COLONY, REBELLION, REPUBLIC: 18TH CENTURY AMERICA/U.S.

The eighteenth century proved to be a deeply transformative era for North America. By the turn of the nineteenth century, direct French influence was all but eradicated from the eastern region of the continent and diverse religious influences challenged definitions of church power, facilitating a growing democratic impulse. The British colonies of North America declared their independence from the Crown and raised arms to do so. Those same colonies-turned-states then altered themselves from generally autonomous members of a loose confederation into a more politically centralized and dynamic constitutional republic. Ideas and actions cultivated an age of social, intellectual, and religious evolution which was influenced by Enlightenment notions of empirical science, a growing diversity of religious thought, and radical expressions of political philosophy that threw off monarchical rule in favor of republican civic virtue. As often transpires in history, the many figures who made these transformations possible did so, at times, unwittingly, and often did not envisage the democratic and anti-aristocratic tendencies which emerged in the nineteenth century. The American Revolution was not merely a war of independence. It was a revolution informed by and resulting in immense shifts in economic, political, and religious culture.

Different regions of English North America evolved in particular ways based on their distinct motivations for colonization, whether they were rooted in religious freedom, economics, or other factors. Virginia, for example, and its characteristics can be understood through an analysis of its first permanent colony: Jamestown. Jamestown had initially been undertaken in the early seventeenth century as a profit-making post that would cultivate natural resources. When it was soon discovered that the precious metals that the Spanish had exploited in the West Indies were not to be found in the Chesapeake, the profit motive drove the English colonists at Jamestown to improvise. They required a different tack. They found it soon enough in the cultivation and transport of tobacco.

Tobacco came to define Jamestown and eventually Virginia. It not only proved to be a highly profitable crop, but it helped shape the politics and stratified culture of the colony. Because of the use of indentured servants early on, gentlemen who had arrived in Virginia as free, unbonded men were able to secure positions in a nascent aristocracy rather quickly. As indentured servants earned their freedom and became gentlemen farmers themselves, they utilized incoming indentures and the process both continued and grew. As demand for tobacco continued to rise and expansion of land was required to maintain economic growth, the two most egregious features of American history developed and took root: displacement of Native Americans to take their land for cultivation and the influx of African slaves. The use of slaves slashed labor costs, did away with the problem that came with indentured servants (indentured servants eventually became free and thus became competition), and created unending potential in the exploitation of slave labor, as the children of slave mothers were born slaves. Thus, Virginia’s aristocratic culture began quickly with the early solidification of gentlemen as local office-holders and then its stratified culture was then amplified exponentially through the introduction and utilization of the buying and selling (and harvesting) of African slaves. This aspect of Virginia culture was then repeated in other southern colonies, including South Carolina and Georgia.

Religion was, then, not a defining feature of early Virginia culture. Rather, the profit motive and the creation of an aristocratic class defined the early Virginia colony. Another important aspect included notions of English liberty. Virginia gentleman (and eventually gentlemen throughout the colonies) saw this as an especially noteworthy part of their existence and power. As Alan Taylor notes in Colonial America (2013), “Colonial leaders insisted they were transplanted English endowed with all the liberties enjoyed by propertied men at home. They boasted that their English liberties rendered them superior to the colonists of the more authoritarian empires of France and Spain.” Although religion took a stronger role in Virginia culture as time went on, it was English liberty that gave Virginia gentlemen much of their sense of worth and identity. These notions of the rights of Englishmen would later inform much of the arguments of colonists against acts of Parliament and the King in the 1760s.

New England was very different in its social and religious makeup from Virginia, as it was defined greatly by its religious influence. New England, of course, was founded by religious separatists in the early seventeenth century. These early colonists believed every aspect of one’s existence, in the contexts of moral living, devotion to family, and commitment to community, were wrapped up in living a Christ-like life. Industriousness was also an important part of New England puritan life, and so commerce and production informed the generations that followed. Religion, however, remained the cultural north star for New Englanders well into the eighteenth century. When tragedy struck, whether natural disasters or human-facilitated calamities such as the Salem Witch Trials in the 1690s, they were seen as the result of a drawing away from God. Thus, such misfortunes would be used to bring the people back to a Christ-centered life. New England, however, was not a place for religious toleration and its reputation for this tendency persisted. Additionally, though slavery never took root in New England the way it did in Virginia, it soon enough became tied to the international slave trade by way of its selling of timber and other products. New England’s connection to slavery was thus a commercial one and, though they profited from what came to be known as the triangle trade (American products and materials sent to England, slaves sent to the Americas, slave labor cultivation of land in the Americas, etc.), slavery remained far more culturally removed in New England in comparison to southern colonies like Virginia, whose economy grew to be dependent on the institution.

