On Sept. 19, 1796, President George Washington took a small new nation by surprise when he announced he would not seek a third term, thereby establishing a two-term precedent for the American presidency now enshrined in the twenty-second amendment to the Constitution.
The profound document in which he announced his retirement is known as his Farewell Address.
Taking leave from public life Washington addressed his accomplishments, his belief in the wisdom and benefit of orderly democracy in the form of a republic with a measured governmental system, and warned against three perils to that vision and its permanence.
In the first he warned against geographic divisions and jealousies as the nation grew, urging there be no conflict or excessive competition between north and south, east and west, a caution thrown to the winds in 1861 with cultural and political consequences that reverberate in this United States in this time.
In the second he warned against foreign entanglements, against preference for or animosity toward any foreign nation. This was fitting advice at the time from the leader of a new nation, separated by an ocean from the European power centers and conflicts of the 18th Century and looking to stay so.
However, even as Washington contemplated leaving office, within a year or two of receiving that advice the United States was peripherally drawn into Europe by the political and diplomatic tailwinds from the French Revolution whipping across the Atlantic Ocean.
However fitting and sage his advice on foreign relations for a newly sovereign nation with a fragile commercial and communal life — then but a small and weak player on the international stage as it played in 1796 — Washington did not, could not foresee that the United States would rise to become what today we call a super power – necessarily engaged throughout the world.
Above all in his Farewell address, the first president warned against what he called “factions” and factionalism, against the rise of factions, of parties aligned against one another seeking to control the reigns and tools of government as they divided the public and public opinion.
In an observation expressing concern about factions/parties, most salient for Americans in this moment of this fraught presidential election in the United States, President Washington wrote (emph. added):
“The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries which result gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of public liberty.”
Of course even as he wrote the Farewell Address with assistance from Alexander Hamilton, Washington’s administration was riven by a factional dispute in which Hamilton emerged as the leader of one point of view with Thomas Jefferson leader of the other.
Their dispute centered on the reach and purpose of the federal government, with the differences defined in terms of being pro or con as to Hamilton’s national banking system and its affect on the balance of powers between the federal government and the states of the new federal union.
Then too they tangled over the right course for America in response to the first international crisis to confront the new government, the French Revolution.
Hamilton, the martial man, counseled netrality between France and England, a leading opponent of revolutionary France. Jefferson, ever the vocal armchair proponent of rebellion, sided with France. Washington, the decider as a much later president would say of himself, sided with Hamilton, his treasury secretary, on both vital matters, causing Jefferson, his secretary of state to depart the cabinet.
Anyone who did not know the character of their dispute and the general differences that accelerated them has perhaps learned its outline from the musical “Hamilton”.
Their internal policy differences in the cabinet became defined in factions aligned with Hamilton or with Jefferson in their opposition to one another. From that, the core two-party political model we know in the United States emerged.
The first two were the Democratic-Republican Party of Jefferson and the Federalist Party of Hamilton. In their opposing visions they forged fundamental political differences that come down to us today, though adapted and adaptible as times changed and the nation changed and expanded.
Jefferson’s faction in time became the Democratic Party that emerged in the age of Presdident Andrew Jackson while Hamilton’s Federalist Party, shrunk in just 20 years to a New England base, gave way to the Whig Party after 1828 when its last ostensible president, John Quincy Adams, left the White House.
Jacksonian Democrats were an insular faction, the party of the small landholder, against a system of national finance, for state supremacy in banking, indeed of state supremacy in the entirety of that notion, and above all the pro-slavery party exerting national political dominance erected on the pro-slavery architecture of the U.S. Constitution (the Electoral College, equal Senate representation, the three-fifths clause at Article I, Section 2.). The man most identified with those principles in that time? Sen. John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, the great proponent of nullification.
The Federalists and successor Whigs were the party of the frontier and expansion, of economic development, a national bank and westward settlement, a party of the merchant and financial classes that had been the backbone of the Federalists. Their platform, for the twenty odd years they served as the chief other faction was best expressed in the American System of Sen. Henry Clay of Kentucky, their leader through those decades.
The Whigs, torn by disension concerning slavery and its extension to new territories and states, imploded in the late 1840s and disappeared in the 1850s as a spate of lesser parties emerged. Chief among those, the American Party, known as Know Nothings. It embodied an enflamed, angry response to and resentment of the flood of Irish peasant immigrants fleeing starvation on their famine-struck island.
In the stagnation of the Democratic slave party and alarm at chaotic visceral Know Nothingism, remnants of the Whigs, leading political men like Abraham Lincoln of Illinois, William Seward of New York, and Salmon P. Chase of Ohio, began to search out one another with new ideas about America. They coalesced between 1854 and 1856 in a new party. They called it the Republican Party.
