After the Republican victory in 1800, the Federalists were to limp slowly off the political scene, with Alexander Hamilton suffering a brutal end, slain in a duel with Vice President Aaron Burr in 1803. The Republicans were then faced with the very problems that plagued Hamilton. For all their philosophical scruples, they had no novel answers on how to grow and manage the new nation, and they ultimately relied upon the insights he had laid out more than a decade before: a powerful national government based on a generous interpretation of the Constitution could yield a more perfect union by guiding national policy—foreign and domestic—toward a series of sensible goals like economic growth and sovereign independence.
Indeed, both the Federalists and Republicans—in their ways—committed to a kind of American empire. Hamilton, as we saw in Federalist #10, proposed an economically powerful America that could rival the European powers, and his policies were designed to bring that about. The Republicans hated the Hamiltonian program, which they saw as expanding the powers of government too far. Even so, once in power they were similarly drawn to what Thomas Jefferson had once called an “Empire of Liberty.” The Republicans envisioned a nation that filled in the vast expanses of the North American continent, and to bring that about they too advanced a program that stretched the powers of the Constitution well beyond their original limits. They called for protective tariffs, territorial acquisition, federal internal improvements, and even a Second Bank of the United States.
But the original insights of the old Republican opposition were no less valid, even if they were impractical for managing an empire: growing the powers of the government without modifying its structures ran the risk of corruption. It undermined the principle of checks and balances, and limited the capacity of the government to self-correct, to make sure that only the public interest was being served, rather than private and parochial interests.
Thus, it should come as no surprise that the upsides of Hamiltonianism—sensible economic policy; vigorous foreign policy—also brought the downsides—corruption. Governmental perfidy became rampant during the James Monroe administration of 1817 to 1825, but it was during the tenure of Andrew Jackson that it transformed into outright lawlessness. Jackson believed that he was a defender of the old Republican faith, but in reality he supported a big government when and as it suited his political agenda, and worse he was more than happy to enforce or not enforce the law according to similar dictates. In Nicholas Biddle, the president of the Second Bank of the United States, he met a foe every bit as crafty and deluded as he, and the lawless battle between the two dragged the American economy into a needless recession.
The political battles of the 1790s were some of the most polarizing and divisive that the country has ever seen. Hamilton’s economic agenda of the early part of the decade set the stage, but the outbreak of war between Britain and France—the country’s two largest trading partners—meant that foreign affairs would dominate much of George Washington’s second term. The Federalists narrowly carried the day in 1796, with Vice President John Adams barely edging former Secretary of State Jefferson in the Electoral College. Political intrigue by the French gave the pro-British Federalists the advantage in the 1798 midterm elections, after which they controlled nearly 60 percent of all House seats and better than two-thirds of the Senate.
But the Federalists overplayed their hand, expanding the military and passing the grossly un-republican Alien and Sedition Acts, politicized laws that trampled on the Bill of Rights to target their Republican opposition. That, plus the abatement of war fever, led to a Republican resurgence in 1800, with Jefferson narrowly winning the presidency and the Republicans taking control of the entire Congress.
This would mark the beginning of the end for the Federalist Party. Ironically enough, it was strong trade with Britain that facilitated economic prosperity and thus the Republicans’ political victories during the first term of Jefferson. The breakdown of relations with Britain in Jefferson’s second term and Madison’s first term helped bring about a Federalist mini-revival in the Northeast, but none of this was enough to give them control of either chamber of Congress, let alone the presidency. During the War of 1812, economic tumult hit the Northeast particularly hard, and radical Federalists in New England floated the idea of secession during the Hartford Convention in 1814, which further delegitimized Hamilton’s old party.1 With the conclusion of the war in 1816, the country rejoiced and the Federalists were finished, not even running a presidential candidate in 1820.2
With the decline of the Federalists, New England was essentially left on the outside looking in. Control of the country shifted to a coalition of the South and West, helmed for twenty-four years by the “Virginia Dynasty.” Jefferson served two terms as president, to be followed by his friend Madison for another two, then for another two by Monroe, a sometimes friend, sometimes foe of Madison but always a close confidant of Jefferson. To this day, the Republican dominance of government for the first quarter of the nineteenth century is unmatched in American history in terms of length and breadth.3
This dominance of the government meant that the Republicans alone had to face the very problems that had bedeviled the Federalists during the 1790s. And of course, these were tribulations that Republicans did not have to endure at that point, seeing as how they were a minority coalition. Jefferson and Madison could cite chapter and verse of republican philosophy to decry the Bank of the United States, but that is not to say they had an alternative to stabilize the currency, promote credit, or facilitate tax payments. They did not.
This goes a long way to explaining why, after acquiring control of the government, they slowly but surely adopted much of the Federalist program, and even expanded the scope of government beyond what the Hamiltonians had proposed. And as for the republican ideals of the 1790s? Implicitly, the Republicans adopted a vaguely aristocratic attitude: as long as the government was controlled by sensible Republicans (such as they), the country need not fear the kind of corruption that was supposed to have been ruining the body politic in the decade prior.
The Republican comfort with governmental power began to grow in Jefferson’s first term. His first annual message to Congress called for the reduction of taxes, a cut in the military, and a plan to retire the national debt, all consistent with the Republican policy of the 1790s. However, Jefferson ultimately made no moves against the Bank. Over the course of his term, he made noises within his cabinet about ending the Bank’s monopoly on federal deposits, but his secretary of the treasury, Albert Gallatin, consistently stayed his hand. An enormously influential Republican who had served as Republican House leader after Madison departed the lower chamber, the Swiss-born Gallatin was a close confidant of Jefferson and probably the only major party leader with a firm grasp of how public credit actually functioned. He saw the utility of the Bank and consistently sidestepped the issue whenever Jefferson pressed him to take action on it.4
Interestingly, the Jefferson administration also spent more on internal improvements than either of its Federalist predecessors, despite the Republican insistence on economy in government. The Republicans could have their cake and eat it too: economic prosperity meant they could cut taxes while also spending more than Washington or Adams had on domestic projects. Yet Jefferson’s most extraordinary expansion of government power, especially the authority of the president, came in the realm of foreign affairs.
The Louisiana Purchase is the most striking example. After the successful coup by former slaves in Haiti, Napoleon Bonaparte effectively gave up his pretensions to a French empire in North America, and looked to divest his nation of its expansive holdings on the continent. The Republicans, naturally, were more than happy to cut a deal, but Jefferson worried about the constitutional implications. There was nothing in