History 147

Lecture1CreatingtheConstitution.pdf

Home >History homework help >History 147

©Copyright Devon Hansen Atchison

Lecture 1, Creating the Constitution

Contents I. The Articles of Confederation ................................................................................................. 3

II. The Constitution ...................................................................................................................... 6

III. Ratification ......................................................................................................................... 12

IV. The First Years of the New Government ........................................................................... 14

V. The First Political Parties ...................................................................................................... 14

VI. Republicanism .................................................................................................................... 21

Important Terms and People (in order of appearance): Articles of Confederation; Alexander Hamilton; James Madison; 5% Import Tax; Daniel Shays; Paper Money; Shays’ Rebellion; Constitutional Convention; Founding Fathers; Democracy; George Washington; Virginia Plan; New Jersey Plan; Legislative; Executive; Judiciary; Grand Committee; Great Compromise; Three-fifths clause; “Supreme law” of the land; Checks and Balances; Ratification; Federalists; The Federalist Papers; Anti-Federalists; Bill of Rights; John Adams; Supreme Court; Federalist Party; The Bank of the United States; Yeoman Farmers; Republican Party; Thomas Jefferson; XYZ Affair; Department of the Navy; Alien and Sedition Acts; Election of 1800; Aaron Burr; Judiciary Act of 1801; “midnight appointments”; Marbury v. Madison

Instructions for reading this lecture: This lecture is broken into the chronologic or thematic sections shown above in the Table of Contents. I have done this to make it easier to follow the information being presented. Please also note the list of Important Terms and People that show up directly below the Table of Contents; this list provides a guide for terms and people you should be familiar with once you have completed reading the lecture. There may be instances in which you desire more information regarding an important term or person; I have hyperlinked useful websites throughout this lecture to important terms or people that you can follow up on and read if you would like more information (these hyperlinks show up in bright blue and when you click on them, they should direct you to the appropriate website). Additionally, there are images throughout with captions, to help you better visualize the information you are reading, as well as film clips that you can watch via YouTube (these hyperlinks to YouTube show up in maroon and when you click on them, they should direct you to the clip on YouTube).

©Copyright Devon Hansen Atchison

It’s impossible to talk about the Creation of the Constitution without first talking about

the American Revolution that predicated and influenced the drafting of the Constition. I’ll just

briefly say that the American Revolution was fought for two major reasons: first, to create a new

and different government from a monarchy in the post-Revolutionary world; and second, to give

power to people (but “people” meant educated, hardworking land owners). This was a dramatic

undertaking—the former colonists had a huge swath of land to govern and no real sense of how

best to govern so much territory and so many people. Indeed, many of their first attempts at

governing America failed, most notably the first federal government to take shape in America—

and it’s governing document, the Articles of Confederation. What I’d like to do in this lecture is

briefly look back at the Articles of Confederation, namely the weaknesses of the form of

government that was laid out by the Articles. Then we’ll be looking at the move, in the 1780s, to

centralization of the American government. Next we’ll examine the constitution that was written

with the decision to move to a more centralized government, as well as the compromises that led

to the drafting of that constitution. There were problems ratifying that constitution and we’ll

look at those problems and how those men who were at the forefront of American political life at

this time helped solve those ratification problems. We’ll then look at the first American political

parties, see what ideologies they developed out of and what their views of the new government

were. We’ll also be looking at how that new government secured support, both locally and

internationally, and we’ll conclude our lecture with a discussion of how the Federalist party, one

of those ‘first political parties’ was ousted from the forefront of American politics and what it

was replaced with.

©Copyright Devon Hansen Atchison

I. The Articles of Confederation The Articles of Confederation were drafted on the heels of the Declaration of

Independence as a way for the sovereign states to come together and successfully fight a

revolution; but given the patriots’ fears of strong, centralized government, it was no surprise that

the Articles of Confederation called for an extremely weak national government so that states

could continue to be sovereign nations. The Articles gave Congress the only national power, and

that national power really only allowed Congress to borrow money from other countries.

Congress did not have the power to draft troops or levy taxes, which would become particularly

important in the later years of the Confederation.