New York was in some ways similar to Virginia in that it was developed (originally as New Netherland by the Dutch) as a commercially-motivated outpost, but through merchants and manufactures. By 1700, the New York colony established policies of religious toleration which brought in thousands of Quakers, Puritans, and Presbyterians. The transformation of England to Britain in 1707, with the Act of Union, facilitated an influx of Scottish Presbyterians into New York and Pennsylvania in the eighteenth century. The Scottish/Presbyterian influence upon the middle colonies region, particularly Pennsylvania, was immense.

Pennsylvania had been founded by William Penn who sought establishing a colony based on religious toleration—particularly for members of the Society of Friends, or Quakers. The settling of Philadelphia in 1682 was a priority for Penn. He had given the name because of its meaning in Greek: “brotherly love.” Also important to Penn, along with religious toleration, was to establish and maintain friendly relationships with the Indians. In his “Letter to the Indians,” which he wrote in England and sent ahead of his own arrival to the colony, Penn stated that “the king of the country where I live hath given unto me a great province, but I desire to enjoy it with your love and consent, that we may always live together as neighbors and friends… I am very sensible of the unkindness and injustice that hath been too much exercised towards you… I have great love and regard towards you, and I desire to win and gain your love and friendship.”

Unlike New England’s rocky earth, Pennsylvania and the middle colonies held forgiving and generous soil. The fortuitous and fruitful land, combined with the colony’s religious toleration, made it very appealing and facilitated the growth of a middling farmer class which was both self-sufficient and able to capitalize on the growing and selling of livestock for profit. Adding to this, because of the amity established with the Indians by William Penn, the colony benefited from extended periods of peace with Native Americans. Religious toleration, an established peace with Indians, and good land for farming thus informed the features of Pennsylvania in the eighteenth century, including the massive influx of Scots Presbyterians and German Pietists, including Lutherans and Baptists.

One of the events—or series of events—in the eighteenth century that brought these various and unique colonies closer together culturally was a phenomenon of religious revival known as the Great Awakening. Among the Great Awakening’s first champions was George Whitefield from Gloucester, England. Whitefield toured the American colonies, from New England to Georgia, preaching his form of evangelical Anglicanism from 1739 to 1741. Whitefield helped to popularize Methodism, a denomination which originally sought to reform the Church of England from within but eventually became its own sect.

Whitefield and other participants of the Great Awakening promoted what came to be known as New Light evangelicalism. The New Lights challenged the so-called Old Lights and their staid, reserved, and academic approach to biblical teachings. New Lights, in contrast, were decidedly non-academic and employed an emotionalism that excited many colonists. Old Light preachers, however, were critical of such emotionalism. Alan Taylor notes in Colonial America that “the Old Lights feared the outbursts evoked by the revivals: weeping, crying out, twitching, and falling down during worship. Most Old Light ministers were older men. Well established in their careers and set in their ways, they felt rattled by the ambitious zeal of New Light rivals, who tended to be younger and more adaptable to ‘new measures.’”

Another important participant of the Great Awakening was the Connecticut-born Jonathan Edwards. Edwards approached biblical thought through an overtly philosophical lens and had earned an M.A. in divinities, yet his style was also similarly evangelical and emotional. The wave of Protestant missioning in the nineteenth century owed an enormous debt to Edwards’s influence during the eighteenth. Edwards himself was influenced by the preaching of George Whitefield as well as Gilbert Tennent, a Presbyterian minister from New Jersey. Jonathan Edwards’s sermons often leaned into fire and brimstone-related oratory. His sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” exemplifies this. The sermon is a meditation on the circumstances of salvation and judgment. Edwards contends that “God hath had it on His heart to show to angels and men both how excellent His love is and how terrible His wrath is.” A recurring theme of the sermon is taken from Deuteronomy 32:35, “… their foot shall slide in due time.”

