GOOD FEELINGS TURN SOUR

 

As the story goes, the War of 1812 began as mostly a reaction to Great Britain’s restrictions to American trade and the young nation’s ambition to expand westward.  In the way of this last aim was British colonial lands.  In the last posting, it was described as a short war, if any war can be short.  It lasted from June 1812 to February 1815.  And its conclusion led to a relatively unified time in the US, the Era of Good Feelings.  But one cannot say it was completely unified.  One region, New England, was not too happy with the war.

          So upset were New Englanders that representatives of the five states (Maine was not yet a state) met in secret at was called the Harford Convention.  On the agenda was the following:

 

·       concerns over the three-fifth compromise – the provision in the Constitution that allowed the southern states to count slaves as three-fifth a person for determining the South’s representation in Congress,

·       the requirement to have a two-thirds vote of agreement to admit new states, declarations of war, and establishing trade restrictions (seen as weakening the central government),

·       the Louisiana Purchase, and

·       the Embargo of 1807

 

While generally the Federalist Party favored a strong central government, in terms of these issues, the Federalist attendants at the conference felt Washington was exerting too much power.  Ironically, that power was inordinately in the hands of the South, a region that supported strong state government.  But then fate played a nasty turn on these delegates.

          Down in New Orleans, Andrew Jackson captured the imagination of his countrymen/women with a decisive victory over the British and the fact the peace treaty ending the war had already been signed did not diminish the battle’s romantic hold.  This reaction was so strong that it led to discrediting what the Federalist dissent and helped mightily to end that political party – or so the story goes although that simple assertion is questioned as being an exaggeration.

            For the purposes here, though, the end of the Federalist Party is the relevant fact.  And one can dig a bit closer to what was going on with these malcontents in New England.  They were so upset over their concerns that talk of succession was common among them.  When word of such talk got out, one can say that with the peace treaty all that successional sentiment was judged unpatriotic and even seen as traitorous.  After all, in terms of the war, it gave Americans its national anthem and that cannot, by association, hold the war too negatively. 

If nothing else, the war gave Americans the sense that they could successfully fend off any attack from Europe.  That fact put the fact that Americans did not accomplish any of the aims they sought in fighting the war, as not even being relevant.  In addition, it gave them two heroes, Jackson and William Henry Harrison, the former would establish the Democratic Party (more or less an outgrowth of the Democratic-Republican Party), and the latter helped establish the Whig Party.

The Whig Party would become the second major party.  Its viability extended from the 1830s to the 1850s.  And its initial impetus was an opposition to Andrew Jackson.  It drew its members from the National Republican Party, the Anti-Masonic Party, and Democrats that did not follow the general’s politics (some being former Federalists who fell into the Democratic Party as being the only viable party during the years following the War of 1812). 

What finally set them off was during Jackson’s Administration and its policies – anti-national bank and low protective tariffs (tariffs protecting domestic manufacturers that were just getting started and the importation of cheaper goods).  The election that convinced them the Whigs had to nationally unite occurred in 1836 when four of their candidates earned electoral votes but could not deprive Jackson’s vice-president, Martin Van Buren, his victory.

Since Van Buren was Jackson’s picked successor, his term was seen as Jackson’s third term.  In 1840, the Whigs united under the candidacy of William Henry Harrison and defeated Van Buren’s attempt at a second term.  But fate would then play its part in steering the new party in a bazaar fashion.  

First, due to the longest inaugural address in history given in inclement weather, the aged Harrison became ill and died one month into his term.  His vice president, John Tyler took office and shortly found himself at odds with the other prominent Whigs in Congress.  That would be Henry Clay among other Whig leaders and their point of contention was over the reestablishment of a national bank. 

Jackson had terminated the first national bank, 1791-1811, that Alexander Hamilton initiated during the Washington Administration.  The contingency of Whigs led by Clay wanted to reestablish such a bank and were able to pass through Congress various attempts to do so.  Tyler opposed such efforts. 