Because of these weaknesses, the Articles of Confederation proved to be an ineffectual

document. There were a number of failures in terms of international diplomacy and dealing with

the Native American population. But the real issue that many of the former patriots, now leaders

in this new country, were worried about was a financial one. It was these financial problems that

ultimately caused a number of men to come together to design a new, stronger government to

replace the Articles of Confederation. The financial issues the new country faced were

illustrated by a post-Revolutionary War depression that lasted from 1784 to 1787 (this was not

uncommon; demand is often lower in postwar times). At the same time, the Confederation was

strapped with enormous war debt; they needed to: 1) pay back the people who had purchased war

bonds during the war to help the effort; 2) to pay back Revolutionary soldiers who had never

been paid for their service; and 3) to pay back those countries who had lent the country money to

secure their independence from Britain.

Unfortunately, the Articles of Confederation didn’t provide the national government with

any way to tax people. Under the Articles, only states had the right to tax their citizens. And

©Copyright Devon Hansen Atchison

states only taxed their citizens enough, in the postwar period, to pay back a fraction of the owed

money. This was a big problem. Just imagine: you have this brand new nation that has just

fought and won a long and complicated war, and they were already about to default on their

loans. The prospect of this caused a group of political leaders to come together in search of a

solution, in search of a way to increase the power of the national government so that it could pay

back its debts.

The solution that was first proposed was a 5% tax on all imported goods; political leaders

like Alexander Hamilton and James Madison were behind this 5% import tax idea. That tax

was to be levied and collected by the national government and used solely to pay war debts. But

there were many people who feared this plan. The Articles of Confederation were drafted with a

weak centralized government because many Americans were fearful of too much power being

consolidated into one set of hands; this resembled a monarchy too much. And many people

feared that if the national government had the power to levy taxes, those political leaders—

Hamilton, Madison, and others—would have too much power.

So Congress failed to pass this tax, leaving the issue in the hands of the states. States

tried to follow through, imposing new taxes on their citizens. But farmers—who were

increasingly feeling the burden of the depression and these new taxes—revolted against what

they considered a tyrannical and unfair taxation. In New England, hostilities and resentment rose

so high that a man named Daniel Shays, who had been a captain in the Continental Army, put

©Copyright Devon Hansen Atchison

Figure 1: Shays' Rebellion1

out a set of demands to the Massachusetts government demanding that paper money be issued

to relieve the small money supply, which many believed was the cause of the depression in the

first place. He also demanded tax relief, and worked to stop the prevention of debt collection,

particularly because many farmers were being imprisoned when they were unable to pay their

debts. Shays and his men led a rebellion in 1787 to try and secure weapons and create a

powerful militia that the state would have to bargain with, and though a state army met and

disbanded Shays’ rebellious bunch, the incident was very telling. The thought was: what would

have happened had Shays’ Rebellion been successful? The episode demonstrated to many that a

more centralized national government was necessary in order to put down radical calls for the

issuance of paper money (if Massachusetts had acquiesced to Shays’ demands and printed paper

money, it would’ve made America’s financial troubles even more problematic because instead of

dealing with the debt and the depression, paper money would’ve just created temporary relief but

much greater debt and inflation in the long run) , as well as to deal with other economic and

military issues successfully.

1 From http://etc.usf.edu/clipart/12600/12691/shayrebel_12691_md.gif

©Copyright Devon Hansen Atchison

Though many former patriots remained wary of a stronger government—what they

believed they had fought against in the Revolutionary War—Shays’ Rebellion demonstrated

once and for all that the national government at least needed to be able to levy taxes. As a result

of this realization, a number of the leaders of the Revolution came together in the summer and

fall of 1787 to redraft and strengthen the Articles of Confederation.

II. The Constitution This Constitutional Convention consisted of a series of meetings in Philadelphia

between fifty-five men who had come as delegates from all the states except for Rhode Island

(Rhode Island was suspicious of what they saw as an attempt to overthrow the established

government). These fifty-five men have come to be known as the “Founding Fathers” of the

Figure 2: The Constitutional Convention2

nation, and they were made up almost entirely of relatively young men (in their mid-forties) who

were well educated, well propertied and feared the whims of the mass of the population; in other

2 From http://theblackcommenter.files.wordpress.com/2009/08/foundingfathers.jpg

©Copyright Devon Hansen Atchison

words many of these men feared democracy, but they were also wary of too much power being

in the government’s hands.

The Constitutional Convention had come together to make sweeping changes to the

federal government and they agreed quickly on three major points. First, General George

Washington was selected to lead the meetings, which were closed to the public and the press.