The Great Awakening drew the farthest ends of Colonial America closer together by enflaming interest in evangelical Christianity throughout. Its impact not only stoked a new age of religious revival in the colonies but its impact on ordinary people contributed to a feeling of agency and power which acted as a vehicle for later democratic thought. By challenging the norms of church customs and leadership, a whole new world of possibility was made manifest within the American mind. Thomas Kidd makes a similar point in his article, “The Great Awakening and the Contested Origins of American Evangelical Christianity,” when he observes that “the radical impulse within evangelicalism supplied pre-Revolutionary America with one of its strongest resources of egalitarian thought.” He also notes that evangelicals like James Davenport promoted a leveling spirit by preaching to and consciously seeking out “the poor and the outcast of society” and that he “made more inroads among Native Americans” than any other New England minister, New Light or Old. Indeed, this reaching across the racial barrier was another important aspect of the Great Awakening, as New Lights missioned to Indians and to African slaves. Alan Taylor ably underscores this point when he observes that slaves often “responded positively to their accessible and emotional style of worship. Ordinarily reminded of their [social and legal] inferiority… the enslaved found in evangelical worship fleeting moments of equality with every other seeker.”

The Great Awakening, then, which only lasted less than a couple decades, had much longer-lasting cultural ramifications. A new degree of egalitarian thought, rooted in this religious revival, likely enabled an ability to consider more democratic notions than before. The teachings and examples of the New Lights gave the uneducated a feeling that they could be as close to God as their ministers. Missioning to Native Americans and African American slaves allowed ideals to transcend legal and cultural divisions based on race and ethnicity. There is thus an irony to the Great Awakening. It promoted a certain antiauthoritarian rhetoric and employed emotional appeals to a diversity of peoples, but by appealing to various groups around Colonial America the awakening made the different colonies (which had different histories and different priorities) more similar than they had ever been before. Antiauthoritarian enthusiasm, in one sense, brought different people together in a new way that would inform American perspectives on the role of religion and governance going forward.

The eighteenth century, of course, was the age of Enlightenment, where scientific thought, reason, questioning of religious orthodoxy, and a resurgence of classical notions of virtue and republicanism emerged. Those who became revolutionaries for American independence in the 1770s and reshaped constitutional republicanism in the 1780s were children of the Enlightenment. The first among the founders, chronologically, to promote Enlightenment values—through print and by example—was Benjamin Franklin. Franklin became a hero in the nineteenth century as he seemed to embody the self-made man, entrepreneur who made his riches through a combination of hard work and brilliance. He was an international celebrity for proving that lightning and electricity were one and the same, implicitly demonstrating that lightning strikes were not actions of a wrathful God but natural phenomena. As Gordon Wood observes, however, in Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different (2006), Franklin was already an older man in the 1760s (let alone the 1770s and 1780s) and had been a proud Tory during his life. Franklin’s participation in the American Revolution “was not natural or inevitable.” Wood similarly asserts that because Franklin was significantly older than the other founders “and had lived longer under British rule, he was more deeply committed to the British Empire than [the other founders] were.” This point is significant, as it underscores how dramatic the shift was when Franklin decided to become a revolutionary. When he did, he helped secure a military alliance with France and his influence and fame increased.

It would be a mistake, however, to see Franklin the way many a century later (and beyond) did. Despite his success as a printer and being an example of bootstrapping capitalism, this was not all that Franklin had to offer. Virtue was of particular importance to Franklin. In his autobiography, Franklin ruminates on a list of thirteen virtues he advocates for. The list includes the following virtues, in order: Temperance, Silence, Order, Resolution, Frugality, Industry, Sincerity, Justice, Moderation, Cleanliness, Tranquility, Chastity, and Humility. Each of these were meditated upon. For example, regarding Silence, he wrote “Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself; avoid trifling conversation,” and for Humility he asserted “Imitate Jesus and Socrates.” This quote is especially useful as it foretells a growing movement later in the eighteenth century, during the revolutionary and early constitutional periods, when notions of civic virtue and classical republicanism reached their cultural zenith in the United States.

Thomas Jefferson too was a man of science and the Enlightenment. Gordon Wood observes that Jefferson “was probably the American revolutionary leader most taken with the age’s liberal prescription for enlightenment, gentility, and refinement.” Jefferson, however, when not acting as a radical by challenging trinitarian Christianity with his advocacy of Deism or celebrating bloodshed in the later French Revolution and comparing the Terror with storms in the atmosphere, actually proved to be—at times—rather doctrinaire. Wood notes that Jefferson could occasionally be “an early version of a knee-jerk liberal.” Jefferson’s bundle of contradictions are best exemplified by his ideas regarding race. Though he championed the end of slavery in many of his writings in his younger years and even proposed bills in Virginia to phase out the peculiar institution, his comments about the inferiority of Africans in his Notes on the State of Virginia are difficult to resolve. It may well be that Jefferson’s genius, and his manifold skills in political theory, botany, diplomacy, music, and architecture makes his shortcomings more striking. Jefferson certainly was not the only slaveowner to espouse notions of liberty. The juxtaposition of his brilliance and moral failings, however, cause us to expect more from him regarding emancipation and racial equality. He is jarring to modern sensibilities for the very reason that he was so forward-thinking in other ways. Nevertheless, Jefferson, for this reason as well, may be the most accurate personification of eighteenth century enlightenment thinking: simultaneously radical and backward.

