The Founders Were Right to Fear Factionalism

The Founders of the American Republic understood the dangers of factionalism, but they also acknowledged, at least by deed if not in word, that parties could play a positive role in the governance of the nation. The theories of republicanism they inherited from the Western tradition warned of parties and factions, but as they struggled to make self-government work in practice, they created the nation’s first parties. Their equivocation provides a useful lesson to us on the role that parties should—and should not—play in the politics of a free society.

James Madison’s Federalist 10 is a landmark essay in explaining how government can pursue the public good rather than fall prey to what he described as the “violence of faction.” But the ideas Madison outlined were not altogether new. He was standing on the shoulders of giants, combining his unique vision for the nation with insights that trace back to the beginning of Western civilization.

Aristotle had argued that the ideal community for a polity was one dominated by a middle class, where factional conflict would be kept to a minimum. Barring that, Aristotle praised a government that balanced the interests of the wealthy with those of the masses, preventing any one faction from rising against another. Polybius, the Greek-born historian, had argued that the Roman Republic had kept any one faction from dominating the others by blending the institutions of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy into a single system. Niccolò Machiavelli amplified this idea in his Discourses on Livy, arguing that the rivalry between the patricians and the plebeians had contributed to the Roman Republic’s greatness. By the end of the Middle Ages in Britain and France, a new form of government had emerged: one built on “mixed estates,” combining small freeholders with the aristocracy and the ecclesiastical hierarchy.

But what about places where formal distinctions between classes of people did not exist? The English philosopher James Harrington, in developing his ideal commonwealth, Oceana, proposed rules such as capping the total amount of land one could own to mitigate the dangers that come with differences in property, and Thomas More in Utopia went so far as to suggest outlawing private property altogether. Both sought, in other words, to address factionalism by addressing one of its major causes: different levels of property ownership.

Madison shared their concerns about faction, and likewise believed, as he put it in Federalist 10, that the “most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property.” But he rejected their call for limiting property rights, arguing instead that the size and diversity of the United States would impede any faction from dominating the rest. In Federalist 51, he borrowed heavily from Polybius to argue that checks and balances would decrease the likelihood of factional rivalries in government leading to the dangerous concentration of power.

This is why, as historian Richard Hofstadter put it, the Constitution can be viewed as a document “against parties.” After all, what are political parties if not organized and durable factions? Factions may be inevitable, Madison admitted, but they are dangerous and must be contained. And yet just a few years later, Madison and Thomas Jefferson would create a political party to fight the policies of Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton. The United States, the typical story goes, has been a nation dominated by partisan politics ever since.

The actual history, however, is a bit more complicated—and understanding the nuances of parties in the early republic can help us understand the advantages and dangers of partisanship today.

It is common today to refer to the party of Jefferson and Madison as the “Democratic-Republican Party,” but neither referred to it by that name. To do so in the 1790s would have been foolish, as the “democratic societies” that sprang up in the 1790s were castigated by the Federalists as a source of French radicalism. Instead, Jefferson and Madison referred to their organization as the Republican party.

That was a deliberate word choice, as Madison and Jefferson were signaling to their countrymen that their conflict with Hamilton was about more than just public policy. It involved essential questions regarding how a true republic should operate.

Beginning in 1790, Hamilton proposed several policies to reform public finances, most controversially the federal assumption of state debts and the creation of the Bank of the United States. His plans owed a great deal to British Prime Minister Robert Walpole, whose financial reforms in the early 18^th century facilitated tremendous economic growth and the expansion of the British Empire. Opponents of Walpole argued that his project of commercialization posed a threat to English liberty, viewing the system as a transfer of wealth and power from the landowners—whose civic virtue and economic independence were necessary for free government—to an idle speculative class that traded in government debt and sought to seize political power to enrich themselves.

Polemicists like Lord Bolingbroke and the pseudonymous Cato (Thomas Gordon and John Trenchard) denounced Walpole to little effect in Great Britain, but their opposition literature was widely read by the American colonists, who used it to justify their independence from a corrupt British Empire. And when Hamilton proposed Walpole-style policies for the United States, Jefferson and Madison interpreted the move just as Bolingbroke and Cato had: an effort to transform the American republic into a “monarchy bottomed on corruption,” as Jefferson once wrote. In a letter to Benjamin Rush in 1811, Jefferson relayed two anecdotes from his time as secretary of state that made clear what he thought Hamilton’s ulterior motives were:

I invited [John Adams and Hamilton] to dine with me, and after dinner … other conversation came on, in which a collision of opinion arose between mr Adams & Col^o Hamilton, on the merits of the British constitution, mr Adams giving it as his opinion that, if some of it’s defects & abuses were corrected, it would be the most perfect constitution of government ever devised by man. Hamilton, on the contrary asserted that, with it’s existing vices, it was the most perfect model of government that could be formed; & that the correction of it’s vices would render it an impracticable government. and this you may be assured was the real line of difference between the political principles of these two gentlemen. another incident took place on the same occasion which will further delineate Hamilton’s political principles. the room being hung around with a collection of the portraits of remarkable men, among them were those of Bacon, Newton & Locke. Hamilton asked me who they were. I told him they were my trinity of the three greatest men the world had ever produced, naming them. he paused for some time: ‘the greatest man, said he, that ever lived was Julius Caesar.’

