Penguin History of the United States of America

by Hugh Brogan

  He also aroused voluble opposition. The assumption of state debts meant that those states (such as Virginia) which had paid what they owed now had to bear part of the burden of the debts of those states (such as Massachusetts) which had been dilatory or inefficient. The decision to make payments from the national funds only to actual holders of national paper, such as speculators, not to the original purchasers, who had often been forced to part with their holdings at a huge loss, seemed unfair, especially in the case of the Revolutionary War veterans, who had been paid with certificates instead of cash and, to avoid starvation, had had to part with the certificates for whatever they would fetch, which was never their face value. Hamilton was inflexible: to secure the national credit it was necessary to make no exceptions, no concessions, even if the ‘improvident many’ suffered. When in 1794 the excise provoked a rebellion among the small whisky producers of western Pennsylvania, Hamilton led an army across the Appalachians against them. No wonder he became unpopular, so much so that, as he admitted himself, only Washington’s great name protected him. He was also a restless and ruthless political intriguer, which alienated many political leaders. Jefferson had endorsed the assumption of the state debts and secured the acquiescence of Southern Congressmen in it by winning a promise that the federal capital city should be set up on the banks of the river Potomac, on the border between Maryland and Virginia; but when, a year later, a Bank of the United States was proposed, he opposed it as unconstitutional. He thought that its real purpose was to establish ‘an engine of influence’ by which Hamilton could recruit members of Congress to his capitalist phalanx; or, in plain language, corrupt them; nor was Jefferson wholly wrong. He began to resist Hamilton steadily within the administration; Madison was already doing so in Congress. Two new factions began to form: the followers of Hamilton took to themselves the honoured name of Federalist; his opponents began to call themselves Republicans.

  Thanks to its proliferation of elections, the multiplication of its interest groups, the great extent of its territory, the assertiveness of its citizens and, not least, the ambitions of its politicians, the United States has always been fertile ground for party politics; but it is doubtful if even Alexander Hamilton could have provoked the emergence of a full-scale national party system had there been no other developments. The Anglo-French war changed everything. Everyone, as has been remarked, favoured neutrality; but neutrality, as has also been shown, was horribly difficult to maintain. The question before the American people therefore tended to become, not how might neutrality be preserved, but which side should the United States favour?

  This question dovetailed all too easily into the controversy between the Federalists and the Republicans. Even the retirement of Jefferson from the Cabinet in 1793, and that of Hamilton in 1795, did not assuage the conflict. For here was a major issue of principle and policy. On the one hand (argued Hamilton) was the chance to use the great crisis to settle the outstanding issues with Great Britain. The need for American co-operation would induce the old country to remove her troops at last from American soil by vacating Fort Detroit and the other posts she still held in the North-West; an agreement would prepare the way for American traders to gain access to the markets of the British Empire, officially closed to them since 1783. All this, for the price only of quarrelling with the dangerous French Jacobins. On the other hand (said the Jeffersonians) was the Republic’s truest ally, France, now a great sister-republic, who had thrown open her West Indian possessions to American traders. The way to get similar concessions from corrupt, monarchical Britain was not by alliance but by stern measures. Madison proposed discriminatory duties against British commerce; others advocated an embargo, or the sequestration of British debts. Andrew Jackson, who entered the House of Representatives as a fiery Republican in 1796, looked forward to the day when a French invasion would transform Britain herself into a republic.

  The first great trial of strength between these views came when Jay’s Treaty was laid before the Senate for ratification in 1795. This instrument had been negotiated in London by the Chief Justice of the United States, John Jay: it was an attempt, inspired by Hamilton, to arrive at an understanding which would preserve peaceful relations between Britain and America. The British made minimal concessions, but they did agree to vacate the North-Western forts. They might have conceded more had not Hamilton secretly informed them of the minimum terms that Jay was empowered to accept – an action which was tantamount to treason. Naturally, the British held out for the best terms they could get; and the result was a treaty which President Washington himself accepted only with the greatest reluctance. It was four months before he could bring himself to submit it to the Senate, which very nearly rejected it; and then it was two months more before he could bring himself to sign it (August 1795). The country was bitterly divided: as one Federalist had rightly predicted, ‘the success of Mr Jay will secure peace abroad, and kindle war at home’. For in effect the treaty required the Americans to acquiesce in Britain’s arrogant maritime polices for the duration of the war: it seemed to many an intolerable national humiliation. The fight against the treaty drew Jefferson back into public life from his unsuccessful struggle to bring some order into his personal finances, and marks the real beginning of the American party system.

  Yet many of the issues which were so hotly debated do not look very real today. The Federalists did indeed include, as their enemies alleged, some fanatical anti-democrats; men who maintained, in almost caricature form, the traditional eighteenth-century distrust of ‘the swinish multitude’. The majority were sensible men. So were the majority of Republicans, though a few were posturing pseudo-Jacobins and a great many were noisily egalitarian Westerners. The two groups had far more in common than they would admit, and alike had the good of their country at heart. This is well symbolized by the relations between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams.

