American Experiment (26 page)

These leaders had witnessed other experiments too. Farmers in Massachusetts and in Pennsylvania had had a fling at rebellion. Many Southerners and a few Northerners had flirted with notions of secession. Federalists had tried their hand at repression. Jefferson and Madison had proposed nullification. Rhode Islanders had tried separatism. Through all these Washington had lived, but he died as another great experiment was coming to a head—an experiment of which he heartily disapproved. He had warned in his Farewell Address against nothing more solemnly than “the baneful effects of the Spirit of Party, generally.” But as the general was laid to rest in the family plot, overlooking the fields and the river he loved, the nation was on the eve of an election year—and the spirit of party was in command.

A supreme paradox lay behind that spirit. By the end of the 1790s the American people had started to build the foundations of a powerful two-party system. But: they did not fully know what they were doing. Nor did they believe in what they were doing. The strategy of 1787, that of checks and balances and the fragmenting of power, had been designed to prevent Americans from establishing parties. The received wisdom of the day—especially that of the most noted political and intellectual leaders—was absolutely hostile to political parties. And historians to this day have differed as to how these party foundations were built, despite the obstacles. But built they were.

The strategy of 1787 had been shaped first by a brilliant and masterful elite corps of leaders and then had been reshaped and ratified by a second cadre of nascent republicans and a “third cadre” of grass-roots leaders throughout the states. That strategy had been achieved in a few stunning acts—in Philadelphia in 1787, in the state ratifying conventions, in the framing of the Bill of Rights by Congress and the state legislatures. That strategy had been clear and purposeful; the Framers and their friends and opponents well knew what they were up to. The strategy of
party
emerged out of gropings and fumblings, short-run needs and narrow interests, local and state as well as national rivalries. It emerged less from national conventions and congresses than from taverns and coaching houses, local clubs and caucuses, town and state debates and elections, dram-shop rows
and fisticuffs. If the constitutional strategy of the 1780s was founded on consensus, the strategy of the 1790s grew out of conflict.

The wise men of the day hated the very thought of unbridled factions and parties. “If I could not go to heaven but with a party,” Jefferson said, “I would not go there at all.” They had a theory of constitutions, but they had no theory of parties. To men in power, the opposition party was not a benign adversary that someday, through the ordinary rotation of “ins” and “outs,” would come to power. The opposition party was at best divisive, factious, destructive, at worst illegitimate, conspiratorial, subversive, and, if allied secretly with the British or French, utterly traitorous. Federalists and Republicans alike looked on the other’s activities as partisan and hence as malign, their own as transcending party and faction and hence benign. Each perceived the other, whether in Congress or state legislatures, as regimented as Prussians, itself as composed of free spirits. Typically Federalists and Republicans wanted less to compete with one another than to destroy the other, or at least absorb the other.

The Constitution had been designed to balance, fragment, and overwhelm the play of party power. Staggered elections, fragmented constituencies, the separation of powers between President and Senate and House, the division of powers between nation and states—all were intended to compel conciliation among and between parties and factions, to break the thrust of popular majorities, to submerge small conflicts in a higher consensus, to promote bargaining and compromise. George Washington marvelously symbolized and practiced the constitutional strategy of consensus.

How, then, did the Americans of the 1790s build the foundations of a party system under national leaders who feared parties, under a national Constitution designed to thwart them? Historians, speaking from different schools of thought, have offered a variety of explanations. Some see the origins of American parties in the old divisions between patriots and Tories, between foes and friends of the Constitution of 1787, between early Federalists and Republicans; other historians find the origin in the searing domestic and foreign policy issues of the 1790s; others in the state and local issues of that decade; others in the elections that pitted against one another candidates who had to find campaign allies and in the process forged factional and party links with other candidates; still others in the economic, regional, ethnic, and ideological forces that divided rich and poor, Northerner and Southerner, Congregationalist and Quaker, yeoman and slaveowner.

The question, perplexing enough in itself, has been further complicated by the tendency of historians, like blind men feeling the elephant, to confuse different aspects of the party beast with the whole. They variously
perceive party as merely the existence of strong conflict over issues; or of elections and election mechanics; or of clubs or associations or movements that took on certain party forms; or of national activity such as a congressional caucus or presidential leadership of a majority; or of state and local political organizations like Tammany; or of simple contests for power between the ins and the outs. Historians have not always made clear whether they were speaking of a condition of one-party domination over a disorganized opposition, or of a two-party balance with rotation in office, or of a multi-party or multi-factional array, or of a two-party system embracing presidency, congressional majorities or minorities, state party organizations, and electoral constituencies.

Complex though they were, the origins of the American party system need not be left in a twilight zone of historical understanding. National parties seem to have originated in conflict in Congress, as Federalist and Republican factions polarized more and more around the burning questions of the day—issues between commercial and agrarian interests, between North and South, between “Anglophiles” and “Francophiles,” all of which issues came to a head in the Jay treaty, with its implications for both foreign and domestic policy. As Federalists and Republicans each developed “party lines” that tied their positions on these issues together, party rivalry in Congress became heated. At the same time rudimentary state and local parties were rising out of conflict over local issues, in turn stemming from economic needs and aspirations, competition for government jobs, continuing debate over “states’ rights” under the new Constitution. As national, state, and local politicians seized variously on national, state, and local issues for their political advantage, the levels of party development “hooked” in with one another. National issues debated in Congress ricocheted back into the states, enhancing party competition in the more politically advanced areas and helping mobilize latent conflict in the less advanced.

