Notes

The leaders of the American Revolution made three great gambles. First, they sought independence from the powerful British Empire, becoming the first colonies in the Americas to revolt and seek independence from their mother empire. Second, they formed a union of thirteen states, which was also unprecedented, for the colonies had long histories of bickering with one another. Third, the revolutionaries committed their new states to a republic, then a radical and risky form of government. In a republic, the people were the sovereign—rejecting the rule of a monarch and aristocrats. Today we take for granted that governments elected by the people can be stable, long lasting, and effective. But the Americans in the new nation were not so sure, given the lessons of history. In 1789, the United States was the only large republic in the world; the others were a handful of small city-states scattered in Europe, and none of the larger republics in the history of the world had lasted very long. Like the ancient republic of Rome, they had collapsed and reverted to some form of tyranny, usually by a military dictator.

Any one of those three gambles was an enormous risk. The miracle was that the revolutionaries pulled off all three of them, winning their war against the British, and securing a generous boundary in the peace treaty of 1783: west to the Mississippi, south to Florida, and north to the Great Lakes, with the Atlantic Ocean as the eastern boundary.

During the mid-1780s, however, the new nation seemed about to collapse as quickly as it had been created. The first constitution of the United States was the Articles of Confederation, adopted in 1781. It proved too weak to control the powerful state governments. Unable directly to tax people, the confederation lacked its own revenue and could not afford an army or a navy, or even to pay the interest on its massive war debt. American Indians defied the confederation, and the Europeans insisted that no republic could endure on such a big geographic scale.

Plus the states were roiled by social conflicts between the wealthy gentlemen and the common people over issues of credit or debt. Gentlemen faulted the state governments for pandering to common voters by offering to relieve debtors at the expense of their creditors, those gentlemen who had loaned them money and goods. The gentlemen concluded that the state governments were too democratic, which meant too responsive to public opinion. And when a rare state government did favor the creditors, it provoked resistance from armed farmers.

In 1787 alarmed gentlemen gathered in Philadelphia for a constitutional convention meant to shift power away from the states in favor of the nation. After a heated political debate between the Federalists (in favor of the Constitution) and the Antifederalists in state ratification conventions, eleven of the thirteen states ratified the new Constitution in 1787 and 1788. The laggard two would join within the following three years, once promised a bill of rights to amend the Constitution.

Brief and often vague, the US Constitution left much to the interpretation of the leaders who implemented the new government. Today, we celebrate the Constitution as if it put the nation on autopilot to greatness. In fact, the new federal government would rise or fall, become strong or remain weak, depending on the decisions made by the leaders and voters.

In 1789 the new American republic seemed to teeter between future greatness and imminent collapse. Unlike present-day Americans, the leaders of the early republic could not comfort themselves with a long and successful history of free and united government. Although endowed with an immense potential, the United States was then a new and weak country in a world of more powerful empires deeply suspicious of republican government.

The American experiment in independence, union, and republicanism seemed especially unstable because the thirteen states were so different. The commercial states of the North contrasted with the agricultural South, and the new settlements west of the Appalachians feared domination by the old eastern communities of the Atlantic seaboard. Many observers expected the union and republic would eventually but inevitably collapse in some civil war either between the North and South or between the East and West.

When the newly elected Congress and President gathered to implement the Constitution, the federal government benefitted from extraordinary leadership at the top. The dignified president, George Washington, was revered for commanding the Revolutionary army to victory over the mighty British. His vice president, John Adams, had a genius for political theory. The new Cabinet included Alexander Hamilton, high-strung but the leading financial genius in the nation, as well as the mercurial Thomas Jefferson, who served as the secretary of state. The primary author of the new Constitution, James Madison, became the Speaker of the House of Representatives. Madison, Washington, and Jefferson came from Virginia, the largest state in territory, population, and wealth. Adams hailed from Massachusetts and Hamilton from New York.