In the dispute over slavery which finally led to bitter sectional war, the Republicans were a free soil party. They advocated that future expansion of the nation should be in free territories and free states. Most of them were not yet abolitionists, who were still deemed radicals though among them emerged a radical faction favoring abolition, led formidably by Congressman Thadeus Stephens of Lancaster, Pa. Like the Whigs before them, these new Republicans were also pro-expansionists in favor of development of national infrastructure.
Quickly came the Civil War. Its end established the dominance of the party that led the nation through it, the Republicans.
It is an interesting historical note that their first president, Abraham Lincoln, while leading the nation in war also led his party to pass the Homestead Act, the land grant collelge law, and authorized and financially seeded construction of the Union Pacific Railroad. It is not an exaggeration to say that those three acts created the American upper Midwest and plains states as we know them – and the great Big Ten universities that today are such a dynamic and democratic force in American life, culture and education.
More than 60 years later in response to the gravest national crisis since the Civil War, the Democratic Party made a decisive turn toward liberal economics, toward Kenynsianism with programs for major public investment in both the nation’s physical and human infrastructure and new regulation of its financial system.
Franklin D. Roosevelt’s depression-bending New Deal embraced the industrial worker and, in time,the party of slavery became the party of Civil Rights, attracting to it nearly total support from Black Americans, who hitherto decisively favored Republicans, the party of their emancipation by the 13th Amendment, the party that promised them equal full citizenship and equal voting rights in the 14th and 15th Amendments.
Later in the 20th Century, a Republican President, working with a Democratic House and Senate, would continue his faction’s nation building tradition through his National Highway Defense Act of 1954 to build our Interstate Higway System. There was a time, albeit only from time to time, when the two parties cooperated as they would memorably in the 1960s to pass civil and voting rights laws over the objection of southern Democratic inheritors of the ways of the slave south.
Since then, Democrats, who worked hard in the south for 100 years to suppress the voting rights of Black people guaranteed by the 15th Amendment, have become the advocates of voting rights while, with supreme irony, Republicans, led by those converted to their party in the south in the backlash against civil and voting rights, began to obstruct those rights and ballot access.
The parties have changed and in large degree exchanged clothes. Though the two factions remain substantially divided along the broad philosophical lines on which Hamilton and Jefferson split more than 200 years ago, substantially they have moved to opposite sides on those lines.
The ever and ongoing dynamic evolution of the two parties is important because of what it tells about how major Ameircan political parties arise, change and sometimes disappear.
What then is in focus is the comparison to be made to the political turmoil that took over in the 1840s and 1850s in a nation so bitterly divided that eventually it went to war with part of itself? In that turmoil a strong new party came into being just as the political and economic turmoil of the Great Depression years realigned the parties, their beliefs, policies and purposes in the next century.
The two factions descend to us today as the liberal and conservative parties we know, the one slightly left of center the other formerly but no longer slightly right of center, having taken a troubling reactonary cast. Today the factions are so divided and at odds that one wears only red, the other only blue — their colors vividly separating us on our national political map.
Today the Republican Party has moved far from near the center at which the parties have traded places for 15o years of governance from the center left or center right along the nation’s political continuum with opposing and competing visions, progams, platforms, beliefs and dynamics.
Through it all, mostly, the center held in the United States or won out in the end as it did in 1865. There is grave risk now it cannot. The factions have become tribes and as in so much that is tribal no quarter is given, no prisoners are taken and the space that is common ground vanishes.
The presidency of Donald Trump has markedly accelerated the change caused by this upheaval, pushng us toward a political realignment that congers up the fall of the Whigs, the rise of the Reublicans.
For the past two decades at least the Grand Old Party has been constricting, not keeping up with the stark and challenging change of American demographics. It has become almost exclusively a diminising white party, something you could literally see as far back as the 1970s at the national conventions of the two parties. Democratic conventions presented a rainbow of people, the Repulicans a chromatic monotone.
In this turmoil, significant figures in the Republican Party have left it this year to support the Democratic candidate for president, witness the Lincoln Project, Republicans for Biden, et. al. These folks talk of restoring the Republican Party when this is over.
But there is no evidence they can. It seems possible now they will need to gather in the year or two ahead to examine if they should replicate what their political forebearers did at mid-century 175 years ago.– form a new party.
The next great transcendent moment in American politics is about the future of the Republican Party, whether it stays in business or is succeeded by a new structure to carry the beliefs of conservatives.
They will need to ask whether they can stay Republicans and win elections if it continues as the Republican Party has become, a party of race, racial division and a diminishing white minority; a party nostalgic for discarded cultural norms of gender distinction and misgogyny from times gone by that cannot, will not and should not return.
Otherwise, the Republican Party could be on the verge of becoming a minority party for decades to come.
Peeling the Onion 