This proposed bank provision reflected not a dual sense of federalism, but a cooperative sense.  The Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations, a present-day federal government entity funded by federal dollars, makes a distinction in one of its publications.[1]   That is the difference between a dual vision of federalism and a cooperative vision one can detect in American history. 

The dual vision holds to a federal model in which each level of government – the central government and the state government – mostly operate in different areas of governance, each respecting the other in its realm.  Of course, local areas of concern would be the province of the state and national areas of concern would be the province of the central government.  Cooperative vision sees both levels overlapping and cooperating among the various realms from local to national. 

Using this distinction, Tyler had a dual vision and Clay, in terms of banking, had a cooperative vision.  Everyone agrees that up until the New Deal in the 1930s, a dual vision prevailed, and since then, the cooperative vision has over-taken the American approach to federalism.

This account’s concern over this history can look at this structural debate as telling.  Both antagonists, along with Harrison, were originally Virginians (although Clay represented Kentucky) and both were previously either Democrats or Democratic-Republicans.  The split between Tyler and Clay started with the Nullification Crisis, 1832-1833, that spurred from an antagonism toward a national bank proposal and South Carolina’s reaction to it.

There, in opposition to a national bank, their legislature passed an Ordinance of Nullification, 1832, stating that a state had the right to nullify federal law within its borders.  Tyler sided with the nullifiers, Clay did not.  President Jackson, by the way, opposed this notion and threatened hangings for those who attempted to implement the policy.  Again, this debate reflected, to a highly antagonistic level, the difference between the dual view, the pro-nullification position, and the cooperative view, the anti-nullification position.

President Tyler took on a strict interpreter’s posture of the Constitution – what is called a strict constructionist – and he felt the bank, especially as it was to be structured, offended the federal character of the Constitution.  He especially objected to the law’s provision for the bank to have branches in several states. 

As President, therefore, Tyler’s vetoes of Clay’s bank bills and Clay’s obvious support of them were in line with their respective positions and either began or heightened the tensions that would eventually lead to the Civil War.  Most of the rhetoric that heated up the divisions within the US was mostly targeted over this contention of states’ rights to govern their affairs.  It wasn’t until the Civil War began that the verbal barbs identified slavery as the main point of contention.

But this account’s review of this national divide is still at the initiating stages.  And the next posting will further describe the role the Whig Party played.  This posting ends with Tyler and Clay at odds and Clay setting himself to displace Tyler as the Whig candidate in 1844.  This will prove to be unhelpful in establishing the young party on solid ground.

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[1] The Federal Role in the Federal System:  The Dynamics of Growth (Washington, DC: Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations, 1981).

THE FACTION FACTOR

 

Through the administrations of the first two presidents, George Washington and John Adams, the republic attempted to stay true to a very (some might think extreme) federalist bias.  That being that a federalist polity of any size can exist without the development of political parties.  As a matter of fact, that belief was influenced by a calculation that James Madison explains in the The Federalist Papers.

Madison’s famous “Federalist Number 10” attempts to logically contradict Charles-Louis Montesquieu’s admonition that republics should be geographically small.  Presumably, small territories hold small populations that can consequently encourage and maintain high levels of interaction among all members of the republic.  As such, they, the population, can more readily see beyond self-interest and be more disposed to favor policy that promotes the common good.

This commonness leads to the levels of familiarity and trust the Frenchman saw as necessary to provide the shared interests that a people-run governance needs to have.  Afterall, such a polity can only operate with its populations sufficiently agreeing with what its government should be striving to accomplish.  Or stated simply, fewer people mean fewer conflicting interests.

Madison, in No. 10, analyzes what it takes to reconcile individual concerns and interests which tend to conflict with that of others in the normal life of a society, no matter how big or small it happens to be.  All smallness assures is that one or a few will become dominant and, in turn, will use that dominance to abuse the rights of others – which naturally occurs as economic and other interests seek their advantages. 

The result is that these dominate entities become the enemy, or at least an adversary, of the common good.  Madison uses the term, faction, to designate each of these entities and if one wants real life examples of this principle at work one need only look at small Latin American countries’ attempts to establish republican governance.  This blogger – whose father was Cuban – sees today’s images out of Havana with their capitol in the background, as such a case.