Second, the delegates decided that each state should have one vote on any decision and all major

decisions would only require a majority, not unanimity (even though the Articles said that

unanimity was required for any major changes to the Articles). Finally, and most importantly,

the convention easily agreed that the goal was to provide a stronger central government for the

United States. Unfortunately, that was where easy agreements in the Constitutional Convention

ended.

Indeed, a debate over how to structure this new government quickly emerged. Two plans

for the organization and direction of the new, more centralized national government were

immediately brought to the table: the Virginia Plan and the New Jersey Plan. So first, the

Figure 3: The Virginia Plan3

3 From http://www.ourdocuments.gov/document_data/document_images/doc_007b_big.jpg

©Copyright Devon Hansen Atchison

Virginia Plan. Delegates from Virginia opened up the Constitutional Convention by proposing

that the new, stronger national government be created with three main bodies: the Legislative,

the Executive and the Judiciary. Sounds familiar, right? But in 1787, this was a pretty radical

departure from the decentralized government that had existed under the Articles of

Confederation. Nevertheless, delegates were committed to revamping the Articles of

Confederation and they quickly approved this new organization.

But when the Virginia delegates introduced how they wanted those three bodies to be set

up—when they introduced the guts of their “Virginia Plan”—many delegates balked. The major

issue under the Virginia Plan was that it called for a bicameral (two-house) national legislature.

They proposed that of the two houses of legislature, the lower house would give each state

proportional representation based on population—what this meant, then, was that big states (any

guesses on which state was the biggest, population-wise??) received more lower-house

legislators than small states, like Delaware and New Jersey, did. The upper house, they then

outlined, would be elected by the lower house and not every state had to be represented in the

upper house—if you’re a small state, then, imagine the fears that were beginning to surface.

There’s a chance that the upper house might not have any delegates from the small states, that

national politics might be dominated by the biggest states: Virginia, Massachusetts and New

York.

Obviously, the delegates from Delaware and from other small states could not accept this

layout and they struck back with their own plan. First, they argued that the convention had no

right to do anything but revise the Articles of Confederation. A delegate from New Jersey went

so far as to call for a plan, known as the New Jersey Plan, that would keep the one-house

legislature that already existed under the Articles of Confederation, and give each state equal

©Copyright Devon Hansen Atchison

representation (essentially maintaining the structure of the Articles of Confederation), but would

give the Confederation the right to levy taxes and to regulate commerce.

Heavy debate ensued, but most of the men at the convention were committed to

designing a centralized government that was dramatically different from the Confederation. So

they voted down the New Jersey Plan, but still had a lot of work to do to get the new constitution

drafted. There were still a number of issues that needed to be dealt with, such as how to set up a

two-house legislature and, most notably, how to deal with the issue of slavery. This was a tricky

set of questions: Should slaves be counted as part of the population, since population determined

representation in Congress? Or were they property (as many slaveholders had long argued)? Of

course, slave states wanted to have their cake and eat it too; they argued that when it came to

proportional representation, slaves should be counted as part of the population (this would boost

the number of representatives that a state like Virginia, or even a small slave state like Maryland,

would receive), but if the federal government were going to tax states based on population, slave

states argued that in those cases slaves should be counted as property rather than people. Not a

very fair argument, right? And, of course, delegates from states where slavery had disappeared

or where slavery was on its way to disappearing, those delegates argued that slaves should not be

included either in calculating taxation or calculating population for representation purposes.

Debates over this issue and all the other remaining issues about how to set up the new

government went on for weeks, until the end of June, when a “grand committee” was called to

resolve all the remaining points of debate. This “grand committee” came up with a proposal that

has been called the Great Compromise. What the Great Compromise did, why it’s called the

Great Compromise, is that it resolved the slavery issue for the time being and it resolved the

debates over the design of the legislature. The Compromise proposed that the Lower House of

©Copyright Devon Hansen Atchison

the legislature give states population-based representation (i.e. bigger states get more

representatives) and to calculate that population, whites would be counted as a whole person

while slaves would be counted as three-fifths of a person (so for every five slaves, a state would

have three people added to their population numbers). At the same time, when a state was taxed

based on population, slaves would be counted as three-fifths of a person (altogether, this idea of

slaves being counted as three-fifths of a person was known as the three-fifths clause of the

Constitution). Finally, the Compromise proposed that the Upper House of the legislature give

each state equal representation (i.e. each state would receive two representatives in the Upper

House); this took away some of the worst fears of the small states and by July 16, 1787, the

Convention had enough support to accept the Compromise and move forward.

