A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror (32 page)

Ideologically, Republicans clung to the Anti-Federalists’ radical Whig embrace of small, democratic, decentralized government. They accepted the Constitution, but they read and interpreted it closely (strict constructionism), with special attention to the first ten amendments. In this spirit they retained their suspicion of direct taxation and standing armies; in foreign policy they were naturally drawn to the radical French Revolutionaries. Federalists, on the other hand, continued their drift toward a policy of expansive, vigorous national government—certainly not a monarchy or coercive state, but a government that nevertheless could tax, fight, regulate commerce, and provide Hamilton’s revered “general welfare” for all Americans. Federalists wanted a viable army and a foreign policy that courted New England’s foremost trading partner, Great Britain.

Members of both parties strongly believed in republican government and the division of power; both aimed to use the Constitution to govern fairly and avoid a return to authoritarianism; and both ultimately rejected violence as a legitimate means of achieving their political goals. While both groups feared tyranny, only the Federalists thought it likely to come from the masses as easily as from a monarch, with Adams arguing that “unbridled majorities are as tyrannical and cruel as unlimited despots.”
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One supremely important issue was missing from the list: slavery. It would be hard to claim that the Federalists were antislave, especially with slaveholders such as Washington at the helm. On the other hand, it would seem to be equally difficult to paint the small-government Republicans as proslave. Yet that is exactly the direction in which each party, respectively, was headed. Because of their view of general welfare and equality for all, but even more so because of their northern origins, the Federalists laid the framework for ultimately insisting that all men are created equal, and that included
anyone
defined as a man. Under other circumstances, few Republicans would have denied this, or even attempted to defend the proslavery position. Their defense of states’ rights, however, pushed them inevitably into the proslavery corner.

How to Recognize a 1790s Republican or Federalist
*

Sometime in the early 1790s, Madison employed his political savvy in officially creating the Jeffersonian Republican Party. He began his organization in Congress, gathering and marshaling representatives in opposition to Hamilton’s reports and Jay’s Treaty. To counter the Hamiltonian bias of John Fenno’s influential
Gazette of the United States
, Madison, in 1791, encouraged Freneau to publish a rival Republican newspaper, the
National Gazette.
Madison himself wrote anonymous
National Gazette
editorials lambasting Hamilton’s three reports and Washington’s foreign policy. He simultaneously cultivated national support, encouraged grassroots Republican political clubs, and awaited an opportunity to thwart the Federalists’ electoral dominance. When Jefferson resigned as secretary of state in protest in 1793, the stage was set for the first national electoral showdown between Republicans and Federalists.

It is true these were not parties in the modern sense of the word.
⁵⁹
They lacked ward/precinct/district organizations; since voting was still the privilege of a few, they did not rely on “getting out the vote.” The few existing party papers were not comparable in influence to those of the Jacksonian age twenty years later. Most important, these parties still relied on ideology—the person’s philosophy or worldview—to produce votes; whereas the Second American Party System, founded by Martin Van Buren and William Crawford in the 1820s, was built on a much more crass principle, patronage. Still, these organs did galvanize those holding the franchise into one of two major groups, and to that extent they generated excitement during elections.

Democracy’s First Test

Whereas Hamilton crafted the major Federalist victories of the 1790s, Vice President John Adams dutifully defended them. After Washington, unwilling to serve a third term, finally announced his retirement in 1796, Adams became his party’s de facto standard-bearer against Jefferson in the nation’s first contested presidential election. At an early point, then, the nation came to this key crossroads: could the people transfer power, without bloodshed, from one group to another group holding views diametrically opposed to the first group?

Federalists enjoyed a distinct advantage, thanks to Washington’s popularity and the lateness of his retirement announcement (the Republicans did not dare announce opposition until it was certain the venerated Washington would not run). Yet Jefferson’s popularity equaled that of the tempestuous Adams, and the two joined in a lively race, debating the same issues that raged in Congress—Jay’s Treaty, the BUS, national debt, and taxation, especially the whiskey tax.

