Practicing Democracy

Popular Politics in the United States from the Constitution to the Civil War

Daniel Peart, Adam I. P. Smith, Daniel Peart, Adam I. P. Smith

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780813937717
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early American History
• Index: History

In Practicing Democracy, eleven historians challenge conventional narratives of democratization in the early United States, offering new perspectives on the period between the ratification of the Constitution and the outbreak of the Civil War. The essays in this collection address critical themes such as the origins, evolution, and disintegration of party competition, the relationship between political parties and popular participation, and the place that parties occupied within the wider world of United States politics.

In recent years, historians of the early republic have demolished old assumptions about low rates of political participation and shallow popular partisanship in the age of Jefferson—raising the question of how, if at all, Jacksonian politics departed from earlier norms. This book reaffirms the significance of a transition in political practices during the 1820s and 1830s but casts the transformation in a new light. Whereas the traditional narrative is one of a party-driven democratic awakening, the contributors to this volume challenge the correlation of party with democracy. They both critique constricting definitions of legitimate democratic practices in the decades following the ratification of the Constitution and emphasize the proliferation of competing public voices in the buildup to the Civil War. Taken together, these essays offer a new way of thinking about American politics across the traditional dividing line of 1828 and suggest a novel approach to the long-standing question of what it meant to be part of "We the People."

Contributors: Tyler Anbinder, George Washington University · Douglas Bradburn, Fred W. Smith National Library for the Study of George Washington at Mount Vernon · John L. Brooke, The Ohio State University · Andrew Heath, University of Sheffield · Reeve Huston, Duke University · Johann N. Neem, Western Washington University · Kenneth Owen, University of Illinois, Springfield · Graham A. Peck, Saint Xavier University · Andrew W. Robertson, Graduate Center of the City University of New York and Lehman College, CUNY

* PART ONE *

PARTY

DEVELOPMENT

DOUGLAS BRADBURN

“Parties Are Unavoidable”

Path Dependence and the Origins of Party Politics in the United States

In 1804, the U.S. Congress approved a constitutional amendment to fix the rules of presidential selection. The electoral tie in 1800 spooked the people, and the redesigned process was intended to limit the potential for usurpation.¹ The change was necessary. The original mode of selection assumed that the electors would act alone, without collusion — that they would not combine their support for two candidates for the highest office, thus creating an unwanted tie between two candidates who were really intended for different positions. The new amendment, on the other hand, assumed that the electors would operate as a party, to support a “slate” of candidates, for president and vice president. It was the last change to the fundamental character of the Union before the Civil War, the completion of the founding.²

Two aspects of the 12th Amendment are remarkable. First, the amendment was a party amendment. The Republicans, in power since the fall of 1800, designed the amendment without meddling from the minority party, the Federalists. Second, people debating the amendment assumed that there would be two national parties. Federalists opposed the amendment, offered substitutes, and asserted the danger of fiddling with the framework of government. But Federalists also admitted the inevitability of national parties. As Delaware’s Samuel White argued, the “United States are now divided, and will probably continue so, into two great political parties.”³ James Hillhouse from Connecticut suggested that the “federal and republican parties have had their day — and their designations will not last long.” But soon new parties would arise, and “new names and new views will be taken” in the competition for power “as it has been the course in all nations.” Hillhouse even suggested that the losing presidential candidate of the opposition party should become vice president, so that the officials would be “checks upon each other.”⁴

The belief that the country would “probably” always be divided into two great political parties — acknowledged and institutionalized in the creation of the 12th Amendment — marks the end of the naive hopes of the original framers that national parties would not come to dominate American political life. American democracy, as it evolved over the nineteenth century, would be practiced most obviously through parties. Yet, as this book suggests, parties were not necessary for democracy, so why did parties have so much staying power? Why only two, and not three or more?