  These two old friends and collaborators were rivals for the Presidency in 1796, after Washington had insisted on escaping at last to Mount Vernon. Jefferson was the inevitable Republican candidate, Adams the only Federalist who could beat him. Adams’s long and outstanding record as a patriot, especially his service in the Continental Congress and as revolutionary emissary to Holland and France; his courage and integrity; the reliance which Washington had increasingly come to place on him; his prickly intelligence and warm heart; above all, the fact that he was sure to carry the states of New England, his native region, compelled his adoption as the Federalist candidate, to Hamilton’s great annoyance; for the very qualities which would make him a worthy successor to Washington, including the fact that he was no party man, meant that he would be nobody’s tool, and certainly not Hamilton’s. So the former Secretary of the Treasury embarked on a desperate intrigue to keep both Jefferson and Adams out of the Presidency. He hoped to foist the insignificant Federalist Vice-Presidential candidate on the country. As it turned out, he nearly gave away the election to Jefferson, who came within three electoral votes of Adams (sixty-eight to seventy-one); and when news of his treachery leaked out Adams was bitterly angry. He never forgave Hamilton; the Republicans crowed that ‘when a little Alexander [Hamilton was only five feet seven in height] dreams himself to be ALEXANDER THE GREAT… he is very apt to fall into miserable intrigues’. The way seemed open for collaboration between Adams and Jefferson, who was now Vice-President.10 For one thing, Adams disliked the Hamiltonian financial programme as much as Jefferson did, for the same reasons. He was particularly distrustful of the Bank of the United States.

  However, the behaviour of the French made a reconciliation between Adams and Jefferson impossible and postponed the day of an open breach between Adams and Hamilton. In 1797 revolutionary France thought herself on the brink of final victory over all her enemies. Only Britain and her satellite (which is what the United States seemed, since Jay’s Treaty, to be) still held out; the time had come to finish with both. Plans matured for an invasion of the British Isles and privateers were dispatched
to wreck American maritime trade: over 300 merchantmen flying the Stars and Stripes were sunk or captured; and French diplomatic insolence brought the two countries to the very edge of war. So while Jefferson at Monticello drank success to General Bonaparte, Adams and his Cabinet (which he had inherited from Washington: it was packed with Hamiltonians) began to make plans in a very different spirit. The navy must be strengthened and an army recruited, which General Washington was summoned from retirement to lead (to Adams’s intense vexation he insisted on Hamilton as his second in command). Jefferson gave up Adams as an ‘Anglomane’ and a ‘monocrat’. By 1800 the President and the Vice-President were no longer on speaking terms.

  Meanwhile the hastening march of the country to the brink of war produced ever-deeper political divisions. In 1798 an Alien Act and a Sedition Act were passed by the Federalist-dominated Congress, the ostensible purpose of which was to protect the country against French intrigue, but which were really meant to assail Republican journalists and politicians. By way of counter-stroke, in 1799 Jefferson and Madison secretly drafted the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions (adopted by the legislatures of those states) which denounced the Alien and Sedition Acts in the name of the Bill of Rights, and proclaimed that the state governments had the right to settle, in the last resort, the question of whether actions by the federal government were constitutional or not. (This provoked counter-resolutions by all the states north of Virginia, asserting that the right of interpretation rested with the courts.) Then the spectre of war with France began to recede: to the intense indignation of the High Federalist war-party, Adams dismissed Hamilton’s allies from his Cabinet and sent a new envoy to France, who was able to negotiate a settlement. It was a notable stroke of policy, but it determined Hamilton to get rid of John Adams. The election of 1800 was a lively one.

  Party feeling was indeed bitter, and party organization reached a peak not seen again for a generation. After his victory, which the Federalist split made more or less inevitable, Jefferson liked to talk of the ‘Revolution of 1800’; but the upshot was much less dramatic than such a phrase implies. Albert Gallatin became Secretary of the Treasury and carried out his duties with extreme Republican frugality, but the Hamiltonian system was not dismantled. This was just as well: President Jefferson’s greatest achievement, the purchase of Louisiana, was made possible only by foreign loans, which would not have been forthcoming if Hamilton had not established the credit of the United States so solidly. Madison, as Secretary of State, found that foreign policy was no easier for a Republican than it had been for Federalists; and Jefferson quarrelled quite as bitterly with Vice-President Aaron Burr, the leader of the New York Republicans, as John Adams had quarrelled with Alexander Hamilton, leader of the New York Federalists. Then a duel between Hamilton and Burr in 1804 resulted in the death of the one and the disgrace of the other. In 1809, when Jefferson retired, Madison succeeded him; the Republicans were solidly entrenched in power; yet still everything went on much as it had under the Federalists. An old friend presently reconciled Adams and Jefferson.

