Federalist Party

Federalist Party. By 1783 critics of the Articles of Confederation—those who thought the Continental Congress too weak and its powers insufficient—were using the word “federal” when discussing the powers and stature of Congress. In June 1783 George Washington, as commander in chief of the army, sent a circular letter to state governors discussing the need to add “tone to our federal government”. The term “federal” was thus both a description of the central government and a shorthand method of describing the program for enhancing its authority. By 1786 Washington, James Madison, and their political friends were referring to those who opposed strengthening the Articles of Confederation as “antifederal”.

At the Constitutional Convention of 1787, the Federalists drafted a Constitution that greatly increased the powers of Congress and the executive, and the debate over ratification sharpened the lines of division. Washington, elected president in 1789, solidified the organization of the embryonic Federalist party through the use of patronage. Although Washington's public criteria for federal offices were honesty and intelligence, in practice he found those qualities only in persons who agreed with him politically. Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton took the next step in party development when he gave the new party a political creed. Hamilton's fiscal policy, which involved funding the national debt through the issue of bonds and the founding of a Bank of the United States to provide a national currency, advanced a Federalist political program that won the support of wealthy merchants and landowners. The outbreak of war in Europe in 1783 further polarized American opinion, and the political parties became associated with the contestants in Europe: the Federalists were regarded as pro‐British, their “Republican” opponents, led by Thomas Jefferson, as pro‐French. By means of the Alien and Sedition Acts, passed in 1798 as war with France loomed, the Federalist majority in Congress sought to silence their Republican critics.

By the middle of Washington's second term he was an avowed partisan, and his successor John Adams was a staunch Federalist from Massachusetts. The election of Jefferson as president in 1800 ended Federalist rule, and the party never recovered control of the national government. The party's chief contribution was to convert the Constitution into a stable, relatively affluent government that they peacefully turned over to their electoral successors.

After 1800 the party's dwindling popular support was mainly confined to rural New England and pockets of voters of German or Scots ancestry in the mountain valleys of the South. The Federalists ran Charles Cotesworth Pinckney of South Carolina for president in 1804 and 1808, and DeWitt Clinton of New York in 1812. The party's opposition to the War of 1812 and flirtation with disunion in the Hartford Convention of 1814 completed its ruin. In the presidential election of 1816, Rufus King of New York, the last Federalist presidential candidate, lost to Republican James Monroe. Most Federalists, such as Daniel Webster, who began his congressional career in 1814, became National Republicans in the 1820s and joined the Whig party in the 1830s.
See also Bank of the United States, First and Second; Conservatism; Early Republic, Era of the; Federal Government, Executive Branch: The Presidency; Federal Government, Legislative Branch: House of Representatives; Federal Government, Legislative Branch: Senate; Federalism; Political Parties; Quasi‐War with France.

Bibliography

James M. Banner Jr. , To the Hartford Convention: The Federalists and the Origins of Party Politics in Massachusetts, 1789–1815, 1970.
Stanley Elkins and and Eric McKitrick , The Age of Federalism, 1993.

Norman Risjord