Securing the Revolution: Ideology in American Politics, 1789-1815

Abstract

If could not go to heaven but with a party, observed Thomas Jefferson, I would not go at all. Why a political generation so deeply hostile to political parties created a tightly structured party system has long been a standard-and serious-historical conundrum. The argument that the Republicans were the party of the poor crumples at the mention of the name of Thomas Jefferson, master of Monticello. Charles A. Beard's suggestion that the Federalists represented a commercial interest group disintegrates when centers of commerce like Baltimore and Newark vote Republican while agrarian counties in the same states vote Federalist. And the protestations of contemporaries, that all they really sought was national harmony, are of little help in deciding why that harmony splintered. In a book distingished by its careful reasoning and common sense, Richard Buel tells the story of national politics in the early republic. The shaping events are predictable ones: Hamilton's economic program, the Jay Treaty, the Alien and Sedition laws, each handled with a fine eye for detail. Throughout Buel asks the question: how did it happen that a cluster of leaders who had agreed so vigorously on the essentials of the Constitution could come, in less than a decade, to distrust each other intensely? And throughout he offers the answer that the differences between the parties are ultimately to be ascribed to the fact that each party's leaders displayed varying degrees of confidence in the society which the Revolution had created, and varying degrees of willingness to trust public opinion. Politics is a weighing of alternatives. As Buel reconstructs these alternatives, Republicans make the choices they do primarily because they are confident and optimistic about American society; they believe it strong enough to venture risks. Federalism becomes, by contrast, the ideology of the insecure (p. 87). Thus Madison opposes assumption because he is confident that fiscal competence can be achieved without Hamiltonian devices. Responding to British provocation in 1793 and I794, Federalists emphasize the dangers of war and therefore make the long list of concessions that add up to the Jay Treaty; Republicans remind themselves