At the time of Madison’s essay, he and the other founders had experienced a series of developments:  the conditions leading up to the Revolutionary War, the war, political life under the Articles of Confederation, and the uprising of Shay’s Rebellion.  During those years certain problems seemed to reoccur.  At its base, and until 1787, the various state legislatures had inordinate power in determining what collectively would be national policy or, better stated, non-policy. 

From the need to tax to the need to address national – in many cases, statewide – problems, those governments could not produce the necessary actions that only government could provide.  Why this inaction?  Madison saw it as the ability of the limited number of factions being able to stymie any threatening policy that counteracted its interests. 

If in a given state there were one or two dominant factions, they controlled what their respective legislatures would consider or issue as policy.  If a proposal threatened their interests, they would simply squelch it.  But if the governing landscape grew to a national one, then the number of factions would greatly increase.  Then, because of the larger number, no one or small group of factions could control a national legislature.  With such variety, the factions would not even be able to organize sufficiently to form political parties. 

At least, that was the idea.  Under such a rationale, political parties were seen as facilitating purely self-interest at the expensive, most likely, of the common good and of undermining the competitive position of the lesser sized or otherwise weaker entities be they small businesses or individuals.  In turn, such politics would (or was) undermining the espoused federalist values of the nation in general, but of the founding fathers in particular. 

Yes, the limitation of state-level power can be described as federalist and goes to explain, to a degree, that the initial party that promoted a stronger central government was the Federalist Party.  But that skips some developments in this story.  As was described above, therefore, initially much effort was expended to delegitimize the formation of parties and the hope was that factions, unavoidable political entities, would be held in check in terms of national policy. 

That would result in Congressional members approaching each policy question independently – each judged on its own merits to advance the common good.  That would avoid congressmen from allying their votes over the various issues they were called upon to consider.  Each proposal would be evaluated on its own terms and not be the subject of trading votes or forming ideological connections among their various considerations. 

An ally on one vote, therefore, might be on the other side in another vote.  But this sort of thinking lasted for about ten years and was abandoned as the election of 1800 approached.  As Adams’ term of office came to an end, his vice-president, who found himself at odds with Adams’ national-strengthening policies, actively sought to replace Adams. 

That would be Thomas Jefferson and this turn would prove to undo a close friendship between him and Adams – one that took years to repair (Abigail Adams, the President’s wife, never forgave Jefferson).  By the time of the election, two parties vied for power.  Adams’ party, the Federalists, as alluded to above, favored a strong central government.  Jefferson’s party, the Democratic-Republicans, fought to maintain the balance of power in favor of the states. 

Ironically, Jefferson’s fellow Virginian, Madison also aligned with the Democratic-Republicans – a sort of one-hundred and eighty degree turn around from the time he argued for a viable national polity.  So, in effect, the 1800 election with Jefferson’s win marks the first real transition of power in the US.  And in terms of the fate of federalism, this blog wishes to look at the effect the resulting competition for power generated, especially in light of the rise of political parties. 

The role of the Federalist Party was short-lived.  With Adams’ defeat, that party mostly disappeared.  In its place a newer one arose.  This blog will highlight that party as a reflection of what the state of federalist values was in the eyes of Americans in the early years of the 1800s after a short reign of “unnatural” unanimity in the American political arena. 

That short-lived level of unity was the product of a short war – the War of 1812.  Historically, that time is known as the “Era of Good Feelings.”  But such a term gives short shrift to underlying vying regional interests.  They would prove to undermine the legitimacy of the central government and its power to institute policies that within various regions would be seen as detrimental to their interests. 

As such, even with the demise of the Federalist Party and the unifying influence of the War of 1812, the nation found that the forces of competing interests too powerful to shun the political forces that led to the formation of newer political parties.  That development culminated in the formation of the Whig Party.  The next posting will pick up the story there and comment on how one region of the country – not the South – saw the central government as oppressive to its interests.  That led to the first serious talk of succession from the union.