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- After overthrowing a monarch in the 1770s, Americans needed a new source of legitimacy — parties became that machinery.
- James Madison first sought to control factions, then concluded parties were unavoidable and could act as checks and balances.
- From the peaceful handover of 1800 to today, parties have restrained executive excess and made orderly succession possible.
Washington
MONARCHS PERSONIFY power and enforce stability. Once Americans overthrew their monarch during the upheaval of the 1770s, they had to discover another foundation for legitimacy and fresh means of preserving public order.
Following an unsteady beginning, organized parties assumed that task. Today such organizations are commonly denounced as factional, poisonous and paralyzing. Yet across more than two hundred years they have steadied self-government, secured orderly successions and limited official excess — a case made by historian H.W. Brands, who argues that parties signal democratic vitality, not decay.
The republic that tried to live without parties
Initially, the architects of the American republic expected ordinary citizens to supply that fresh legitimacy, with public virtue safeguarding stability. The measure of such virtue was thought to be immunity to parties, then called factions. Those elevated the ambitions of a handful of dominant figures above the welfare of all.
James Madison, urging ratification of the 1787 constitution, celebrated its capacity to neutralize factions. “There are two methods of curing the mischiefs of faction: the one, by removing its causes; the other, by controlling its effects,” he wrote.
Faction sprang from clashing views and freedom to voice them — both inviolable features of a liberal order. The constitution therefore had to focus on managing factional consequences, by dispersing power among the 13 states. “The influence of factious leaders may kindle a flame within their particular states, but will be unable to spread a general conflagration through the other states,” Madison said.
Madison’s denunciation of factionalism assisted the constitutionalist camp, known as the Federalists, in prevailing. Neither he nor fellow Federalists regarded their own coalition as a faction; instead, they viewed it as a provisional union of kindred spirits. But much like present-day parties, that bloc cohered around a lasting doctrine: trust in government to solve the young republic’s difficulties.
Its adversaries in the ratification struggle, the Anti-Federalists, likewise considered their alliance provisional while sharing a durable conviction: that state authority threatened personal liberties.
How parties became the check the framers forgot
Consequently, once the constitution entered operation in 1789, those divisions endured. Advocates of energetic government and champions of limited government each located fresh controversies around which to rally. Alexander Hamilton became chief of the energetic-government camp, which kept the “Federalist” name from the ratification contest. Thomas Jefferson stood out as the leading figure of the limited-government camp, which adopted the name Republicans.
Growing worried by Hamilton’s designs for a powerful central authority, assumption of Revolutionary War debts by the federal government and establishment of a national bank, Madison aligned himself with Jefferson. By doing so, he admitted that the vision of a virtuous republic had been unrealistic. Clearly, concentrated authority demanded a disciplined opposition.
“In every political society, parties are unavoidable. Different interests and parties arise out of the nature of things, and the great art of politicians lies in making them checks and balances to each other.”
James Madison
Those organizations supplied an element the framers had neither anticipated nor immediately grasped they would require: a method for contesting official power and restraining each other without endangering the constitutional order itself. That function grew sharper after Britain and France entered war in 1793. Hamilton’s Federalists sided with Britain in that struggle; Jefferson’s Republicans sympathized with France.
President George Washington declared American neutrality and strove to stay above the dispute, rebuking Hamilton and Jefferson alike for elevating party over country. Yet Washington, progressively exhausted by partisanship, decided against seeking a third term. That example was later formalized as the 22nd Amendment, among the most significant restraints on executive authority.
Parties and the invention of the peaceful transfer of power
The elevation of Washington’s successor, John Adams, intensified partisan friction. A candid Federalist, Adams approved the Alien and Sedition Acts, which criminalized much Republican criticism of his government and sought to depress the Republican vote.
Jefferson pressed Republican-controlled states to nullify those objectionable statutes — that is, to prohibit their enforcement inside those states. The Republican party’s coordinated defiance of the Sedition Acts effectively curbed that misuse of authority: Adams’s attack recoiled, causing his defeat in the election of 1800.
The confrontation of 1800, though acrimonious and disorderly, nevertheless yielded America’s first peaceful handover between competing factions, made workable by parties. The muddled electoral system produced an unforeseen result: a deadlock between Jefferson and Aaron Burr (both Republicans). The outgoing Federalist Congress had to decide between them. For months rumor and maneuver convulsed Washington, the fledgling capital on the Potomac. Federalists discussed installing Burr as president should he abandon Jefferson. Burr disavowed any such plan, but in the end Hamilton delivered the contest to Jefferson by blackening Burr.
“We are all Republicans; we are all Federalists.”
Thomas Jefferson · inaugural address, 1801
Jefferson extended that cross-party conciliatory gesture toward the Federalists in his inaugural speech. He then shaped the Republicans into what would become the longest-lived party in American history. Rechristened the Democrats during the 1820s, it survives as one of the country’s two dominant political machines. In the early 20th century it exchanged its limited-government creed for an expansive-government doctrine judged better fitted to an era of giant enterprise.
Why parties endure despite American contempt
The Federalists withered as a nationwide presence within little over ten years after Hamilton’s death in 1804. Several of their principles resurfaced in successor organizations, including the Whigs, who arose in the 1830s, and the modern Republican Party, which formed in the 1850s.
That party preserved the Federalists’ energetic-government outlook until Democrats appropriated the cause and drove modern Republicans toward the limited-government stance of the original Republicans. Parties as an institution survived because the organizations themselves evolved. Across national history, parties have taken in fresh alliances, adapted to societal transformation and stopped any one faction from capturing all power.
Americans have never cherished parties. Plenty wish to abolish them altogether. Yet they have persisted, for the reason Madison pinpointed. Parties prove inescapable wherever citizens may freely develop views and pursue them. Each president since Washington has belonged to one. They have modernized with changing eras and sustained orderly transfers of authority for centuries. Rather than heralding the republic’s collapse, parties testify to its rough — at times extremely rough — vigor.
H.W. Brands is a historian and professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin.
Sources
James Madison, Federalist No. 10; historical record on the Constitution of 1787, operation from 1789, Alien and Sedition Acts, election of 1800, and party evolution. Essay adapted from H.W. Brands.
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