But the new leaders soon divided into rival political parties, a development that shocked them all, for they had designed the Constitution to discourage organized partisanship. Washington, Adams, and Hamilton claimed the name of Federalists, while Jefferson and Madison organized an opposition known as the Democratic-Republicans, or Republicans (which should not be confused with the Republican Party of today).

The two parties polarized over four big issues: political economy, foreign policy, how to interpret the Constitution, and the proper nature of a republic. First, the Republicans sought to preserve the nation’s agricultural economy out of a conviction that it alone could sustain a relatively simple and equal class structure for white men. The Federalists, however, hoped to accelerate industrial development, which might enrich the nation as a whole but produce greater extremes of wealth and poverty, power, and powerlessness.

Second, the two parties divided over how to react to the renewed warfare between the two superpowers of the age: France and Britain. After the French Revolution created a radical republic, the Republicans favored France, while the Federalists preferred the more conservative government of Britain.

Third, the two parties disagreed over whether the Constitution should be read narrowly or broadly. Federalists insisted that the document contained broad implicit powers that would enable the federal government to subordinate the states. But the Republicans insisted on a limited and literal interpretation that reserved to the states all of the powers not specifically assigned by the Constitution to the federal government. This clash of interpretations appeared in 1791, when Hamilton proposed a national bank to manage the economy. The Republicans opposed the bank as a measure that would strengthen the federal government at the expense of the states, and they could find no specific authorization for a national bank in the Constitution. In this case, Hamilton prevailed.

Fourth, the two parties clashed over the proper definition of a republic. Republicans supported a democratic vision of the republic where the public opinion of common men guided their leaders. The Federalists, however, defended a more traditional republic, where the common people deferred to the judgment of wealthier and better-educated gentlemen. They asserted a subtle but important distinction between a republic, which they supported, and a democracy, which they feared. A Massachusetts congressman, George Cabot, described the ideal republic as “a perfect whole in which the general harmony is preserved, each one learning his proper place and keeping to it.” In the Federalists’ republic, the common men were supposed to vote for the right sort of people—the wealthy and well born—and between elections the people were supposed to keep quiet and stay home, permitting the elected to govern as they saw fit.

Where Federalists spoke of themselves as “Fathers of the People,” the Republicans preferred the more egalitarian identity as “Friends of the People.” While the Federalists offered social stability, the Republicans promised social mobility. During the 1790s, most Americans preferred stability, but the majority would swing at the start of the new century.

Like the Federalist leaders, the prominent Republicans were well-educated gentlemen, but they felt more comfortable with appealing to common voters. The Federalists denounced the leading Republicans as rogue gentlemen, as unprincipled “demagogues” who pandered to the common people with flattery and hollow promises. Such demagogues sought power by warning the common people to reject the Federalists as British-style aristocrats who wanted to ruin the republic so that they could install a king. Of course, the Federalists insisted that they defended the republic against the lies and the greed of the demagogues.

The Republicans cared primarily for the rights of free white men, who alone could vote in most of the states. The Republicans catered to the desires of common white men to preserve their legal rights over their wives and their slaves. And the Republicans promised to provide farms for the next generation by taking western land from the American Indians. The paternalism of the Federalists led them to offer a little more protection to the rights of free blacks and a little more room for women to express themselves in politics. Because free blacks generally voted Federalist, they usually lost the franchise when Republicans rewrote state constitutions. The same happened to widows in New Jersey, the one state in which women could vote until the Republicans came to power there. And, although the Federalists shared the national goal of western expansion, they proceeded more cautiously and slowly, treating the Indian nations with a little more diplomatic respect and generosity than did the Republicans.

Each party saw the other as bent on destroying the republic. In their bitter conflict with one another, they might have done so. Hostile to the concept of political parties, neither group accepted the legitimacy of the other. Both the Federalists and the Republicans believed that their party alone represented the public will and defended the public good. Consequently, their opponents had to be insidious conspirators determined to destroy both freedom and union. The partisans were so shrill because the stakes seemed so high: nothing less than the survival of free government in the United States, deemed the last, best hope for liberty in the world.