ABSTRACT
In his farewell address before he retired to Mount Vernon, George Washington warned the nation against the dangerous spirit of party.1
Washington saw political parties as ‘parasitic, divisive and destructive’.2
Republican principles in the young America regarded factions as a threat to the stability of the nation. Anti-party feeling stretched well into the 1830s and beyond. Whig President, William Henry Harrison, criticised parties in his inaugural address as ‘harsh, vindictive, intolerant, and totally reckless’; parties were in direct opposition to liberty.3
Yet by the mid-1840s America had an extremely sophisticated and well-organised party system, the second of such political structures in the first sixty years of the republic. Aware of the divisive issue of slavery, however, Washington warned
that sectional party affiliations could destroy the fabric of the nation. Ultimately the first President was correct, though party spirit could also function to diffuse sectional tensions. As influential as any man in the development of the second party system, Martin Van Buren believed that interparty conflict was ‘the optimal way to avoid naked sectional division in the country’.4 The first parties were crucial agencies in the development of the Constitution and the construction of what it was to be an American, as they competed to protect the republic from danger. In this sense parties helped to develop a sense of national spirit, drawing on the signs and symbols of the Revolution and vowing to protect and guide the self-governing experiment. Partisan competition, though, required substantive issues to nourish it and party spirit was unable to resist sectional strife. Washington was right to warn his nation about the dangers of the spirit of party, though the first two party systems were not universally threatening. Traditional revolutionary republicanism believed that the republic’s
safety necessarily required limitations of the power of government. Republicanism also emphasised the importance of community
consensus and the common good. In this sense partisan politics which split the community were dangerous to the health of the new republic.5
In states like Virginia, which had a settled social structure, deference politics militated against the emergence of a vibrant two-party system in the 1790s.6 Jeffersonians embraced a settled social structure where land ownership gave men the independence that would restrain a destructive self-interest. The ideal of Jefferson’s republic of farmers was closely linked to fears about partisan politics. The growth of artificial wealth, of credit and speculation, would promote factions.7 Parties indicated a breakdown of the commonwealth and of social harmony and in this sense ‘implied a failure of the Founding Father ideals, an unnatural and unnecessary growth of the socio-political order’.8