John Adams and Thomas Paine in many ways best represent the opposite impulses of American Revolutionary thought. Paine was an Englishman who did not find fame until coming to America and publishing Common Sense in 1776. The work was massively popular. It not only crystalized and popularized the idea of independence from Britain, but was written in a way that was accessible to general readers. Paine’s writing style, though it certainly carried a dramatic flair, did not write over the heads of a common readership. The success of Common Sense and the plain-spoken language of the work cast Paine as a man of the people. This underscored the democratic spirit of the work. Rather than focus on matters important to figures like John Adams (and, later, James Madison), Common Sense didn’t focus on political debates regarding separation of powers. Instead, it argued that the American people themselves could be the writers of their own destiny. Common Sense may be the first overt expression of literary populism in America.  In this way, it informed a growing democratic sentiment among the people. Its notions of popular sovereignty would be echoed in the writings and oratory of Scottish immigrant and American Founder James Wilson a decade later.

John Adams, however, distrusted popular democracy. He was far from alone in the eighteenth century in thinking that democracy was merely another name for mob rule. Adams, instead, believed in the importance of fidelity to written constitutions, the separation of powers, and the rule of law. Adams was himself a lawyer. He famously defended the British soldiers who participated in the so-called Boston Massacre in 1770. For Adams, rule of law and a sense of pragmatic order mattered more than representative government—though he did believe in the importance of parliaments. Adams, then, and Paine, offer two opposite ends of the growing political spectrum in the era of the American Revolution, both of which were informed by enlightenment thought. One championed the power of the common people to participate more directly in the political sphere and be influencers upon their rulers, if not rulers themselves. The other tempered notions of radical democracy with a distrust of popular opinion and advocated for legal and constitutional safeguards which would allow a republic to endure.

Eventually, the disparate ideas of Adams and Paine resolved themselves, at least to the point that both felt that the British Empire was ultimately a corrupting influence. Paine was early in the understanding that a monarch ruling a people from three thousand miles away was both unnecessary and absurd. He also saw the potential in a people who would rise and fall by individual merit and finally throw off the shackles of aristocracy and nobility. Paine may have been among the earliest to recognize this precisely because he had spent most of his life, until the mid-1770s, in England. He had lived physically and geographically closer to the corrupting influence of monarchy and aristocracy. The colonies of British America had existed for more than a century and had done so without a system of monarchical rank. This meant that those who had grown up in the colonies could have deference for a far way king whose rule they did not generally feel. Until the 1760s, with some notable exceptions including the era of the New England Dominion in the late seventeenth century and the French and Indian War in the mid-eighteenth century, American colonists were among the freest and most prosperous people in the world. The distance from the Crown informed a culture of self-rule which they had often generally taken for granted. When the imperial crisis emerged in the 1760s (to raise taxes on the colonies to settle French and Indian War debt), the colonists felt the power of the Crown in a more significant way than ever before. George III’s 1763 declaration that colonists may not expand westward into further Indian lands—and the garrisons that remained west of the colonies to ensure no more encroachment ensued—also challenged the sense of autonomy that colonists had largely believed to be their birthright. It was not until the imperial crisis of the 1760s and early 1770s that Paine’s arguments regarding the corrupting influence of monarchy could have been considered by a receptive American audience. Prior to the 1760s, such claims would likely have fallen upon deaf ears. By 1776, however, the Americans became capable of envisioning a regenerated society whose sovereignty resided in the people themselves rather than a European monarch.

