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FEDERALIST PARTY

FEDERALIST PARTY. The name "Federalist Party" originated in the ratification debates over the U.S. Constitution. In 1788 the group that favored ratification and a strong central government called themselves "federalists," which at that time indicated a preference for a more consolidated government rather than a loose "confederation" of semi-sovereign states. After the Constitution was ratified, the term "federalist" came to be applied to any supporter of the Constitution and particularly to members of the Washington administration. The term received wide currency with the publication of a series of eighty-one articles by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay arguing for the ratification of the Constitution. Thus, in the early 1790s, not only George Washington, John Adams, and Hamilton, but even Madison, then the floor leader of the administration in the House of Representatives, were all "federalists."

The Washington administration found itself divided, however, over Hamilton's debt, banking, and manufacturing policies, all of which favored the commercial and financial interests of the Northeast over the agrarian interests of the South and West. Foreign policy questions also split Washington's cabinet in his first term, especially the problems arising from treaty obligations to the increasingly radical republicans in France. These questions deeply divided the government, and eventually caused the resignations of the secretary of state, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison as floor leader. Nevertheless, these questions did not precipitate permanent, consistent political divisions in Congress or in the states.

The Emergence of a Party

The Federalist Party took permanent and consistent form in Washington's second term as president during the controversy over the Jay Treaty with Great Britain. John Jay negotiated a treaty that alienated the frontier interests, the commercial grain exporters of the middle states, and the slaveholders of the South. The division over foreign policy—between "Anglomen" who hoped for favorable relations with Britain and "Gallomen" who hoped for continued strong relations with France—generated a climate of distrust, paranoia, and repression that propelled these foreign policy divisions into sustained political conflict at the elite level and eventually promoted the expansion of a party press, party organizations, and strong party identification in the electorate.

Although the Federalist Party did not arise from the controversy over Hamilton's economic policies, those states and interests that had benefited from Hamiltonian policies tended to favor the Federalists from the beginning. New England and the seaboard states of New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, and South Carolina favored the Federalists in part because each of these states was dominated by commercial interests and an entrenched social and religious elite. Similarly, the urban seaboard interests and prosperous agrarian regions of Pennsylvania and New York also favored the Federalists. In New England, federalism was closely associated with the Established Congregational church in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire. In the middle states, Federalists tended to be Episcopalian in New York, Presbyterian in New Jersey, and might be either of these, or Quakers, in the area around Philadelphia. In Delaware, on the other hand, Federalists were more likely to be Episcopalians from the lower part of the state, rather than Presbyterians or Quakers from Wilmington.

In the South, federalism dominated only one state, South Carolina, and that was in part the result of its benefit from the Hamiltonian funding policy of state debts. Like the northern Federalists, South Carolina Federalists formed a solid elite in the Low Country along the coast. Mostly Episcopalian and Huguenot Presbyterians, their great wealth and urban commercial interests in Charleston, the South's only significant city, led them to make common cause with Hamiltonians in New England and the middle states. Elsewhere in the South, federalism thrived in regions where the social order was more hierarchical, wealth was greater, and the inroads of evangelicalism were weakest. Thus the Eastern Shore of Maryland, once Loyalist and Anglican, was a Federalist bastion, as were the Catholic counties of southern Maryland. The Tidewater of Virginia was another Federalist stronghold, as were the Cape Fear region of North Carolina and the Lowland counties of Georgia. Outside of a few New England exiles in the Western Reserve area of Ohio, Federalists did not gather much support in the new states of the West.

With strong political support across the Union at the time of Washington's retirement, the Federalists managed to hold the presidency for their party and for their candidate, John Adams, but only by three electoral votes. Adams allowed Washington's cabinet to retain their posts into his new term. They were followers of Alexander Hamilton, arch-Federalists, and far more ideological than Adams himself.

In 1798 the Federalists reached the peak of their national popularity in the war hysteria that followed the XYZ AFFAIR. In the congressional elections of 1798 the Federalists gained greater support in their strongholds in New England, the middle states, Delaware, and Maryland. They made significant gains in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia. North and South, the popular slogan in 1798 was "Adams and Liberty." Even as they gained strength over their Democratic Republican adversaries, however, they viewed their opponents with increasing alarm. In a time of war hysteria, extreme Federalists genuinely believed that many Jeffersonians had allied themselves with the most radical factions of Revolutionary France. At a time when the Democratic Republicans were out of favor, their criticisms of the Federalists took on a shrill, often vituperative tone.

The harsh personal criticism by the leading Democratic Republican newspapers prompted some Federalists in Congress to find a way to curb this "licentious" press, punish the opposition editors, and perhaps cripple Democratic Republican political chances in the upcoming presidential election. In Congress, Representative Robert Goodloe Harper of South Carolina and Senator William Lloyd of Maryland introduced legislation in 1798 known as the Alien and Sedition Acts. The Sedition Act, modeled on the British Sedition Act of 1795, made it unlawful to "print, utter, or publish … any false, scandalous, and malicious writing" against any officer of the government. Under the energetic enforcement of Secretary of State Timothy Pickering, the leading Democratic Republican newspapers in Philadelphia, Boston, New York, and Richmond, Virginia, were closed down in 1799.

