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.
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.
If leaders such as Adams and Jefferson failed to understand the strategy of national parties, could anyone else have done so? We know of only one man who did—William Manning, a farmer and tavernkeeper in North Billerica, Massachusetts. Around 1797 Manning wrote a tract entitled “The Key of Libberty.” To counter the organized upper-class power of merchants, lawyers, ministers, and doctors, he called for a “Society to be composed of all the Republicans & Labourers in the United States” and organized on a class (educational), town, county, state, “Continental,” and even international basis. The associations would be composed of only those who “Labour for a living.” After intense political education in small classes with access to a library and magazines, the associations would mass their power against the elite at the polls. The “ondly Remidy” against existing evils, he wrote, “is by improveing our Rights as freemen in elections,” as long as “we ware posesed of knowledge anough to act rationally in them.” Manning concluded his tract with a constitution that spelled out the structure and powers of the new association.
The annals of the poor. All we know about Manning is that he marched to Concord on a famous April day but arrived too late to fight at the bridge, that he later served two terms as a Billerica selectman, and that he wrote one of the most prescient tracts in American history. And we know one other thing about him—that he submitted his manuscript, with the words formed one by one as though by a child, and with countless misspellings, to the Independent Chronicle, the only pro-Jefferson newspaper in Boston. The newspaper did not publish “The Key of Libberty,” however, for the editor about this time was arraigned for seditious libel under the Sedition Act. The editor died before his trial came on; his brother and clerk went to jail. By chance Manning’s papers survived.
We will never know how many other village intellectuals were thinking in as radical and creative terms as Manning, while the nation’s political leaders were occupied by thoughts of repression and secession. The nation would wait many years before finding another untutored thinker who would unite so brilliantly the concepts of thought and action, knowledge and power.
If, as Presidents and historians agreed, a dominant theme of the early republic was “the idea of America as an experiment, undertaken in defiance of history, fraught with risk, problematic in outcome,” how was the experiment faring by the end of the first decade? That question had to be asked, for experimentation, no matter how unwitting or radical, must not only tolerate testing in terms of certain general criteria—it requires such testing. Otherwise experiments would serve only as mindless leaps into the dark. But by what criteria—by what general values, principles, purposes—could the experiment be assayed? New generations would advance new standards of judgment, but the initial criteria for the early republic had to be those of early Americans themselves.
The first was of course sheer survival, as a people, as a nation. The Declaration of Independence, in trumpeting the unalienable rights of man, listed “life” before liberty, “safety” before happiness. The Constitution was carefully framed to gain the economic and military strength of a larger republic without threatening the security of individual states. Some Americans had greeted this effort with skepticism. To convert a continent into a republic, said Patrick Henry, was “a work too great for human wisdom.” It was impossible, said another doubter, “for one code of laws to suit Georgia and Massachusetts.” The constitutional solution was a radical and previously untested challenge to traditional republican thought, one that, in Benjamin Barber’s recent words, “turned the nation’s early years into an unprecedented historical experiment,” and one that could be met only by a people that, according to James Madison, had not allowed “a blind veneration for antiquity, for custom, or for names, to overrule the suggestions of their own good sense, the knowledge of their own situation, and the lessons of their own experience.” For a decade, at least, the experiment in federalism had survived, despite efforts toward nullification and secession—and despite, as well, unrest and some violence at home, bloodshed along the western borders, and conflict with two great powers abroad.
National survival required economic strength. Agriculture continued to be the main American production during the 1790s, and agriculture continued to boom. Stimulated by better techniques of fertilization, crop rotation, erosion control, and other improvements, crop output skyrocketed in some places. Cotton exports from the Carolina coast rose from about 10,000 pounds a year at decade’s start to 8 million pounds by decade’s end. Wheat and corn production expanded in the North and West.
Commerce also grew. Exports rose strongly from an average of $20 million annually in the early 1790s to four times that by decade’s end. Imports increased about fivefold during the 1790s. With population surging in the Ohio and Mississippi valleys, the sinews of continental strength were evident in the growth of manufactories, the expansion of trade especially along the big rivers, and the blossoming of ports like New Orleans. While road conditions typically ranged from fair to poor, and most rivers still had to be forded, men were building more bridges and establishing ferries. By 1800 New Yorkers were boasting of their Cayuga Bridge, more than one mile long and three lanes wide.
National strength gained from a burgeoning population. Between 1790 and 1800 the population spurted from about 3.9 million to about 5.3 million. Ohio and Mississippi were among the fastest-growing areas. Most of the rise was due to the fecundity of Americans, especially of American farm parents needing sons to help till the fields; immigration probably amounted to only about 50,000 persons for the whole decade.
Of the immigrants, those from the Briti
sh Isles still predominated. But among the newcomers were people from less-known places—Oyo, Dahomey, Benin, Biafra, usually by way of Barbados and other Caribbean islands. These were African slaves. Kidnapped from their villages, sold often by other Africans to European traders for cloth or liquor or guns, herded in chains onto slave ships, they had survived the horrors of the Atlantic passage—heat, filth, stench, disease, hopeless efforts at resistance to be herded into slave-trading ports for sale mainly to planters.
National security, individual safety, economic well-being—as these fundamental needs were to a substantial degree satisfied for much of the population, other, “higher” needs were created or enhanced. Probably the most powerful of these in the 1790s was for individual liberty. Here the record was mixed. Congress had passed, and the states had ratified, a Bill of Rights of wide scope and noble sentiments. The flush of prosperity doubtless had broadened economic opportunity and liberty of choice for many Americans. The passage and enforcement of the Alien and Sedition Laws, however, had shown how frail was the defense of these liberties. The enactment of these laws could be explained, but to explain is not to excuse. The Sedition Act lay like a blot across the luminous pages of the Bill of Rights.
Equality, like liberty, was as powerful in its appeal to early Americans as it was amorphous in meaning. “All men are created equal,” proclaimed the Declaration of Independence, before even mentioning the ideal of liberty. But informed Americans had little thought that the ideal of equality required collective action to help equalize the conditions of men born in poverty, ignorance, disease, malnutrition, and despair; they would have been aghast at the notion, if indeed they could even grasp it. Rather the term meant to most Americans the idea that men were created equal only in their God-given natural rights to life, liberty, and property.
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