A few weeks later, an additional compromise was struck and agreed upon, which gave

another concession to the slave states. The new constitutional plan had given Congress the right

to regulate commerce, but delegates from the southern states were worried that Congress’s

ability to regulate trade might have some bearing on the slave trade. So they hesitated to

continue in discussions about drafting a new constitution until this issue was resolved. In

response and in order to keep the discussions going, the convention agreed to bar the new

government from stopping the international slave trade for twenty years (in other words, they

couldn’t vote on stopping the international slave trade until 1808, at the earliest).

The only issues that remained, then, were over whether or not to include a list of

individual rights, and how to deal with the question of limiting the power of the federal

government, two issues that were very important in the new nation’s rejection of England’s

constitutional design and the constitution that they created in its stead. To deal with the issue of

limiting the power of the federal government, the Constitution divided powers by making the

©Copyright Devon Hansen Atchison

Constitution itself, as well as the national government, the “supreme law” of the land—national

laws could not be violated or denied by any state. But many important powers remained in the

hands of the states; anything that was not designated by the Constitution as a power of the

federal government was considered a state’s jurisdiction.

Additionally, the Constitution created a system of checks and balances that were

designed to make tyranny impossible. James Madison sponsored the idea of checks and

balances, claiming they would make it impossible for one person to gain too much power in the

federal government. You see, under the system of checks and balances, Congress had to come

up with agreement in both chambers of Congress before they could pass any law, checking the

legislative branch. The president could veto acts of Congress, thus making it impossible for

Congress to control the executive branch (and Congress could override a presidential veto with

enough votes, making it impossible for the president to control Congress). Finally, in the federal

courts, judges would be protected by the tenure they were granted once elected by the president.

They could make judgments without the fear of losing their job if they acted in ways the

president or Congress might not have agreed with—a check on the executive branch.

One final agreement was reached with regard to the set up of the three branches of

government. Because the framers of the Constitution feared the people having too much power,

they set up the national government such that the people only elected the representatives in the

lower house of the legislature, the House of Representatives. Representatives of the upper

house, the Senate, were selected by the state legislatures (it wasn’t until the 17th Amendment to

the Constitution in 1913 that Senators were elected by the people). The president was selected

by members of the electoral college and judges were nominated by the President and confirmed

by Congress. In other words, the American people had very little say in who their leaders were;

©Copyright Devon Hansen Atchison

instead, the most powerful people in the nation decided who would be in the leadership roles.

The founders did this because they worried that the populace wouldn’t make the best or most

well-thought-out decisions.

So now the Framers of the Constitution had solved all of the remaining issues and in

September 1787, thirty-nine delegates were there to sign the new Constitution. They were very

proud of what they had produced, but they were also a little worried—they had gone pretty far

above what they were supposed to do. Their original goal was only to modify the existing

Articles of Confederation, but instead, they went and drafted an entirely new, entirely different

document. Accordingly, the framers worried that it might be tough to get enough voters from

enough states on board with the new Constitution and so they proposed that the new government

could come into power when just nine of the thirteen states had ratified it.

III. Ratification Just changing the rules wasn’t enough for quick ratification, however. When the new

Constitution went to state conventions for ratification, a number of Americans began debating

how good and useful a document the Constitution was. Those people who supported the

Constitution were called “Federalists,” and counted men like Benjamin Franklin and George

Washington among their supporters. James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay also

supported the Federalist cause, anonymously publishing a series of arguments in favor of

ratifiying the Constitution, known as The Federalist Papers. The name given to those who

didn’t support the Constitution was “Antifederalists,” and these men (men like Patrick Henry)

worried that the Constitution would go against the ideals and values that the American

Revolution had been fought for, namely that the establishment of such a strong government

would closely resemble the monarchy the patriots had fought so hard to get rid of. They worried

©Copyright Devon Hansen Atchison

mostly that the new government would raise taxes and would take all the power away from the

states, and they also feared that the common man would have no say in government. Their

biggest concern, in fact, was that there was no list of individual rights, or a bill of rights, in the

Constitution.