If Thomas Paine provided the language of independence and political liberty to the colonists, however, the seeds had been sown previously by seventeenth and eighteenth century philosophers. Sheila Kennedy, in a section of her book, God and Country: America in Red and Blue (2007), titled “The New Learning,” notes the indelible imprint John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government had upon the American founding, the Declaration of Independence, and even the U.S. Constitution. She also observes that the intellectual revolution that underscored the Enlightenment and became manifested in the American Revolution was similarly informed by prominent Scottish philosophers. These Scottish Enlightenment figures, which included David Hume and Adam Smith, “emphasized the agency of man; that is, they held that man is possessed of a rational freedom that empowers him to act (and not just be acted upon).” It is noteworthy to recognize, to underscore the connection between Paine and the philosophers who both preceded him and were his contemporaries, that the Scottish renaissance school of thought is also known as Common Sense Realism. Kennedy explains that the Enlightenment “was not in any sense a unitary phenomenon; it included literally hundreds of other thinkers, scientists, political economists, and philosophers, many of whom considered themselves staunch of the established faith. It was certainly not a doctrine, nor a set of agreed-upon principles; rather, it was a new way of conceiving reality, based on science and reason.” Thus the philosophical and economic influences upon the American founding were manifold.

By the time of the American Revolution, then, an assortment of concepts and ideologies—some of which contradicted each other—emerged as something representing a relatively cohesive philosophy, however inconsistent it could at times be. Classical liberalism championed a more laissez-faire approach to manufacturing and trade. This form of libertarian economics promoted profit for self-interest, arguing that in a market defined by voluntary association and voluntary trade, all participants benefit. In this way, classical liberal economics promoted a certain level of egalitarianism and social democracy. Anyone might have something to sell, thus everyone might be a potential customer. One could benefit from the work of their own hands and their own mind. In this sense, free market values also informed a staunch individualism that came to be associated with United States culture in the next century.

Civic virtue, informed by notions of classical republicanism, also came to the fore in the age of revolution. Classical republicanism emphasized the idea of the virtuous citizen. The virtuous citizen put the needs of the community and his republican government above self-interest. The model of the family was important to this concept. The wife/mother was the primary educator of the children and in this way she contributed to the republic through the civic motherhood of inculcating her children with republican values. The man of the house performed a dual role of husband/father and that of public citizen. The expression of being a public citizen (generally a man who owned land, though property status requirements soon disappeared after the Revolution) may be expressed through voting. It could also be through office-holding as a delegate or some other representative position. 

For decades, however (essentially from the time of the revolution until the turn of the century) those seeking office had to exhibit a disinterestedness in the role. Disinterestedness was one of the paradoxes of classical republicanism in the revolutionary era and the early republic. Those most interested in office-holding required a showing of disinterestedness to demonstrate that concern for public office was for the good of the community and not for self-interested motivations. This is not dissimilar to the relationship between classical liberal economics on one hand and classical republicanism on the other. These two impulses were not merely different from each other, but in many ways opposite and contradictory. Classical liberal economics casts individual self-interest as an engine for manufacturing and commerce. Its philosophy maintains that individual self-interest benefits all, as it is made up of voluntary associations conducting voluntary transactions. The individual, through self-interest, benefits the group. Yet, classical republicanism is decidedly communitarian. It is defined by its assertion that devotion to community is of higher importance than devotion to individual desires. More than communitarian interests being paramount, classical republicanism asserts that self-interest is in fact a corrupting force. This is why exemplifying disinterestedness in politics was such a prominent feature in classical republicanism. Somehow, nevertheless, these two contradictory philosophies informed the economics, politics, and culture of the American Revolution and the early American republic.

When the war for independence was won, it did not take long for some to believe the individual states were failing to maintain order. The two figures most responsible for the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787, James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, had similar yet simultaneously divergent motivations for reforming the young American government. Economics was a factor for both men. The rampant use of paper money among many of the states and the debt relief offered by some state legislatures was driving the economy further downward. During the convention, Hamilton made himself clear that he desired a British model of government and made no secret that he sought a system that would facilitate industrialization, urbanization, and speculation. His ideas would become realized when he became the first Secretary of the Treasury in 1789, but his desire for an energetic federal government which could encourage economic growth and stimulate trade were first proposed both at the Philadelphia Convention and in the essays published to promote ratification of the new Constitution (written by Hamilton, Madison, and John Jay, all sharing the pseudonym “Publius”), the Federalist Papers (originally known simply as The Federalist). One of the acts Hamilton soon put forth in his role as Secretary of the Treasury was the federal assumption of state war debt. Hamilton cleverly recognized that the larger the debt the federal government assumed, the better its credit (provided it did not default on repayment). Increasing federal debt thus relieved the states economically, gave the federal government a stronger position to borrow from other nations (increasing its credit further), which then facilitated the industrial, trade, and military strength that Hamilton sought. A more energetic federal government which had the power to tax (one of the most obvious deficiencies of the Articles of Confederation), assume state debts, and borrow from friendly nations could make an American empire (which Hamilton made no secret of wanting) possible.