As political historians of the last twenty years were moving away from the study of ideology to the study of culture, numerous social scientists were rediscovering the problem of thinking about continuity and change over time. Beginning with work on institutional analysis in economics — especially the work of Douglass North on the role of institutions in shaping and constraining the choices of societies and individuals — political scientists have been giving increasingly sophisticated attention to the historical processes that shape and influence social and economic behavior. As North puts it succinctly in his call for the complete integration of institutions into theories of economic growth and performance, “history matters” not simply as a repository of facts but “because the present and the future are connected to the past by the continuity of a society’s institutions.” While institutions have always been studied, the recent literature defines institutions broadly, to incorporate not only the formal structures of government or the market but also the “rules of the game,” the informal cultures, prejudices, and mores that shape acceptable behavior.⁵

Beyond this, understanding that history and context are essential components of social development means that “time” and “the sequence of events” matter — what happened first effects what happens next, and that in turn effects what might happen years later in social, economic, and political outcomes. Political scientists have latched onto this last problem in their enthusiasm for “path dependence,” the belief that “once a country or a region has started down a track, the costs of reversal are very high.” Institutions, once “entrenched,” obstruct the “easy reversal of the initial choice.”⁶ As political scientist Paul Pierson has suggested, a proper respect for the problem of path dependence means that “specific timing and sequence matter, a wide range of social outcomes may be possible, large consequences many result from relatively small or contingent events; particular courses of action, once introduced, can be almost impossible to reverse; and consequently, political development is punctuated by crucial moments or junctures that shape the basic contours of social life.”⁷ While social scientists are still interested in building models that apply throughout time and place, the enthusiasts for institutional analysis are skeptical about the possibility of creating a general theory of politics, and refuse to accept a deterministic approach to the problem of change over time. Institutional analysis promises nothing less than a paradigmatic shift in some branches of the social sciences, as they move out of a Newtonian model of science — in which universal laws govern cause and effect — and move into “complexity science.” With such an awareness of contingency and context, as one critic of the concept of path dependence notes, “history becomes the ultimate explanation of all political choices and changes.”⁸

Historians might rightly smirk to hear our cousins in the dismal sciences argue, in a provocative manner, that things change, that choices are often determined by what came before, and that human beings often die long before the consequences of their actions can be fully understood and appreciated. But there is much to be gained by embracing this welcome historical turn in the social sciences, and for historians to ignore the trend — which is certainly the case for recent historians of politics in the early republic — is bad for everybody. Historians too often work without attention to the relative usefulness of our work, either for a general public, for a general audience of historians, or for the possible use (or misuse) by social scientists. This chapter considers three problems related to the concept of path dependence in the origin and legacies of the first parties under the Constitution. First, it looks at the “framers” in action to find the relationship among the design of the new institutions of the “more perfect Union,” the original polarization in Congress, and the organization of the first parties. Second, it examines “national” parties before the 1790s and the local practices that would shape the character of post–1790s politics. Finally, the essay considers the relationship of ideology to the existence of an American assumption that two parties, not three or four or more, will inevitably shape national political life.

Madisonian Failure and the Birth of Party

One of the key elements of institutional analysis and the interpretation of the path dependence of social, political, and economic outcomes is finding an “original ordering moment” that “triggered particular patterns.”⁹ Here the originating moment is clear. The Constitution as written, ratified, and amended between 1787 and 1791 marks a clear “original ordering moment” of the new national institutions of government. The original organization of the judiciary, the departments of the executive branch, and the procedures of the U.S. Congress stand out as the beginning of new institutions. But if we understand institutions to also include “the rules of the game,” the more informal constraints that limit choice and action, there was still much to be solidified in 1791. In fact, it was differences over the rules of the game that would create the original polarization in Congress — and ultimately drive the formation of the original parties. Fundamental questions about how strictly to interpret the powers granted in the Constitution, the legitimacy of organized opposition to government policies, and the relative usefulness of national party organizations would need to be clarified before the “founding” of the United States under the Constitution was complete. The original polarization in Congress is the place to start.

Too many historians imbibe the prejudices of their subjects in telling the story of the 1790s. Much of the literature on the original leaders of the parties descends from the original polarization. American historians have overwhelmingly been Whig historians and so also have not escaped the impulse toward choosing sides in the ideological and partisan battles of the founding. If history must be moving progressively toward better government or more civil rights — more inclusion, more liberty, more social justice — then anyone who blocks the march of progress must be attacked. There are only two sides; people are either right or wrong. These tendencies have not disappeared in either popular or academic scholarship, nor in contemporary American politics. Balance is rare.

