Despite the many uses of political parties, the Framers of the Constitution were deeply suspicious of them. In Madison’s view, the factionalism that had rent the state governments during the 1780s—between the coastal, commercial elites and the yeoman interior class—had nearly brought the nation’s experiment in self-government to an end.6 Political parties are, after all, organized factions, and Madison spoke for many when, in Federalist #10, he writes:
By a faction, I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community. There are two methods of curing the mischiefs of faction: the one, by removing its causes; the other, by controlling its effects.7
In other words, no political party could have a truly public-spirited nature; inevitably, every last one of them was bound to favor some group over another, thus undermining the public interest.
An important purpose of the Constitution, per Madison in Federalist #10, is to “break and control the violence of faction.” Rather than acknowledge the inevitability of political parties, the Constitution seeks to keep them from coalescing, by dispersing power far and wide. The hope was that no faction, or party, could possibly grab all the levers of political power for their own selfish purposes. While factions would inevitably form, they would not be able to attach themselves permanently to the government. Somewhere, somehow, an opponent would retain a toehold in the government to veto the designs of fractious majorities, and in time the partisan fever would break. This is why historian Richard Hofstadter calls the founding document a “Constitution against parties.”8
It is thus quite surprising that the Framers would themselves become the originators of the party system. Why the change of heart? In fact, there was not really a change of heart at all, at least among the Republicans. They saw themselves as representing a truly public interest, that of the great majority of the country, and the Federalists as a minority faction, utilizing the preeminence of George Washington and, later, fear of war with the French, to confuse and beguile the public. Ultimately, the Republicans believed that they, and only they, were the representatives of the people, while the Federalists were suspicious of public opinion, and sought to separate the management of the government from the people. This is why Thomas Jefferson, Madison, and their allies could flip-flop so seamlessly from antiparty to proparty. They did not really see themselves as a party in the sense that we think of them today, and they certainly did not think of the Federalists as being a mass-based party like today’s Democrats and Republicans. For them, Jefferson’s triumph in 1800 heralded a restoration of the republican spirit of the Founding rather than the victory of one faction over another.9
Even though they would have denied that they were a party in the way we think of them today, they nevertheless acted like one. For instance, President Jefferson exercised tight control over his allies in Congress, prompting Federalist senator Timothy Pickering to complain, not without merit, that Jefferson “secretly dictates every measure which is seriously proposed and supported” in the Congress. The Republicans also developed a party organization that was a prototype of the modern variety. They believed that their restoration of constitutional principles required an active organization that would spur on the public; the Federalist threat, as they saw it, lay in the idleness of the great mass of people who were true Republicans. And so it was that the contest for the presidency in 1800 did more than any electoral battle in a generation to encourage the growth of party organizations in the states. While few states at this point had popular elections for the Electoral College, a series of battles for state government control in New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia served as proxy battles for the presidency, and in these states the Republicans sought to organize a unified front.10
After Jefferson’s victory, the Republican leadership hoped to separate the Federalist electorate from the party leadership. In his first inaugural, Jefferson declares, “We are all Federalists; we are all Republicans.”11 This was not meant as some kind of new age, gooey pabulum; instead, it signaled a policy of conciliation, an integral aspect to the Jeffersonian project. Much of this was covered in the previous chapter, as the Republicans increasingly adopted the Federalist domestic program. As we shall see later in this chapter, Jefferson and his Republican successors were relatively subdued (compared to the Jacksonians) in removing Federalist officeholders from the government. They hoped that they could peel off enough of their opposition to render this two-party system a dead letter.
While this strategy bore political fruit—as the Federalist position in Congress shriveled to virtually nothing and its capacity to contest presidential elections disappeared—not everybody on the Republican side was satisfied. John Randolph of Virginia and his “Quids” faction believed that the party’s leadership had sold out its principles for the sake of political expedience. More often than not, the peculiar Quids were on the outside looking in during Madison and James Monroe’s tenures, but New York political maven Martin Van Buren was a rising star who felt that the fusion policy of Monroe, which worked to further integrate Republicans with old Federalists, was handing power over to a crypto-Federalist contingency.
Van Buren has since been remembered as a founder of the two-party system, but like the early Republicans he denied the popular legitimacy of his opponents. The National Republicans, and later the Whigs (as his opponents would be called), in his view, were merely rebranded Federalists, who beguiled the public into voting against their own interests. As far as Van Buren was concerned, there was one party that represented the people’s interests, the Republican Party. Where he differed from his predecessors was his opposition to reconciliation with the Federalists, believing that this weakened the party organization and thus undermined principled Republican governance. A robust party organization, clearly delineating what the party stands for and who are its standard-bearers, was the only true protection for the principles that Jefferson had rescued in 1800.12
The events of the 1820s seemed to vindicate Van Buren’s suspicions. The “amalgamating policies of Mr. Monroe”—as Van Buren once put it—led to a collapse in party discipline on the national level in the early part of the decade, culminating in the death of the party caucus in 1824.13 The Republicans could not agree on a presidential nominee, and so four candidates—John Quincy Adams, Henry Clay, William Crawford, and Andrew Jackson—all ran as Republicans, and all sought the White House via a personal following largely predicated on regional ties. The result was the election of Quincy Adams, himself a former Federalist whose ambitious political program would have been music to the ears of Alexander Hamilton.14
Van Buren had faced a similar situation in his home state of New York. Once essential to the Republican alliance, New York had fallen prey to factional rivalries predicated upon family ties. The Schuylers, the Livingstons, and the Clintons variably dominated New York politics during Van Buren’s lifetime, which inevitably meant a corruption of the pure Republican faith as Federalists often held the balance of power. Van Buren and his “Bucktail” faction in New York lacked the family pedigree of their principal opponent, DeWitt Clinton, but they more than made up for it in political organization. By building a network of party operatives that stretched from the state capitol in Albany all