Figure 4: The Federalists and Anti-Federalists Debate the Constitution4

Despite the debate over the merits of the Constitution, enough states ratified the

document less than a year after it was presented to state conventions (by the summer of 1788).

Many of the framers felt that as a new country, however, they needed to have the support of two

of the largest states in the country, New York and Virginia, whose state conventions were largely

divided over the ratification proceedings. Both agreed to ratify under the assumption that a Bill

of Rights that was heavily promoted by another big state, Massachusetts, would be added to the

Constitution shortly thereafter. And now that it appeared the states were behind this new

Constitution, the framers geared up to hold the first elections in early 1789. Unlike some of our

more contemporary presidential elections, the first one was a given. There was never any doubt

4 From http://library.thinkquest.org/11572/creation/framing/feds.html

©Copyright Devon Hansen Atchison

that George Washington would be president. John Adams was chosen as his Vice President and

many of the framers were chosen to serve in Congress.

IV. The First Years of the New Government The new Congress was tasked first with the important job of drafting up that Bill of

Rights that had been promised to the states. In the Fall of 1789, Congress presented and

approved twelve amendments to the Constitution, of which the states ratified ten by the end of

1791. One of the main purposes of the Bill of Rights was to limit the power of Congress, by

“forbidding it to infringe on certain fundamental rights: freedom of religion, speech, and the

press; immunity from arbitrary arrest; trial by jury; and others. The Tenth Amendment

reserved to the states all powers except those specifically withheld from them or delegated to the

federal government.”5

After the Bill of Rights had been drafted, Congress moved on to determine the structure

of the Supreme Court, which they decided should be made up of “six members and a system of

lower district courts and a court of appeals. Congress also gave the Supreme Court the power to

make the final decisions in cases regarding the constitutionality of state laws.”6 Finally,

Congress created three executive departments—the state, treasury and war departments—as well

as the offices of attorney general and postmaster general.

V. The First Political Parties Things seemed to be running smoothly under the presidential leadership of George

Washington, despite the lengthy debate that had taken place between the Federalists and the

5 Alan Brinkley, The Unfinished Nation: A Concise History of the American People (McGraw Hill: New York, 1996), 155. 6 Brinkley, 156.

©Copyright Devon Hansen Atchison

Anti-Federalists prior to ratification. Despite Washington’s widespread popularity, however,

there were some divisions that emerged and those divisions expressed themselves in the creation

of political parties. This was an interesting development because one of the few things that the

Federalists and Anti-Federalists could agree on was that political parties (factions, as they often

called parties) were dangerous to the strength and solidity of a republic. And yet, almost

immediately after the ratification of the Constitution, political parties—the Federalists and the

Republicans (they got rid of the nickname “Anti-Federalists,” unsurprisingly)—developed. At

first, these parties continued the debate that had begun with the ratification of the Constitution,

namely over how much power the central government should have.

The Federalist Party fell under the leadership of Alexander Hamilton who had been

chosen to serve as the secretary of treasury in Washington’s administration. Hamilton had a very

high-brow attitude as to how politics should work—he believed that an elite ruling class was

necessary in maintaining a successful government. To this end, he proposed that the national

government fund the existing public debt. Let me explain this quickly. During the American

Revolution, soldiers and merchants were paid for fighting and supplies, respectively, with bond

certificates because the Continental Army had so little money. But many of these soldiers and

merchants had been forced to sell their bond certificates to wealthy speculators because of a need

for quick cash at the war’s end. Well, Hamilton recommended that these old bond certificates

(that were mostly in the hands of wealthy speculators) be exchanged for new, interest-bearing

ones, and he also recommended that the United States take over, or assume, all of the war debts

each individual state had incurred so that bondholders in those regions would look to the federal

government, rather than the states, for payment. But Hamilton didn’t really want to eliminate the

national debt, or, in other words, pay everyone back. Instead, he wanted to create a large and

©Copyright Devon Hansen Atchison

permanent national debt because he believed that it was the wealthy, the elite, who would lend

money to the national government and if they always had money invested in the government,

they would care about the country’s survival and success.