Recent popular biographies of Alexander Hamilton by Richard Brookheiser, Ronald Chernow, and Williard Randall Stern, for example, bring much to the table but rarely a sympathetic treatment of the opponents of their chosen favorite. These studies follow in a tradition that extends back to John Marshall’s Life of George Washington, which was reinvigorated in Henry Cabot Lodge’s important Alexander Hamilton of the 1880s, and powerfully renewed in Forrest MacDonald’s 1982 biography in which he equates American “decline” with a growing popular enthusiasm for Thomas Jefferson over Hamilton.¹⁰ In these treatments, James Madison emerges as the great betrayer, playing a deep and mysterious game, compelled either by ignorance of the great things Hamilton was doing or by simple jealousy — positions that mimic Hamilton’s opinion at the time. Scholarly studies too often share this view. Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick’s massive survey of the period, The Age of Federalism, puts Hamilton in a position of honor, relegating Madison to the role of a sad confused puppet of Jefferson. Many studies, like The Age of Federalism, which intentionally (and incorrectly) conflate the federalists who supported ratification of the Constitution with the “Federalist Party” that Hamilton organized originally as a governing party seem unable to understand Madison as anything other than a turncoat.¹¹

Studies of Madison for their part, and of Jefferson as well, too often share a similar myopia. So enamored of their subject’s genius, they emphasize the Madison who “wrote” the Constitution and rarely seriously consider Madison in opposition to Hamilton, or if they do, emphasize the least important aspects of Hamilton’s design and mimic the rhetoric of Madison’s critique. They emphasize Hamilton’s arrogance and high tone, his general indifference to the political aspirations of the common man, and his elite style. Added to this literature are the numerous studies of the framing of the Constitution whose organizing assumptions suggest that the drafting and ratification of the Constitution are the completion of “the Revolution” or “the Founding” of the United States in which either democracy is destroyed or genius is enshrined; that the creation of that document anticipated all of the developments of the 1790s, or the 1820s; and thus that the successes and failures of American history can be placed on the mantle of those narrow years. It is time to move beyond these conceptions of these two framers: neither was a villain, neither was confused, each attempted to keep his own vision — which each believed was the best — from being crushed by the designs of the other. Understanding this process remains crucial to understanding the creation of the first parties.

Madison and Hamilton appeal to political scientists, historians of political thought, and rational actor theorists for a simple reason: Madison and Hamilton remind them of themselves. Hamilton built economic and political institutions. He wrote plans and schemes and defenses of the way politics works and economies function. Madison designed institutions with a close attention to historical and contemporary systems of governance. His remarkable series of notes, articles, and polemics on the vices of the political systems of various confederacies, states, and kingdoms presents a thoroughgoing engagement with issues that interest academics today — how to design a government that will work. He believed that all men followed basic impulses, and so human behavior was universal and “natural.” Men were, in essence, self-interested and rational.

Thus modern political scientists, historians, and theorists have canonized Madison and Hamilton. They assert that there is something called a “Hamiltonian System,” a “Madisonian Republic,” a “Madisonian System,” a “Hamiltonian economy,” “Madisonian Presidential Voting,” “a Madisonian Democracy,” and so on. A full text search of “Madisonian” in history, economics, political science, and legal journals catalogued by JSTOR lists 1,127 separate articles, while a similar search on “Hamiltonian” brings up over 600.¹² There is even a Hamiltonian Madison and a Madisonian Madison — but not, unfortunately, a Madisonian Hamilton. And there is not, it appears, an “Adamsian” anything.

But the original polarization in Congress emerges from nothing less than a “Madisonian failure.” Madison’s failures of design were more evident to himself than they are to many historians or theorists, and they were caused, in part, by Alexander Hamilton. Outside of the biases that too many studies of the original polarization bring to their analyses, the biggest error made by political scientists, historians, and jurists who write about the framers of the Constitution is an assumption that Madison and Hamilton were happy with the outcome of the Constitutional Convention. Hamilton’s disgust with the tenor of the convention and his impatience with the final Constitution should be the beginning point of any discussion ...