Here, in Jefferson’s thinking, was a secret effort to transform the free republic into a corrupted oligarchy. Madison agreed, warning in 1792 of an “antirepublican party” that was “more partial to the opulent than to the other classes of society” and sought to establish government on “the pageantry of rank, the influence of money and emoluments, and the terror of military force.”

The only way to stop this threat, according to Madison, was for “the public opinion of the United States [to] be enlightened.” That required a political party to warn the people of the threat and mobilize them to act. Jefferson and Madison never outright acknowledged the value of partisanship, but their actions signaled an admission that parties could expose and defeat factions whose interests ran contrary to the public good.

Still, Jefferson and Madison never abandoned their original view on the dangers of parties. They did not consider the Republican Party a faction in the sense that Madison defined in Federalist 10: an “interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.” Instead, they believed, their party was defending the public interest against a small, elitist clique that sought to corrupt the republic. They were convinced that the difference between the Republicans and most Federalists was not all that great, and that reconciliation was both possible and desirable. “Every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle,” Jefferson declared in his first inaugural address. “We have called by different names brethren of the same principle. We are all republicans; we are all federalists.”

Accordingly, Jefferson’s administration pursued a restrained course against the Federalists. While endeavoring to remove members of the party from the judiciary (which the Federalists had packed in 1801), he generally avoided dismissing Federalists from other jobs, like tax collectors or clerks at land offices. He allowed the Sedition Act of 1798 to expire rather than renewing it as a means to suppress his opposition, and his administration’s policy program was ideologically moderate for its time, reducing taxes and military spending but preserving the Bank of the United States.

Madison followed a similarly moderate course during his presidency. At Madison’s urging, the 14^th Congress of 1815 to 1817 pursued an agenda that fused Hamiltonian economics with Republican politics, taking the best ideas of Hamilton’s system but distributing the benefits broadly across the political spectrum. Madison’s successor—fellow Republican James Monroe—faced only token opposition in 1816. Federalist opposition to the War of 1812 had damaged the party’s reputation, while Republican moderation had robbed Federalism of its urgency. In 1820, Monroe stood unopposed for reelection, the only time since George Washington was president that has ever happened.

Monroe had been one of the most ardent partisans of the 1790s, but he had come to believe that the era of party conflict in the United States should end. “[To] exterminate all party divisions in our country, and give new strength and stability to our Govt., is a great undertaking, not easily executed,” he wrote in a letter to Andrew Jackson in 1816. “I am nevertheless decidedly of opinion that it may be done.” In Monroe’s mind, the Republican Party was only necessary because the Federalist leadership had been “unfriendly to our system of government.” The president-elect went so far as to confide in Jackson that the chief magistrate of the United States “ought not to be the head of a party, but of the nation itself.”

Politics was still rough and tumble during the Jeffersonian era, of course, replete with bruised egos, damaged reputations, and strident denunciations. Many Federalists continued to oppose them, viewing the Jeffersonian deism as a radical threat to the social order and believing the Embargo of 1807 and the War of 1812 to be disastrous mistakes. Still, the Republicans won moderate Federalists to their cause—most notably John Quincy Adams, the son of the former president, who joined the Republican party during Jefferson’s second term. And it reelected the essentially nonpartisan Monroe by acclamation—a triumph of Republican fusionism.

But this vision of Republicanism did not last, instead supplanted by strong party organizations that drew sharp distinctions with the opposition and enforced orthodoxy within their own ranks. And after Jackson’s triumph in 1828, the age of parties returned for good. Some Republicans had grown unhappy with Monroe’s nonpartisanship during the 1820s, believing that it facilitated a revival of corruption. Sen. Martin Van Buren of New York, a key organizer of the new party system, would later argue in his Autobiography that “political parties are inseparable from free governments, and that in many and material respects they are highly useful to the country,” particularly in checking the “disposition to abuse power.” His claim was similar to Madison’s position in the 1790s, but Van Buren considered parties a permanent part of a healthy republic rather than a temporary expediency in an emergency.

There are many reasons for the dramatic rise in partisanship at the end of the 1820s, mainly related to economic diversification and rapid democratization. The number of voters had more than doubled between the elections of 1800 and 1820, and while an electorate exclusively of white men seems terribly uniform by today’s standards, its diversity was unthinkable compared to what had come before it. Farmers, merchants, workers, and industrialists from Maine to Missouri were participating in the democratic process, and partisan politics was how such a wild and unruly people could impose accountability on their government.

That said, the triumph of partisan politics in the United States does not diminish the lessons we can learn from the Republican leadership’s fusionist approach. As the popularity of the term “negative partisanship” indicates, there is a growing conviction that many partisans on both sides of the aisle are motivated in part by hatred of the opposition. Even if we accept Machiavelli and Van Buren’s view that factionalism can be a source of civic strength, we can also acknowledge that Harrington and Madison were correct about its ability to do “violence” to the political community. Indeed, some are castigating the Constitution today as a threat to democracy because it forces the two sides to compromise, and a growing number of Americans believe that political violence is sometimes acceptable.

So, as we accept the institutionalization of factional conflict through the party system, we should be mindful that “not all differences of opinion are differences of principle” and look for opportunities to work together. An idea like cooperation might seem awfully quaint in this 250^th year of American independence, but the author of the nation’s Declaration of Independence and the father of its Constitution took it seriously enough to build their administrations around it.