All these party growths did not amount, however, to a party system—that is, to two national-state-local integrated, hierarchical party structures, each firmly seated in mass partisan electorates, local leadership cadres, electoral organizations, governmental office, and popular understanding and acceptance of party conflict. The reasons party systems did not develop were not only intellectual; they were also social and cultural. American politics at the grass roots in the 1790s was still largely a politics of deference—family-centered, client-oriented, job-motivated. It was still mainly the politics of local elites, social status, patron-client dependency, acquiescence in the influence of local notables. The making of a party system would wait for the rise of widespread local cadres of issue-minded
activists who would mediate between rulers and citizenry and who would constitute the foundations of lasting party structures.

The catalyzing force in early party development was leadership—the congressional leadership of James Madison and others, state leaders who fought their electoral battles over issues old and new, as well as the local leadership—county politicians, professional men, tavernkeepers, state legislators, business and religious activists, newspaper editors—who divided, coalesced, and redivided over issues old and new. The local leaders may have learned a vague fear of party from their intellectual elders, and certainly they had to overcome the politics of deference, but they were influenced mainly by the practical need to win the next election and seize the spoils of office.

The more zealous local leaders had their forums—the thirty or forty Democratic or Republican societies that sprang up in Pennsylvania and most of the other states during the early 1790s. Nothing could have been calculated to alarm and infuriate high Federalists more than these political clubs. Modeled on American revolutionary societies such as the Sons of Liberty, inspired by the euphoria of the French Revolution in its early stages, these societies reached out to city mechanics and country yeomen alike and drew them further into the Republican embrace, thus providing counterweight to the quieter organizational efforts of Hamilton. Even more, some of the leaders aped French revolutionary ways, addressed one another as “Citizen” and “Citizeness,” and even burst into the “Marseillaise” as well as patriotic American songs. They passed countless resolutions against the Washington administration in general and Hamilton’s policies in particular. Suspecting that they had helped foment the Whiskey Rebellion, Washington had left his nonpolitical perch to denounce these “self-created societies” publicly and privately and to warn that they were a “diabolical attempt” to destroy the “fabric of human government and happiness.”

These political clubs soon withered, for they lacked the support of national leaders like Madison and Jefferson and were not geared into the slowly forming party machinery. The crucial political development of the mid-1790s was the shift of popular interest from mainly local issues to the rising national controversy over questions like Jay’s treaty and Hamilton’s bank. The retirement of Washington and the election of Adams focused the attention of state and local leaders increasingly on the nation’s capital. With Jefferson still withdrawn from divisive politics, the rising national conflict was carried to the people by a host of senators, representatives, and others. Not all these were the gladiators of history. Consider the case of the “Spitting Lyon.”

On the floor of the House of Representatives, Roger Griswold, Connecticut Federalist, disparaged the military record of Matthew Lyon, Vermont Republican. Lyon shot a stream of tobacco juice into Griswold’s face. After the House refused to expel Lyon, Griswold strode to Lyon’s desk and beat him with a cane. Lyon seized a pair of fire tongs and beat Griswold. The two men grappled and rolled on the floor until forcibly separated by other congressmen.

“Spitting Lyon” became an instant hero to Republicans, but to Federalists he was a “brute,” an “unclean beast,” “Ragged Mat, the Democrat.” A Bostonian mourned that “the saliva of an Irishman”—Lyon had been born in the old country—“should be left upon the face of an American & he, a New Englandman.” Later, not wholly by coincidence, Lyon was indicted under the Sedition Act for allegedly libelous attacks on President Adams. A Federalist justice of the Supreme Court jailed him after the jury brought in a guilty verdict. From his prison cell Lyon sent a stream of protesting articles and letters that were gleefully reprinted by the Republican press. Hailed as a martyr, the Vermonter ran again for Congress while still in jail in 1798, and won triumphant re-election.

Two years later he would enjoy the sweetest vengeance a politician could dream of; meantime, men who might not understand the philosophical differences between Jefferson and Hamilton could at least follow the case of high Federalists versus the Spitting Lyon.

By the late 1790s, thanks to Lyon and a host of other contentious politicians, conflict over issues had become nationalized. But no national party existed, except in Congress. John Adams had built a personal following within the Federalist administration, but it was not organized as a national party. Hamilton had developed a personal network reaching into the Administration and into Federalist centers throughout the states, but for party support he depended mainly on New York Federalists. James Madison had built a congressional party, organized in an informal caucus of Republican members, held together by rough party doctrine and enmity toward Federalists, and fashioned shallowly on networks of followers in congressional constituencies, but Madison retired to Virginia in 1797 just as Jefferson entered the vice-presidency.

This left Jefferson in titular command of the national Republicans, but the new Vice-President had little stomach for party leadership. The office was hardly an engine for organizing a national party, even if Jefferson had wanted to. Considering the Federalists’ sponsorship of the Alien and Sedition Acts, there was a grave question whether the Adams administration would tolerate an opposition party strong enough to win the presidency.

But the main obstacle to Jefferson’s party leadership was not political or
even personal; it was intellectual and conceptual. He still had little understanding of the possibilities of a nationally organized party that would seek to rally a majority of the people behind a Republican platform, win the presidential and congressional elections, and then translate Republican doctrines into law through control of the presidency and Senate and House majorities. The extent of Jefferson’s confusion is clear from his leadership in promoting the Kentucky and Virginia resolutions. With their bent toward nullification, states’ rights, and even secession, those resolutions were the very antithesis of the idea of majority rule through national party organization. They were also the antithesis of the strategy of party opposition, which calculated that the way to overcome a bad national administration was not to pull out of national politics and act like Chinese warlords, but to win enough votes at the next national election to drive the Federalists out of power.