, and instead of rewriting the articles, junked them completely, in favor of writing an entirely new Constitution that transformed the articles of independent states into a federalized union.

The Constitution of 1787 is a remarkable political document for many reasons. The most important issue at stake was establishing a strong workable union that could arbitrate state conflicts and give a sense on united national identity to the republic. What was noticebly abscent, however, was any appeal in the document to the Classical Republican virtues. Instead, the Constitution of 1787 was a document filled with a series of extremely skeptical compromises whose chief purpose was to deal with the effects of power, not to offer sermons on virtue. They meant to create mechanisms that will place one kind of power in the new republic against another.

The government, for instance, was divided into three branches: executive, legislative and judicial. Each of which was set to watchdog the other. Within the legislative branch, power was divided between a house of representatives, elected by the people; and a senate, choosen by the state legislatures. While the chief executive officer, the president, was elected through a two stage process. First by a general election and then by an electoral college.

As Madison explaines, liberty was best served by contriving the interior structure of the government, so that its several constituent parts may, by their mutual relations, be the means of keeping each other in their propper places.

So, where virtue might fail to make people cooperate, self-interest would not. If the self-interest of the various parts, not only of the government, but of the republic as a whole, were set carefully against each other, then the interest devoted to promoting itself would prevent any single one of them from obtaining control over the others.

The New Government

There was an echo with this in the Constitution’s provisions for the economic life of the republic. Or rather, the almost complete absence of any provisions for regulating the economic life of the republic. The new Constitution did not, in fact, articulate any economic policies or preferences. It merely reserved to the new federal legislature, the Congress, the power to regulate comerce with other nations, levee taxes and tariffs, pass bankrupcy laws and borrow money. More importantly, it clearly restrained the states from establishing their own economic policies.

So far, in fact, was the Constitution from prescribing any particular form of public virtue, that it managed not only to say nothing about how the economy should be build, it managed to avoid even making any reference to God or to Christianity, unlike Jefferson’s declaration. If Jefferson had been a member of the Philadelphia Convention, he quite conceivably could had made a great deal of grief for Hamilton and Madison on all of these points. But Jefferson was not there. Jefferson was serving as American minister to France. And Hamilton and Madison both mounted an effective mediate campaign on behalf of the new constitution through a series of 85 brief articles they serialized in the New York Papers, which subsequently would be known as the Federalist Papers.

By June of 1788, the Constitution had been ratified by the necessary number of states and become the new law of the land. When Madison finally wrote to Jefferson in October of 1787 to describe the new Constitution, Jefferson was predictably anenthusiastic. I like much the general idea, Jefferson replied in December. But he was not a friend of a very energetic government. Well, energetic government was precisely what he was now to witness in action.

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