Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815

Chapter 6

Election of 1796 saw Federalist John Adams and Republican Thomas Jefferson elected president and vice president respectively.

Many hoped that the election would end the growing factionalism.

Adams had put a lot of thought into the proper structure of government and constitutions going back to the 1770s.

Earlier in his career he had viewed the people as a source of virtue but by 1787 had grown to distrust them and viewed society as being characterized as a struggle between people and groups for superiority.

The main division in society, as Adams came to believe, was between the few and the many and in order to keep these interests in check he believed in seperate legislative bodies for both groups with an executive who was supposed to mediate between them.

In the 1770s, like most English Whigs, Adams viewed the principle struggle as being between the Crown and the people represented by the House of Commons but by the 1780s he came to believe it was between the gentry and the people.

While Southern elites did not mind referring to themselves as “natural aristocrats” the term “aristocrat” was an insult to Federalists who preferred to see themselves as disinterested leaders.

Republicans especially Northern Republicans saw themselves as opposed to the Federalists due to them being aristocrats and having monarchical tendencies.

They didn’t think through all of the political or policy differences they necessarily had with the Federalist agenda.

Federalists commonly insulted Republicans by referring to them as “democrats” which had a negative connotation but was eventually worn as a badge of honor.

Competition between Federalists and Republicans in Northern states wasn’t just about a new working class finding space to exercise politics in the post-Revolution culture it was also about the established aristocratic class being weak.

It was difficult for the Federalist elite to play the role of disinterested leaders because almost none could afford to remove themselves from their business interests.

Even gentry planters in the South who relied on slave labor weren’t far removed from the day-to-day management of their plantations in contrast to the landed elite of Britain who could get by on rent alone.

Federalist gentlemen often either wound up bankrupt, used their office for their private benefit, or ignored their public responsibilities to tend to their private interests.

While Southern aristocrats who were Republican leaders were able to more closely resemble old-world aristocrats it’s ironic that men like Jefferson weren’t able to recognize “the character of the democratic and egalitarian forces they and their fellow Southern slaveholding Republicans were unleashing in the North” (234).