American Creation

This chapter tells the story of the development in the 1790s of the two-party system that has become the norm in the United States. It begins with trip up the Hudson River into New England that Madison and Jefferson took in 1791. Ostensibly a “botanical tour,” it also involved serious political discussions. Both were concerned with the passage earlier that year of a law establishing a national bank, the brainchild of Alexander Hamilton. Both likewise felt that Hamilton was leading a takeover of the government by northern bankers.

Madison’s role in this is harder to explain since it was diametrically opposite to the stance he had held during the constitutional convention just a few years earlier. It also contradicted the claim that he and others advocating federalism were the true keepers of the revolutionary flame. Now he argued that among the federalists there had always been a small sliver of secret monarchists, who were now gaining control.

Madison published these ideas in 1791 and 1792, in a series of anonymous essays in the National Gazette, a newspaper run by Philip Freneau and secretly supported by Jefferson (who, as a member of the administration, could not openly embrace opposing ideas). Hamilton returned fire in the fall of 1792, with his own essays in the Gazette of the United States. He outed Jefferson as the mastermind behind the Republican rhetoric and tactics, attacking him as a traitor out for personal gain in seeking to become president. In 1793, the Republicans succeeded in forcing a congressional inquiry into the financial accounts that Hamilton was responsible for as head of the Treasury Department. He was cleared of any wrongdoing—indeed, he was praised for his integrity and accurate work. However, Jefferson only “concluded that Hamilton was an even craftier criminal than he had thought” (186).

When war broke out between England and France in 1793, Washington declared America to be neutral, despite a longstanding alliance with France dating back to the Revolutionary War. This split the two camps further, with Republicans favoring closer ties to France and those supporting Washington favoring greater ties to England. The next year, Jefferson resigned, weary of the political fray and eager to return to Monticello. During his absence from the government, three events created yet more division between the nascent parties.

First, Britain began confiscating American merchant ships in early 1794 as part of its naval blockade of France. Madison wanted to impose a trade embargo on England, but refrained after Hamilton pointed out that this would hurt the United States far more than England. Then, later that year, the so-called Whiskey Rebellion broke out in western Pennsylvania after the federal government imposed a whiskey tax, in part to pay off the states’ debt it had assumed. Washington himself led a huge contingent of federal troops to deal with the rebellion, and the rebels dispersed. Finally, Chief Justice John Jay negotiated a deal with Britain, in part to deal with the confiscation of American ships, which the Republicans opposed. Ellis explains that in hindsight, it was probably the best deal possible, but most Americans opposed it because they hated England. Still, the Senate approved it largely on the strength of Washington’s personal reputation.

The treaty crisis was enough to entice Jefferson out of retirement, however, and he ran for president in 1796 against his old revolutionary ally John Adams. Adams won a close race and, in the waning spirit of a nonpartisan approach to politics, offered his runner-up a vice presidency almost akin to a co-presidency. Jefferson was ready to reply with conciliatory fond feelings for his old brother-in-arms, but decided, with Madison’s input, to keep the personal separate from the political: “His ultimate allegiance must be to the Republican cause, which must oppose every Adams policy from outside rather than attempt to influence it from the inside” (205).