James Madison also sought the formation of a stronger central government and although his concerns were, like Hamilton’s, economic, Madison also meditated upon the nature of government and had grown concerned with issues regarding the separation of powers. Influenced by the French Enlightenment philosopher Montesquieu, Madison advocated Montesquieu’s position that government should be made up of three independent branches: legislative, executive, and judicial. The English Civil Wars and the Glorious Revolution in the seventeenth century had firmly established the importance of separation between executive and legislative power. What made Montesquieu’s model novel was the argument for an independent judiciary, which had never entirely existed before. The closest the world had yet seen of an independent judiciary was Montesquieu’s own pre-Revolution France. Under the Old Regime, the French judiciary—known as the French Parlements—had a level of autonomy and power which was unique. They could challenge the King’s law and initially refuse to register it (France during the Old Regime had no legislative branch). They did not, however, have the final word the way the American Constitutional legal system would come to have. In this way, Madison appropriated the notion of an independent judiciary (advocated for by Montesquieu) and brought the concept into an American framework. Ironically, this French innovation was rejected by the French Revolutionaries in the late 1780s and 1790s because it was seen as a relic of the Old Regime. At the moment France entirely abandoned any strain of judicial independence, it found itself reborn in the United States.

Madison, however, focused even more attention on achieving a balance between the federal government and the individual states. The issues of paper money and debt forgiveness on behalf of the states were, to Madison, symptoms of a larger problem: the states had grown too democratic (these policies were generally passed to appease the people of the states). Just prior to the Philadelphia Convention, Madison wrote an essay called “Vices of the Political System of the United States.” The essay is a critique of the overtly democratic impulses of the individual states. For Madison, a stronger central government was necessary to act as a counterbalance to the whims and influence of the states and their citizens. Indeed, in Madison’s original proposal at the Convention—which came to be known as the Virginia Plan—he wanted the federal government to have the power to strike down state laws it did not like. This proposal was rejected.

James Madison saw the overarching issue to be one of faction. The threat of growing democratic sentiment in the individual states that compelled legislators to cave to popular will was merely one aspect of the problems with faction. Madison asserted that the negative effects of faction could be tempered through a diffusion of power. By spreading power across three branches of the federal government and offsetting the powers of the states with that of a stronger centralized model, power could not be concentrated in any one place. Madison makes this striking argument in Federalist No. 10. He first observes the corrupting influence of faction upon humankind and its inevitability, recognizing that “the latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man; and we see them everywhere brought into different degrees of activity, according to the different circumstances of society.” Faction, then, is both a corrupting influence and, Madison asserts, impossible to eradicate from the natural makeup of man. If a society is going to regenerate itself into something more perfect, it must allow for a system which does not ignore human fallibility (as utopian systems do), but accepts this feature and builds a counterweight to it. Madison contends that this can be achieved by creating a political space which constantly pits faction against faction. If the factions are numerous and alliances are ever-shifting depending on the circumstances, power can be diffused and will not concentrate in any one place for long, whether that be the federal government, a branch of the federal government, or an individual state or region of states. He also maintains that a large republic is possible because of such a model. Madison thus addressed a long-standing criticism of republics, countering the argument that such a model is only possible on a small scale. Instead, Madison argues that the various number of factions over a larger area actually facilitates the possibility of republican government, asserting “the extent of the Union gives it the most palpable advantage.” The brilliance of Madison’s Federalist No. 10 is its ability to address the most credible concerns. By working the inherent human flaw of faction against itself a large republic becomes possible because “we behold a republican remedy for the diseases most incident to republican government.” Federalist No. 10 contributed to the notion of checks and balances in U.S. Constitutional government; a simple phrase which belies a sophisticated political philosophy that approaches the art of governance with similar Enlightenment-influenced conceptions of science.

The 1790s, the first full decade of the new republic brought forth the problems of faction that Madison had overlooked or evaded. This is probably because the form of faction which soon emerged (and which Madison took a significant role in) was the creation of political parties. The two parties that formed in the 1790s were a different breed than what they are today, but they did nevertheless represent the two poles of political thought that has since gone down through the centuries and set the precedent for the two-party system. Though parties have changed platforms and names over the ages, and though from an early period there have also been so-called “third parties,” the dominance of two major political factions at odds on fundamental issues was born in the 1790s. The Federalists were generally regarded as more aristocratic, sought industrial and economic growth (this was Hamilton’s party), and were less fond of democratic impulses than were their rivals. Some major figures among the Federalists included Hamilton, John Adams, and George Washington.

