Founding Partisans

 

The 2015 theatrical musical success Hamilton happily may have saved Alexander Hamilton's picture on the $10 Bill. As a long-time Hamiltonian, I am grateful for that. But Jefferson has a beautiful memorial in Washington, DC, which Hamilton does not have, although as the first Secretary of the Treasury, his statue stands in the plaza south of Washington's Treasury building. The personal and political rivalry between the two de facto founders of the two-party system dominated the first decade-plus of the republic's history, and their two alternative trajectories continue to haunt American politics after more than two centuries.

In varying degrees, the Founders feared political parties as a dangerous threat to civic republican virtue. Nonetheless, partied emerged immediately even in the period preceding the constitution's ratification. University of Texas historian and biographer H.W. Brands has chronicled the development and rise of political partisanship the early republic in Founding Partisans: Hamilton, Madison, Jefferson, Adams and the Brawling Birth of American Politics (NY: Doubleday, 2023). A topic of perennial interest in American history, his book could hardly be more timely.

Notwithstanding the Founders' (especially Washington's) disdainful stance toward political parties, which they saw as a relic of monarchical government, by the end of Washington's first term the inevitability of parties was becoming obvious. If "nothing so signaled republican virtue - nothing so demonstrated the difference between the old world of Britain and the new word of America - as the banishing of parties," nonetheless Madison himself wrote in 1792, "In every political society, parties are unavoidable."

Alexander Hamilton and John Adams were the leading (if personally opposed to each other) Federalists. Thomas Jefferson and James Madison (the latter likely more strongly than the former) had supported the new Constitution in the federalist-antifederalist conflict over ratification, but they quickly evolved into leaders of the opposition party during Washington's nominally non-partisan but generally pro-Federalist administration. Jefferson's and Madison's Democratic-Republican (or simply Republican) party largely replaced the Federalists after the election of 1800 and eventually became the ancestors of the Jacksonian Democratic Party, which is (institutionally at least) the ancestor of the contemporary Democratic Party. The original Federalist party's demise resulted din Monroe's "era of good feeling," but opposition to what became the Democratic Party eventually led to the Whig Party and then the Republican Party, the institutional ancestor of the moderns Republican Party. 

George Washington, in his "Farewell Address," cautioned against "the baneful effects of the spirit of party," which he saw as especially inimical to republican government. undoubtedly reflecting his classical education but nonetheless prophetically anticipating our present political situation centuries later, Washington warned how the "horrid enormities" of partisan dissension could cause future citizens "to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual."

The story of the ideological conflict between federalists and antifederalists prior to the constitution's ratification and then the personal and partisan political rivalry between the Hamiltonian Federalists and the Jeffersonian Republicans - and of the personal and political rivalry between my heroes Hamilton and Adams, which eventually undid the Federalists - is a familiar one, which Brands retells masterfully. There is no need to recapitulate all of that here. There are, however, a few points that particularly stand out as significant for us today.

The first is the built-in bane of American politics, the continued existence of the states as competing sovereignties. As Hamilton predicted, "The forms of your state constitutions must always give them great weight inner affairs and will make it too difficult to bend them to the pursuit of a common interests, too easy to oppose whatever they do not life and to form partial combinations subversive of the general one." Hamilton shockingly told the Constitutional Convention that the states "are not necessary for any of the great purposes of commerce, revenue, or agriculture." Brands shows how even Madison, who he shows started out as a leading pro-constitution federalist, saw the need to circumvent the state legislatures in order to found the new government directly on the people of the nation. "It will be expedient in the first place," Madison argued, "to lay the foundation of the new system in such a ratification by the people themselves of the several states as will render it clearly paramount to their legislative authorities."

The Constitution, of course, did not abolish the states, but it did try to create a single nation even while compromising with the inevitable continued existence of the states. Compromise characterized the Convention." Brands quotes Benjamin Franklin's famous table and planks analogy: "In like manner here both sides must part with some of their demands, in order that they may join in some accommodating proposition." The centrality of compromise - what elsewhere has been called a "civic bargain" - was central to the Constitution. Its notable absence from contemporary politics is but one of the differences between the character of the founding generation and our contemporary political class.

Franklin is also a good source against the excessively secularist interpretation of the founding which is increasingly in vogue in progressive circles today. "I have lived," Franklin told the Convention, "a long time, and the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth - that God governs in the affairs of men." Later, as president, John Adams would proclaim a day of fasting and prayer during the crisis with revolutionary France.

The coexistence of the states within the new nation led to the Conventions great compromises regarding representation, which resulted in such anti-democratic anomalies as the Senate and the Electoral College, both of which distort the popular will much more dangerously than they did when the country was so much smaller.

The other important are of constitutional compromise was, of course, slavery. According the Madison, "the great division of interests in the United States" depended on states' "having or not having slaves." The rivalry between northern and southern states would be significant for the formation and evolution of political parties, although the long-term damage inflicted on the new nation by its compromise with slavery would only become fully evident in the following century.

So familiar are we with the glorious story of the Constitutional Convention and the Administration of our first president, that we may need to be reminded - as Brands does so well - what a struggle it was to get the constitution ratified and the new government actually up and running. While so many of the unsuccessful antifederalist arguments may be easily dismissed if not entirely forgotten, some seem significantly prescient.  Virginia's George Mason worried whether the President's unlimited pardoning power "may be sometimes exercised to screen from punishment those whom he had secretly instigated to commit the crime, and thereby prevent a discovery of his own guilt." And then there was Jefferson's worry that "a determined incumbent" President "will pretend false votes, would play, hold possession of the reins of government, be supported by the states voting for him." 

Many a present problem was already anticipated in the founding era, which for all its greatness "couldn't have been more myopic" in the item devised for electing presidents.  Brands notes "three misapprehensions" of the framers. "One was that Americans would remain content to let their chief executive be chosen by electors insulated from the popular will." (Already by 1800, Georgia, South Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, Virginia Maryland, and Pennsylvania all chose presidential electors by popular vote.) The second "was the assumption that the break with Britain had banished the role of parties from American politics." The third - perhaps most astonishing to modern readers - "was that the presidency wasn't a particular prize." In fact, the originally intended electoral system broke down almost immediately. It resulted in awkward inconvenience in 1796 and a constitutional crisis in 1800. Partially repaired by the 12th Amendment, the Electoral College was demonstrating its potential for mischief early on. 

Anyone sympathetic to the Hamiltonian-Federalist vision for America has to regret the historical loss of opportunity created by the unfortunate personal rivalry between Hamilton and Adams - two personalities so monumentally gifted politically but deeply flawed personally.  That said, the estrangement between the two contributed to Adams' defeat in 1800, setting the stage for the first-ever peaceful transfer of power. Brands quotes a contemporary account of Jefferson's inauguration in 1801: "the changes of administration, which in every government and in every age have most generally Beene epochs of confusion, villainy and bloodshed, in this our happy country take place without any species of distraction or disorder."

Or at least it did until 2020! Whatever his other faults, Jefferson got it right when he said at his inaugural that, the election having been decided constitutionally, " all will of course arrange themselves under the will of the law and unite in common efforts for the common good." In that same speech, he warned his countrymen against "a political intolerance as despotic [as religious intolerance], as wicked, and capable of as bitter and bloody persecutions."

Founding Partisans celebrates the way the founding generation successful negotiated the inevitability of political disagreements and the formation of political parties in a way which preserved and fostered the common good through the vehicle of popular republican government. Its lessons for us today are many.