Analysis of the American party system has been particularly susceptible to dualistic inquiry. The classic formulation was supplied by Charles Beard who contended that the political history of the new nation was permeated by a persistent tension between capitalist and agrarian interests. Other historians such as Claude Bowers have divided partisan groupings and aggregations of economic interest into even more comprehensive polarities of an ideological character: elitists and democrats, radicals and conservatives, and so forth. In a more subtle fashion, the debate among historians over the process of party formation has also tended to focus on dualistic alternatives: were parties grass-roots movements that adopted political leaders, or did parties originate in the national legislature? Was Alexander Hamilton's program the major catalyst promoting party organization, or was it Jay's Treaty? There are good reasons for the prevalence of dualism in the analysis of American party politics, most importantly the long tradition of a twoparty system in the United States. Dichotomous classification also has a symmetry that is intellectually pleasing and often sharpens the focus of a question. But as Cecelia Kenyon has suggested in her insightful essay on attempts of historians to characterize the American Revolution as radical or conservative, a dichotomous pattern may distort reality even as it illuminates it.1 Mary P. Ryan's recent article on party formation in the first four Congresses-an important one-does both.2 Noting that Thomas Jefferson speculated in a letter to John Taylor