The Election of 1800

The election year of 1800 was the last time an incumbent Federalist engaged himself in a contest for the presidency. Despite Thomas Jefferson's referral to the election as a "revolution," the presidential contest was in fact narrowly won. Only five states allowed for the popular vote for presidential electors, and both parties used every means available—especially legislative selection of electors—to maximize their candidate's electoral vote. This was the first and last year the Federalists and Democratic Republicans contested every single state in the congressional elections. The Republicans won 67 of the 106 seats in the House of Representatives. Despite the decisive popular vote for the Democratic Republicans in Congress, the electoral vote was not at all a clear mandate for Thomas Jefferson. In fact, Thomas Jefferson owed his victory in the Electoral College to the infamous "three-fifths" rule, which stipulated that slaves would be counted in congressional (and electoral college) apportionment as a concession to the South.

Although the contest for president was mostly conducted in the legislatures and the congressional contests were conducted at the local level, the party press of both the Federalists and the Jeffersonian Republicans played up the contrast between Jefferson and Adams. Jefferson was a "Jacobin," an "atheist," and a "hypocrite" with all his talk about equality, while keeping slaves. Adams was an "aristocrat," a "monocrat," and a defender of hereditary privileges. The religious issue played an important part in the election. The Gazette of the United States put this controversy in its starkest form: "God—And a Religious President; Or Jefferson—And No God!!!"

The Decline of Federalism

The Federalists lost more congressional seats in 1802 and in 1804, despite Hamilton's attempt to inject the religious issue into the former election. Their opposition to the LOUISIANA PURCHASE seemed to spell certain doom for them in the West. Thanks to the unpopularity of Jefferson's Embargo Act, however, the Federalist Party experienced a revival in New England and the middle states in 1808 at the congressional and state level. By 1812 the Federalist Party and dissident anti-war Republicans grouped together behind DeWitt Clinton and the "Friends of Peace." With the unpopularity of the war in the Northeast, the Federalists and their anti-war allies gave James Madison a close contest for his reelection. The Federalist Party gained seats in Congress in 1812 and 1814 as the fortunes of war seemed arrayed against the Americans.

Some of the more extreme Federalists, however, including Timothy Pickering and Harrison Gray Otis of Massachusetts and Oliver Wolcott of Connecticut, toyed with New England secession in the midst of this unpopular war. They met in Hartford, Connecticut, from 15 December 1814 to 5 January 1815. Although the Federalist delegates defeated a secession resolution, their party was thereafter associated with disloyalty, and even treason. The end of the war made the Hartford Convention nothing more than an embarrassing irrelevance.

The Federalist Party hung on, however, in a long twilight in the seaboard states of Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire, and even enjoyed a modest revival in Pennsylvania and New York in the early 1820s. The Federalist Party never again held power at the national level after 1800 in the election triumph that Jefferson called a "revolution." The death of Alexander Hamilton in 1804 killed the one Federalist leader who had youth, national stature, and significant popular support.

The extended influence of the Federalist Party lay in the judiciary. With the appointment of many Federalists to the bench, John Adams ensured that the Federalists would continue to exert a dominant influence on the federal judiciary for many years to come. Federalist judges predominated until the ERA OF GOOD FEELING. Thereafter, federalism continued to have influence in the law, thanks in no small part to the intellectual authority of John Marshall, chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, who remained on the Court until his death in 1835.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Banner, James M. To the Hartford Convention: Federalists and the Origins of Party Politics in Massachusetts, 1789–1815. New York: Harper, 1970.

Ben-Atar, Doron, and Barbara B. Oberg, eds. Federalists Reconsidered. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998.

Broussard, James. The Southern Federalists. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978.

Chambers, William Nisbet. The First Party System. New York: John Wiley, 1972.

Dauer, Manning J. The Adams Federalists. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1953.

Elkins, Stanley, and Eric McKittrick. The Age of Federalism: The Early American Republic, 1788–1800. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.

Fischer, David Hackett. The Revolution of American Conservatism: The Federalist Party in the Era of Jeffersonian Democracy. New York: Harper, 1965.

Formisano, Ronald P. The Transformation of Political Culture: Massachusetts Parties, 1790–1840. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983.

Hofstadter, Richard. The Idea of a Party System: The Rise of Legitimate Opposition in the United States, 1780–1840. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969.

Kerber, Linda. Federalists in Dissent: Imagery and Ideology in Jeffersonian America. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1970.

Miller, John C. The Federalist Era, 1789–1801. New York: Harper, 1960.

Sharpe, James Roger. American Politics in the Early Republic: The New Nation in Crisis. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993.

Andrew W. Robertson

See also Political Parties; Republicans, Jeffersonian; Two-Party System.