The Federalists’ political adversaries were the Democratic Republicans (generally referred to as simply Republicans), whose most prominent figures included Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe. Republicans were skeptical of banks and speculation. They believed strongly in state powers. Jefferson, especially, was more confident in the will of the people than were his Federalist opponents. Republicans were also vocal in their concern regarding the power of the Executive Branch.

One of the most important distinctions between the Federalists and Republicans was their difference regarding foreign alliances. When revolutionary France went to war with Britain, many Federalists lined up behind the former mother country and the Republicans supported France. It is difficult to overstate how much personal feelings motivated these positions. For example, Hamilton was on record asserting that the British model of government was the greatest the world had ever known. This was merely one reason he would be charged both in his own time and through history as a secret monarchist. Jefferson, on the other hand, had spent five years in Paris as American minister to France in the 1780s. Despite his loathsome feelings of cities in general, he loved Paris. He became well acquainted with the French philosophes, many of whom helped inspire the French Revolution. Jefferson saw the French Revolution as deriving from the same Enlightenment impulse as the American Revolution. Indeed, Jefferson maintained his support of the revolution in France when many others stopped—once the events of the Terror transpired.

In many ways, then, the question over which European state to support in this situation was also a tacit endorsement of Hamilton or Jefferson. President George Washington, acting as a voice of reason and rejecting both Hamilton’s and Jefferson’s arguments, declared American neutrality. This move was precedent-setting as it was controversial. It was controversial because France had supported the Americans in winning their independence. Republicans saw not returning the favor as turning their back upon a friend. Federalists maintained, however, that the alliance with France during America’s revolution was with their king, whom they had overthrown. Washington’s declaration of neutrality was an important precedent because it established the President of the Unites States as the director of foreign policy. Washington’s declaration had no actual legal or constitutional legitimacy. It was not so much unconstitutional as extraconstitutional. It is Congress, after all, that has the power to declare war and it is the Senate who has the advise and consent role with the ratification of treaties. Nevertheless, Washington’s decision to stay neutral in the France/England conflict was recognized as a legitimate act by the United States’ chief executive. It is questionable if anyone other than George Washington would have had the influence to establish such a precedent.

The federal assumption of state debts was also a means for Hamilton to facilitate a national bank. This too divided Federalists and Republicans. Hamilton saw the formation of a national bank as necessary for the kind of energetic industrialization and trade he saw as the future of the United States. Using England as his guidepost, Hamilton was ambitious in his designs to put the U.S. on a similar path of expansion and empire. Jefferson, however, and his Republicans—with their negative views of banks and speculation—saw such economic growth to be at the expense of autonomous states filled with autonomous farmers. Indeed, the national bank debate illuminated possibly the most remarkable discrepancy between the two futures envisioned by Hamilton and Jefferson, respectively. Whereas Hamilton saw the United States as eventually emerging as a commercial and industrial empire to rival those of Europe, Jefferson saw the heart of the country being the independent yeoman farmer who was self-sufficient, drew a modest profit from his surplus, and relied on his state government very little and his federal government even less. Such an economically and politically independent citizen would have maximized individual rights and would thus restrain the natural tendency of government to grow. In this way, it could well be argued that the Jeffersonian republicans were more philosophically connected to the ideas of civic virtue and classical republicanism than were the Hamiltonians and Federalists. Jefferson echoed a sentiment going back to republican Rome: a strong republic is one made up of landholding citizens whose devotion to country is due to their autonomy and the maximization of rights. In order for such a republic to endure, civic virtue among the citizenry is a necessary component to stave off personal and political corruption. Urbanization and industrialization in such a context could only threaten the civic virtue of a people.

Civic virtue was not only important to the Democratic Republicans, however, and the assertion that the Jeffersonians were the best champions of classical republicanism can be countered with Federalist John Adams’ point that a republic is only possible with a virtuous citizenry. Though the push for liberal commerce among Federalists may have been one of the policies most contrary to notions of civic and public virtue (at least, according to Jeffersonians), it was the Federalists who most represented the republican ideal of a naturally-emerging aristocratic ruling class. The Jeffersonians may have been to some degree more democratic, but the Federalists understood the classical republican requirement of not only virtuous citizens but also virtuous leaders who assume the mantle of leadership for the common good.

