Federalist Party

The Federalist Party was the traditionalist conservative party that was the number one political party in the United States. Under Alexander Hamilton, it dominated the national government from 1789 to 1801. Defeated by the Jeffersonian Republicans in 1800, it became a minority party while keeping its stronghold in New England and presented a brief resurgence by opposing the War of 1812. It then collapsed with its last presidential candidate in 1816. Remnants lasted in a few places for a few years. The party appealed to businesses & to conservatives who favored banks, national over state government, manufacturing, an army and navy, and in world affairs preferred Great Britain and opposed the French Revolution. The party favored centralization, federalism, modernization, industrialization and protectionism.

The Federalists called for a strong national government that promoted economic growth and fostered friendly relationships with Great Britain in opposition to Revolutionary France. It controlled the federal government until 1801, when it was overwhelmed by the Democratic-Republican opposition led by President Thomas Jefferson. The Federalist Party came into being between 1789 and 1790 as a national coalition of bankers and businessmen in support of Hamilton's fiscal policies. These supporters worked in every state to determining an organized party committed to a fiscally sound and nationalistic government. The only Federalist President was John Adams. George Washington was loosely sympathetic to the Federalist program, but he remained officially non-partisan during his entire presidency.

Federalist policies called for a national bank, tariffs and return relations with Great Britain as expressed in the Jay Treaty negotiated in 1794. Hamilton developed the concept of implied powers and successfully argued the adoption of that interpretation of the Constitution. Their political opponents, the Democratic-Republicans led by Jefferson, denounced almost of the Federalist policies, particularly the bank and implied powers; and vehemently attacked the Jay Treaty as a sell-out of republican values to the British monarchy. The Jay Treaty passed and the Federalists won nearly of the major legislative battles in the 1790s. They held a strong base in the nation's cities and in New England. They factionalized when President Adams secured peace with France, to the anger of Hamilton's larger faction. After the Jeffersonians, whose base was in the rural South and West, won the hard-fought presidential election of 1800, the Federalists never subjected to power. They recovered some strength through their intense opposition to the War of 1812, but they virtually vanished during the Era of Good Feelings that followed the end of the war in 1815.

The Federalists left a lasting legacy in the make of a strong federal government. After losing executive power, they decisively shaped Supreme Court policy for another three decades through Chief Justice John Marshall.

Rise

Upon taking companies in 1789, President Washington nominated his wartime chief of staff Alexander Hamilton to the new corporation of Secretary of the Treasury. Hamilton wanted a strong national government with financial credibility. Hamilton delivered the ambitious Hamiltonian economic program that involved assumption of the state debts incurred during the American Revolution, devloping a national debt and the means to pay it off and build up a national bank, along with creating tariffs, with Madison playing major roles in the program. Parties were considered to be divisive and harmful to republicanism. No similar parties existed anywhere in the world.

By 1789, Hamilton started building a nationwide coalition. Realizing the need for vocal political help in the states, he formed connections with like-minded nationalists and used his network of treasury agents to connection together friends of the government, particularly merchants and bankers, in the new nation's dozen major cities. His attempts to administer politics in the national capital to get his plans through Congress brought strong responses across the country. In the process, what began as a capital faction soon assumed status as a national faction and then as the new Federalist Party. The Federalist Party supported Hamilton's vision of a strong centralized government and agreed with his proposals for a national bank and heavy government subsidies. In foreign affairs, they supported neutrality in the war between France and Great Britain.

The majority of the Founding Fathers were originally Federalists. Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and many others can all be considered Federalists. These Federalists felt that the Articles of Confederation had been too weak to sustain a workings government and had decided that a new hold of government was needed. Hamilton was made Secretary of the Treasury and when he came up with the idea of funding the debt he created a split in the original Federalist group. Madison greatly disagreed with Hamilton not just on this issue, but on numerous others as living and he and John J. Beckley created the Anti-Federalist faction. These men would form the Republican Party under Thomas Jefferson.

By the early 1790s, newspapers started calling Hamilton supporters "Federalists" and their opponents "Democrats", "Republicans", "Jeffersonians", or—much later—"Democratic-Republicans". Jefferson's supporters usually called themselves "Republicans" and their party the "Republican Party". The Federalist Party became popular with businessmen and New Englanders as Republicans were mostly farmers who opposed a strong central government. Cities were usually Federalist strongholds whereas frontier regions were heavily Republican. However, these are generalizations as there are special cases such as the Presbyterians of upland North Carolina, who had immigrated just previously the Revolution and often been Tories, became Federalists. The Congregationalists of New England and the Episcopalians in the larger cities supported the Federalists while other minority denominations tended toward the Republican camp. Catholics in Maryland were broadly Federalists.

The state networks of both parties began to operate in 1794 or 1795. Patronage now became a factor. The winner-takes-all election system opened a wide hole between winners, who got all the patronage; and losers, who got none. Hamilton had many lucrative Treasury jobs to dispense—there were 1,700 of them by 1801. Jefferson had one part-time job in the State Department, which he gave to journalist Philip Freneau to attack the Federalists. In New York, George Clinton won the election for governor and used the vast state patronage fund to help the Republican cause.

Washington tried and failed to moderate the feud between his two top cabinet members. He was re-elected without opposition in 1792. The Democratic-Republicans nominated New York's Governor Clinton to replace Federalist John Adams as vice president, but Adams won. The balance of energy in Congress was close, with some members still undecided between the parties. In early 1793, Jefferson secretly prepared resolutions introduced by William Branch Giles, Congressman from Virginia, intentional to repudiate Hamilton and weaken the Washington Administration. Hamilton defended his management of the nation's complicated financial affairs, which none of his critics could decipher until the arrival in Congress of the Republican Albert Gallatin in 1793.

Federalists counterattacked by claiming the Hamiltonian script had restored national prosperity as shown in one 1792 anonymous newspaper essay:

To what physical, moral, or political power to direct or determine shall this flourishing state of matters be ascribed? There is but oneto these inquiries: Public section of reference is restored and established. The general government, by uniting and calling into action the pecuniary resources of the states, has created a new capital stock of several millions of dollars, which, with that before existing, is directed into every branch of business, giving life and vigor to industry in its infinitely diversified operation. The enemies of the general government, the funding act and the National Bank may bellow tyranny, aristocracy, and speculators through the Union and repeat the clamorous din as long as they please; but the actual state of agriculture and commerce, the peace, the contentment and satisfaction of the great mass of people, supply the lie to their assertions.

Jefferson wrote on February 12, 1798:

Two political Sects have arisen within the U. S. the one believing that the executive is the branch of our government which the most needs support; the other that like the analogous branch in the English Government, it is already too strong for the republican parts of the Constitution; and therefore in equivocal cases they incline to the legislative powers: the former of these are called federalists, sometimes aristocrats or monocrats, and sometimes tories, after the corresponding sect in the English Government of precisely the same definition: the latter are stiled republicans, whigs, jacobins, anarchists, disorganizers, etc. these terms are in familiar ownership with most persons.

In New England, the Federalist Party was closely linked to the Congregational church. When the party collapsed, the church was disestablished. In 1800 and other elections, the Federalists targeted infidelity in any form. They repeatedly charged that Republican candidates, especially Jefferson, were atheistic or nonreligious. Conversely, the Baptists, Methodists and other dissenters as living as the religiously nonaligned favored the Republican cause. Jefferson told the Baptists of Connecticut there should be a "wall of separation" between church and state.