Hamilton also wanted to create a national bank that could provide loans and currency to

businesses. The national bank, in his vision, would also collect taxes, hold government funds,

and provide stability for the nation’s struggling banking system. And in order to fund this

national bank, Hamilton suggested imposing two new federal taxes: one on alcohol and the other

a tariff on imported goods. The first tax would’ve brought in much revenue, but it would have

created a large tax burden for small farmers who turned part of their corn and rye crops into

whiskey (so naturally, farmers opposed this tax proposal). The second tax would’ve not only

brought in revenue, but also encouraged the consumption of domestic products (if something was

produced in America, it wouldn’t have the added tax on it, so presumably it would be cheaper to

purchase domestic, rather than foreign, goods—a bonus for domestic producers).

And as secretary of the treasury, Hamilton was in a great position to make these ideas

into reality. But there was a good deal of opposition to Hamilton’s plan for paying off the old

bond certificates (many in the new government felt bad for the original holders—those soldiers

and merchants who had been forced to sell their bonds at discounted rates in a time of need—and

wanted the bond payback to be split between the original holder and the speculator to be more

fair). This nicer deal never happened and instead, Hamilton convinced Congress to pass the bill

paying off the old war bonds, with payment being made to the speculators who held them.

In terms of the federal government paying off the state’s individual debts, this was more

problematic and saw a lot more opposition. Those who opposed this measure felt that the states

with few debts would be burdened with having to levy taxes on their citizens in order to help out

©Copyright Devon Hansen Atchison

states with larger debts. Virginia was one of the states that didn’t owe much, while states like

Massachusetts did, so Hamilton had to negotiate a deal to get passage of his assumption bill. In

this deal, the federal government’s capital was agreed to be located in the South, between

Virginia and Maryland, on the banks of the Potomac River.

Figure 5: Drawings for the Original White House (the Original White House was destroyed during the War of 1812)7

Hamilton’s national bank bill also saw much opposition, but Congress was able to pass it,

creating The Bank of the United States. As far as his two proposed taxes went, he got the

protective tariff bill passed, which made importers pay a tax on the goods they imported, but it

wasn’t as high as Hamilton had wanted. His alcohol tax was fought by distillers and in the end,

though Hamilton had the tax implemented, distillers were able to force revisions to reduce their

burden. All in all, though, it seemed that Hamilton really got his way on everything.

But in the process he had upset a number of different groups, namely small yeoman

farmers (farmers who cultivated their own land rather than a plantation owner, who had many

others cultivate his land) who, at the time, made up the majority of the population. Those who

came to stand in opposition to Hamilton and the Federalists became known as Democratic-

7 From http://www.picturehistory.com/product/id/28132

©Copyright Devon Hansen Atchison

Republicans and their party became known as the Republican Party. The heads of this new

political party were Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. Jefferson’s vision was of an

agrarian republic, a system where most citizens owned and farmed their own land (in other

words, a system where the majority of Americans were yeoman farmers). It wasn’t that he was

anti-industry or anti-commerce, he thought those things could develop and thrive under an

agrarian society, but they would take a back seat while most people would be engaged in

agricultural production. Republicans gained much political support in the South and West,

particularly in the rural areas, particularly from farmers, in opposition to the Federalist Party’s

support in the commercial regions of the Northeast and Southern seaport towns.

So these two parties developed in the first years of the new nation, during the late 1780s

and early 1790s, but they wouldn’t be pitted against one another for another couple of years

because George Washington—who liked men on both sides of the coin, and didn’t pick sides—

agreed to serve as president again in 1792. But in 1796, Washington refused to run for a third

term, and the battle between the Federalists and the Republicans came to a head as Federalist

candidate John Adams was pitted against the Republican candidate, Thomas Jefferson. Adams

was victorious, but his party was largely divided which would prove troublesome for him as

president. This division would also spell disaster for the Federalist Party which would never win

another presidential election after this one.

At the start of Adams’ presidency, however, he was doing pretty well—in fact, he gained

a lot of popularity for his dealings with what came to be known as the XYZ Affair. America’s

relations with France had grown extremely poor in the 1780s and 1790s (after the French seized

300 American ships bound for British ports). Indeed, when America sent a group of men to

Paris to try and better relations between the two countries, France demanded that the U.S. first

give France a loan and bribe French officials before they would begin negotiating. The group of

American negotiators were outraged and sent word of this to President Adams, who immediately

denounced France and urged Congress to begin preparations for war (this is pretty amazing to

me—America has only just won the Revolution, with the assistance of France, and we’re

struggling financially… but America was still quick to move toward war!). The drama came to

be known as the “XYZ Affair” because Adams had deleted the real names of the French men

Figure 6: A Political Cartoon about the X, Y, Z Affair8

who had insulted the American group, naming them Messrs. X, Y and Z. The public was

outraged by France’s behavior in the XYZ Affair and fully supported going to war. Adams got

Congress to cut off trade with France and to capture any French ships they came across; he also

persuaded Congress to create the Department of the Navy and construct a number of warships.