Among the most divisive splits between Federalists and Republicans transpired in the late 1790s when President John Adams signed into law the Alien and Sedition Acts. Among the ramifications of this legislation was a clear violation of First Amendment protections of speech and of the press. One clause specifically criminalized speech which was critical of the President or of Congress (critical speech of the Vice President, which happened to be Thomas Jefferson at the time, was tellingly permitted). In response to these acts, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison wrote the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions of 1798, respectively. Jefferson’s authorship of the Kentucky Resolution was done anonymously in order to avoid possible accusations of treasonous speech. Like-minds in the Kentucky and Virginia legislatures made sure the resolutions saw the light of day.

In both resolutions, Madison and Jefferson argue in favor of state nullification of unconstitutional federal laws. Each maintain that a federal law not pursuant to the Constitution (including its amendments) is legally void. The resolutions assert that states are equal members to the constitutional compact and, as equal members, have the power to interpret the constitutionality of laws passed by the federal government and thus imposed upon the states. They further argue that in such cases states should enact nullification conventions (similar to the ratification conventions convened in the late 1780s to debate the proposed Constitution) to decide whether to accept or reject such laws. Madison’s Virginia Resolution even asserts that the citizens of a state are “duty bound” to nullify laws repugnant to the Constitution (there is some irony that Madison argued for federal power to nullify state laws in the late 1780s and then argued for state power to nullify federal laws a decade later). 

This era of nullification debates have been overlooked historically. When nullification is examined it is more often regarding discussions of it during the Jacksonian era, with the arguments of John C. Calhoun. The radical concept of state nullification soon became irrelevant when Thomas Jefferson was elected President in 1800 and a wave of Republicans overtook the political power of the Federalists. As President, Jefferson allowed the Alien and Sedition Acts to expire. Though the matter resolved itself within a few years, the controversy over the Alien and Sedition Acts and the Republican response of advocating state nullification underscores the deep rifts which emerged between Jefferson and Adams, and Madison and Hamilton. If the 1780s culminated in a regenerated American republic, unified by a new Constitution and a belief in the rule of law, the 1790s exemplified the limits of the founders’ initial optimism and made clear the bounds of political civility. Party politics had been born and a commercial culture had been put into gear. The cost of these realities included a diminishing value for civic virtue. Classical republicanism helped give birth to the United States, but it would not survive it. In its place came the primacy of the individual, in business and in politics. The atomistic and self-interested culture that was to define the United States in the nineteenth century was cultivated in the grave of classical republicanism and civic virtue. That said, the amplification of individualism also laid the groundwork for other aspects of the century following the American founding. Because the language of rights replaced that of communitarian virtue, the rights of the marginalized would be given attention in the nineteenth century as never before. The (lack of) political rights of women and the status of African Americans committed to generations of slavery were challenged in the following century. The philosophy of individual rights and self-interest may have contributed to the end of the culture of civic virtue, but it gave new possibilities to a kind of individual rights language which would inform the expansion of rights for African Americans and for women in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. With the slow death of classical republicanism in the United States came a slow birth of an expanded democracy that recognized the rights of more and more groups of people.

The cultural and political arc of the history of Colonial America, Revolutionary America, and the early Republic is made up of a great number of philosophical, religious, and ethical factors. The eighteenth century saw the transformation of the British colonies into rebel states into a Constitutional Republic precisely because of the various migrations, religious influences, revolutionary economic models, Enlightenment science texts, and philosophical contributions of European political theorists such as Locke and Montesquieu. Also important to the American founding was not just its influences but in how those influences were received. Jefferson appropriated Locke for the Declaration of Independence and Madison utilized Montesquieu to establish an independent judiciary and a Constitution that appreciated, promoted, and safeguarded itself with a methodology of separation of powers. Jeffersonians were more sensitive to the will of the people and helped expand a democratic spirit while Federalists (and, ironically, the Republican James Madison) warned of the threat of mob rule. Jefferson championed the economic and political independence of the yeoman farmer and Hamilton campaigned for turning the nation into an economic powerhouse, facilitating an American industrial revolution, and encouraging a liberal market economy. All of these aspects of the United States, contradictory as they may be, live together. They exist together in tension today as they did in the 1780s and 1790s. This tension informs political and social divisions within a given era, and yet it is this tension that makes the United States what it is. It is both the politically independent farmer and the self-interested capitalist. It is both the activist championing democracy and the legal scholar prompting us to remember that the most popular idea is not always the right one. The United States is defined by the tension between these two poles: liberty versus democracy, Hamiltonian versus Jeffersonian, and individualism versus collectivism. These dichotomies act as twin pillars which undergird and inform American culture.