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7 Hammering Out a Federal
Republic
C H A P T ER 1787–1820
THE POLITICAL CRISIS ike an earthquake, the LEARNING FOCUS
OF THE 1790s American Revolution shook
Lthe European monarchical Why did the United States
The Federalists Implement the survive the challenges of its
Constitution order, and its aftershocks rever-
berated for decades. By “creating a first three decades to become
Hamilton’s Financial Program new republic based on the rights of a viable, growing independent
Jefferson’s Agrarian Vision the individual, the North Americans republic?
The French Revolution Divides introduced a new force into the
Americans world,” the eminent German histo-
rian Leopold von Ranke warned the king of Bavaria in 1854, a force that might
The Rise of Political Parties
cost the monarch his throne. Before 1776, “a king who ruled by the grace of God
A REPUBLICAN EMPIRE had been the center around which everything turned. Now the idea emerged
IS BORN that power should come from below [from the people].”
Other republican-inspired upheavals — England’s Puritan Revolution of the
Sham Treaties and Indian Lands 1640s and the French Revolution of 1789 — ended in political chaos and military
Migration and the Changing Farm rule. Similar fates befell many Latin American republics that won independence
Economy from Spain in the early nineteenth century. But the American states escaped both
The Jefferson Presidency anarchy and dictatorship. Having been raised in a Radical Whig political culture
that viewed standing armies and powerful generals as instruments of tyranny,
Jefferson and the West
General George Washington left public life in 1783 to manage his plantation,
THE WAR OF 1812 AND astonishing European observers but bolstering the authority of elected Patriot
THE TRANSFORMATION leaders. “’Tis a Conduct so novel,” American painter John Trumbull reported from
OF POLITICS London, that it is “inconceivable to People [here].”
The great task of fashioning representative republican governments absorbed
Conflict in the Atlantic and the the energy and intellect of an entire generation and was rife with conflict. Seek-
West
ing to perpetuate the elite-led polity of the colonial era, Federalists celebrated
The War of 1812 “natural aristocrats” such as Washington and condemned the radical republican-
The Federalist Legacy ism of the French Revolution. In response, Jefferson and his Republican followers
claimed the Fourth of July as their holiday and “we the people” as their political
language. “There was a grand democrat procession in Town on the 4th of July,”
came a report from Baltimore: “All the farmers, tanners, black-smiths, shoemakers,
etc. were there . . . and afterwards they went to a grand feast.”
Many people of high status worried that the new state governments were too
attentive to the demands of such ordinary workers and their families. When con-
sidering a bill, Connecticut conservative Ezra Stiles grumbled, every elected offi-
cial “instantly thinks how it will affect his constituents” rather than how it would
enhance the general welfare. What Stiles criticized as irresponsible, however,
most Americans welcomed. The concerns of ordinary citizens were now para-
mount, and traditional elites trembled.
Copyright © Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishers. Distributed by Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishers.
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