Adams’s worst enemy turned out to be a former ally, Hamilton, whom the vice president referred to as “a Creole bastard,” and whom Abigail Adams termed Cassius, out to assassinate her Caesar.
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Hamilton distrusted Adams, whom he considered too moderate, and schemed to use the electoral college to elect Federalist vice presidential candidate Thomas Pinckney to the presidency. Similar machinations would reemerge in 1800, when Hamilton and Aaron Burr both tried to manipulate the electoral college for their Machiavellian ends. Under the system in place at the time, the electors voted separately for president and vice president, leaving open the possibility that there could be a president of one party and a vice president of another. (Bundling the two together did not occur until later.) The Founders had anticipated that each state would vote for its own favorite son with one vote, and for the next best candidate with the other elector. Adams won with 71 electoral votes to Jefferson’s 68; Pinckney gathered 59, and Aaron Burr, Jefferson’s vice presidential running mate, finished last with 30. Yet it was a divided and bitter victory. Georgia’s ballot had irregularities that put Adams, in his capacity as presider over the Senate, which counted the votes, in a pickle. If he acknowledged the irregularities, the election could be thrown open because no candidate would have a majority. Adams took the unusual step of sitting down when Georgia’s ballot was handed to him, thereby giving the Jeffersonians an opportunity to protest the ballot. Jefferson, aware of the incongruities, instructed his followers to say nothing. After a moment, Adams affirmed the Georgia ballot and thereby assumed the presidency. This Constitutional confusion (which would soon be corrected by the Twelfth Amendment) made Adams’s rival Jefferson his reluctant vice president. Adams seemed not to mind this arrangement, thinking that at least “there, if he could do no good, he could do no harm.”
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But the arrangement was badly flawed, ensuring constant sniping at the administration from within and a reluctance to pass legislation because of the anticipation that a new election would bring Jefferson into power. Indeed, Jefferson and Madison immediately began to look to the election of 1800.

Two months earlier, President Washington had delivered his famed Farewell Address. Physically and mentally wearied by decades of service, and literally sickened by the political bickering that characterized his last term in office, Washington decided to step down. He was also motivated by a desire to set a precedent of serving only two terms, a move that evinced the strong fear of authoritarianism shared by all Whig Revolutionaries, Federalist and Republican alike. The Constitution placed no limit on the number of terms a chief executive could serve, but Washington set such a limit on himself, and every president adhered to the 1796 precedent until 1940. Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s reversal (via third and fourth terms), even if coming as it did during national crises, so concerned the nation that the Twenty-second Amendment (1951) was added to the Constitution, making Washington’s practice a fundamental law.

Appropriately, Washington’s farewell speech was written to a great extent by Hamilton, although the president read and edited several drafts. The address called for nationalism, neutrality, and nonpartisanship; Republicans no doubt pondered over the sincerity of Washington’s and Hamilton’s last two points. Certainly, nationalism was a Federalist hallmark, and Washington reiterated his deep belief in the need for union versus the potential dangers of regionalism, states’ rights, and “geographical distinction.” In foreign policy, the chief executive reemphasized the goals of his Proclamation of Neutrality—to offer friendship and commerce with all nations, but to “steer clear” of “political connection…and permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world.”

Much has been made of Washington’s warning not to become involved in European affairs—this, after having just cemented new international trade agreements with Spain and Great Britain! Washington knew better than to think the United States could isolate itself permanently. He stated, “Twenty years peace with such an increase of population and resources as we have a right to expect; added to our remote situation from the jarring powers, will in all probability enable us in a
just cause to bid defiance to any power on earth
” [emphasis ours].
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His concern that the young nation would be drawn into strictly Continental squabbles, especially those between Britain and France, reflected not an unwillingness to engage in the international use of power, but an admission of the weakness of American might. In North America, for example, Washington himself had virtually instigated the French and Indian War, so he certainly was under no illusions about the necessity for military force, nor did he discount the ability of the Europeans to affect America with their policies. Rather, the intent was to have the United States lay low and
where prudent
refrain from foreign interventions. Note that Washington gave the United States twenty years to gain international maturity, a time frame ending with the the War of 1812.
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Further, America’s insulation by the oceans kept these goals at the core of American foreign policy for the next century, until transportation and communication finally rendered them obsolete. But would Washington, a man willing to fight for liberty, have stood by and allowed an Adolf Hitler to invade and destroy England, or Japanese aggressors to rape Nanking? His phrase, “in a just cause,” suggests not.

Finally, and incongruously, Washington cautioned against political partisanship. This phrase, penned by Hamilton, at best was a call to better behavior on all sides and at worst was simply a throwaway phrase for public consumption. Washington apparently did not see Hamilton’s scheming and political maneuvering as partisan endeavor, and therefore saw no irony in the pronouncement.

Concluding with an appeal to the sacred, as he frequently did, Washington stated that “Religion and Morality are indispensable supports.”
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It would be hopeless, he implored, to think that men could have “security for property, for reputation, for life if the sense of
religious obligation
desert the oaths” of officeholders [emphasis ours]. In such arenas as the Supreme Court, where oaths provided enforcement of those protections, Washington somberly noted, mere morality alone could not survive without “religious principle.” His speech was the quintessential embodiment of a phrase often ridiculed more than two hundred years later, “Character counts.” Washington’s warning to the nation, though, was that effective government required more than a chief executive of high moral fiber—the entire nation had to build the country on the backs of its citizens’ behavior. Having delivered this important speech, the general quietly finished out his term and returned to his beloved Virginia, attending one last emotional ceremony inaugurating his vice president, John Adams, after he had won the election of 1796.