  The underlying agreements of the American political élite had at last reasserted themselves. Once the disturbing influence of Hamilton was removed and the intransigence of Britain had finally settled the question of what America’s foreign policy should be, there was very little to quarrel about. So the first blossoming of national party politics was coming to an end by, at latest, the 1816 Presidential election, the last which the Federalists ever contested, for they were overwhelmed. Still, the American people had taken to party warfare with significant eagerness. The journalists of the two factions had proved themselves champions at scurrility and abuse (for example, it was alleged that Jefferson had fathered a large illegitimate family on one of his slaves).11 The minor politicians of the various states had shown boundless energy and ingenuity in working for each other’s downfall, and some of them were of the opinion that politics was as good a way of getting rich as any other. Ordinary Americans enjoyed the carnival aspect of politics: the speeches, the processions, the banquets, the racecourse excitement; they had also shown that they could be deeply stirred when they thought that great issues were at stake. The triumph of the Republicans had been due as much to their ability to rouse their fellow-citizens, and to the Federalists’ disdainful reluctance to compete, as to any intrinsic virtue in their cause.

  So the lull that followed the collapse of the Federalists did not last for very long. The old Revolutionary elite was disappearing. The Father of his Country had died in 1799; Adams and Jefferson lived on and on (eventually dying on the same day, which by a wonderful coincidence was 4 July 1826 – the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence) but they held no office. Presidents Madison and Monroe followed Jefferson into complete retirement as they had followed him in the Presidency. Inevitably, new men came to the fore: men without shared memories of the great struggle.

  The country itself was changing too rapidly to be managed any longer by the arts of gentlemanly politics. By 1820 there were twenty-two states in the Union, and the population was 9,638,453. Loyalty to individual states, as against the Union, had perhaps waned somewhat; but Americans were becoming increasingly conscious of their identity as inhabitants of the various sections (principally, North, South and West). New economic interests were arising, old systems were decaying; new attitudes to life were forming, and the ideology that may loosely be described as Americanism – democratic, nationalist, capitalist, individualist – was coming to maturity. Inevitably a new sort of politics emerged.

  The constitutional system both required and induced such a development. The system of checks and balances perpetually threatened to be too successful: President, courts, Congress and state governments might be so efficient at thwarting each other that nothing, however necessary, could get done. Means of inducing them to co-operate had to be sought, and party discipline, it turned out, was just what was wanted. Another factor was the basic principle of election. American life had been permeated with the elective spirit from its beginnings. Puritans had known no other way of securing their congregations against the horrors of prelacy, and practical settlers had known no other way of ensuring that new laws and infant authorities would be respected. The habit of elections was substantially reinforced by the battles of the 1790s. The same conditions which had necessitated elections in early New England now necessitated them as settlements sprang up in the West; while in the older parts of the country they held it to be an essential part of the American liberty which had been vindicated against King George, that all office-holders, whether state, national or merely local, should be answerable to the people at election time. True, there were many posts under the Constitution (most notably federal judgeships) which were appointive, not electoral; but it was elected officials – the President and the Senators – who made the appointments.

  Such patronage increased the importance of Presidential and Senatorial elections, but that importance was already large. While governments exist they will be supposed to do so for the good of the governed, and early nineteenth-century Americans were clamorous in demanding that their government deliver the goods. Manufacturers in the East demanded higher tariffs for protection against British competition; settlers in the West demanded the protection of the US army against Indians and its help in driving the tribes from their lands; others wanted federal assistance in the building of roads and canals to carry produce to market. All these interests had opponents, of course: voters who wanted the federal government to do little of anything, and nothing that involved direct or indirect taxation (in this they showed themselves the true descendants of the Sons of Liberty). All alike turned to the professional politicians for assistance in winning their ends; and the politicians were very willing to co-operate. For they had noticed that elected offices carried salaries with them; so did appointive ones; judicious exertions could, by these means, keep an honest man solvent for the length of his natural life (for dishonest men, it was soon to emerge, the opport
unities were even more glorious). All that was required was to make promises to the voters and then find means either of keeping those promises, or of seeming to do so; or to teach the voters that the art of compromise (with reality and one’s opponents) is the essence of adult politics; or, if all else failed, of persuading them that the promises were broken because of the corrupt and treasonable activity of the opposition. In return, loyal partisans would sustain a man in office, where he could earn a good wage and where he could obtain additional rewards by handing out such jobs as postmaster or government clerk to the deserving. Underlings proved they were deserving by contributing part of their salaries to the war chests of the politicians.

  This was the politics of patronage, of the so-called spoils system, of the lobby12 and the special interest. It is familiar, in one form or another, to everyone who has grown up in a Western democracy, and so need hardly be explained further. The principle of favours given for favours received provides the staple of Atlantic politics. It does not make up the whole of the system. American voters, at least as much as European ones, can be decisively affected in their behaviour by great events; and they may have loyalties or interests which transcend the petty concerns of day-to-day living. Politicians are not mere greedy automata. The best and ablest among them cherish their self-respect; they feel the need to legitimize their personal ambitions by linking them to great causes. So American politics have always presented a complex and fascinating web of immediate personal and economic interests, national, sectional, class or racial rivalries, and individual careers – comical, tragical, heroical or villainous – on the largest scale.

  These generalizations will take on more meaning if we look at the transformation of American politics that occurred in the 1820s and 1830s. For those decades saw the emergence of the classical pattern of the American party system, as a result of the combined activities of great statesmen, ordinary politicians and the mass of the American people.