The Invention of Party Politics: Federalism, Popular Sovereignty, and Constitutional Development in Jacksonian Illinois

Abstract

Invention of Party Politics: Federalism, Popular Sovereignty, and Constitutional Development in Jacksonian Illinois. By Gerald Leonard. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. Pp. x, 328. Cloth, $45.00.)In Invention of Party Politics, Gerald Leonard reinterprets origins of mass party competition by studying Jacksonian Illinois. Taking up a question posed initially by Richard Hofstadter in Idea of a Party System (1969), Leonard asks how mass parties emerged from antipartisan milieu of early national America. question is an important one. After all, mass parties came to dominate nineteenth-century politics, profoundly shaping history of country; and, as Hofstadter observed, they also facilitated operation of government under and established idea of a legitimate opposition.Leonard's explanation for emergence of parties, however, breaks categorically with Hofstadter. Hofstadter contended that a new class of professional politicians spurred rise of modern partisan politics in 182Os and 183Os. Not tethered to strong convictions or to unbending ideologies, these men organized assiduously and accepted idea of permanently competing with an opposition party. By contrast, Leonard argues that emergence of competing mass parties was an unintended consequence of a constitutional reform movement inaugurated by democratic at local and state level. Believing in existence of what they called the democracy, comprising those Americans who advocated political equality, majority rule, and states' rights, and believing that democracy should be sovereign, partyists responded to threat of neo-Hamiltonian loose constructionists, such as John Quincy Adams, by creating a party of democracy to protect federalism and popular sovereignty (5). According to Leonard, partyists paradoxically clung to sentiment because they did not recognize constitutional legitimacy of an aristocratic party, such as defunct Federalists, and they rejected idea that any party could represent a portion of sovereign democracy. Thus party of democracy-soon to be called Democratic Party-was antiparty party of Constitution (46).Antipartyists, unsurprisingly, objected to this justification for party, which seemed to be a hypocritical and unconstitutional assault on framers' attempt to establish a against parties. But antipartyists soon confronted necessity of organizing a party in order to fend off partyists; hence, they haltingly created Whig Party, and so began organized two-party competition. The origins of mass party competition, Leonard explains, thus lay in a battle not so much about social and economic positions for which Democratic and Whig parties are well known, but in a battle over question of party itself and its relationship to Constitution, neither party ever fully accepting constitutional legitimacy of other (14). With this argument, Leonard challenges not only Hofstadter, but also legion of scholars who have located origins of second Party System in social, cultural, or economic issues.Leonard makes his case by tracing how politicians justified expansion of partisan behavior in Illinois from 1817 to 1840. Although this focus may seem narrow, social and economic history of state is largely irrelevant to his argument because he maintains that Jacksonian politics in Illinois was essentially constitutional. While politicians necessarily addressed substantive policy issues, their central focus was the constitutional implications inherent in handling of each issue (117). Thus, to take one example, Leonard does not interpret campaign of 1840 as a debate over partisan economic policy, but rather as a partisan struggle to control historical interpretation of founding and development of American Constitution (176). …