The French saw all of this, and they saw the close alliance that America had forged with Britain,

and decided to begin negotiations. Adams sent over a new set of negotiators and a peace was

reached that demonstrated that America had finally come into its own as a country.

8 From http://www.utdallas.edu/~pkj010100/US/xyz1_s.jpg

The XYZ Affair was seen as a Federalist victory and in the immediate aftermath, the

Federalist Party was able to gain a number of Congressional seats. Once they had done this,

however, they decided to try and silence the Republican opposition once and for all and in order

to do this, they passed the Alien and Sedition Acts. The Alien Act made it more difficult for

foreigners to become American citizens, essentially putting the power of dealing with

immigrants in the hands of the president. Additionally, it extended the number of years that a

new immigrant had to wait before they could vote. Unsurprisingly, many new immigrants voted

Republican, so this law seemed to be a transparent ploy by the Federalists to stifle the

Republican party. The second half was the really controversial part, though. The Sedition Act

allowed the government to prosecute anyone who spoke out or acted out in opposition to the

government. Despite the fact that neither piece of legislation was used frequently or in a

particularly or widely damaging way, the legislation alone was enough to be destructive. The

Alien Act discouraged immigration (and immigrant voting) and Adams’ administration still used

the Sedition Act to arrest and convict ten men who had criticized the Federalist government in

newspapers.

Republicans were understandably outraged and tried to get state legislatures to support

nullification of the Alien and Sedition Acts. Though they didn’t get much state support, the

battle between the Federalists and the Republicans rose to the public view and to the national

agenda. “In one celebrated incident in the chamber of the House of Representatives, Matthew

Lyon, a Republican from Vermont, responded to an insult from Roger Griswold, a Federalist

from Connecticut, by spitting in Griswold’s eye. Griswold attacked Lyon with his cane, Lyon

fought back with a pair of fire tongs, and soon the two men were wrestling on the floor.”9

Figure 7: A Political Cartoon Depicting the Lyon-Griswold Fight10

Tensions had clearly risen to the point of no return.

VI. Republicanism These hostilities had the effect of making the presidential election of 1800 a heated, ugly

one. The candidates were the same as they had been four years before: John Adams for the

Federalists and Thomas Jefferson for the Republicans. Though the two men behaved rather well,

their supporters launched a no-holds-barred war, starting smear campaigns and spreading

Figure 8: The Federalists Illustrate Opponent Thomas Jefferson as a Dangerous Infidel11

9 Brinkley, 169. 10 From http://law.jrank.org/article_images/gat_0000_0001_0_img0014.jpg

rumors. The election was close, but thanks to a man named Aaron Burr, who was the Vice

Presidential nominee for the Republicans, Jefferson was able to win the election. Eventually.

Let me explain. What Burr had done was to gather support for the Republican candidate,

Jefferson, in New York, where the election was at its closest. Doing this allowed Jefferson to

win that crucial state of New York by a large majority, and it appeared that he had won the

presidency. However, a strange issue had arisen with the electoral college ballots based on the

way the Constitution outlined national elections. The Founding Fathers had never anticipated

political parties, even though parties quickly developed. As you know, the Founding Fathers had

been really afraid of parties, believing them to be those factions that both the Federalists and

Anti-federalists had fought against during the ratification period. While that’s true, we also

know that parties can actually be a really healthy thing for a functioning democracy to have. At

any rate, the Constitution wasn’t designed with political parties in mind. So what this meant for

presidential elections was that there was no way to express support for one person for president

and another for vice president. The electors simply cast their vote and out of the electoral votes,

whoever came in first was President, while the second place guy became Vice President. So

when political parties did develop, each party used this method to select a vice president from

their own party. In the election of 1800, Burr was supposed to be the VP, so 74 electors were

supposed to write down Jefferson and 72 were going to write down Burr… but one elector

messed up and instead of Jefferson he wrote Burr, giving each man 73 electoral votes to Adams’

65. Whoops!

According to the Constitution, in the event of a tie, Congress was tasked with choosing

the victor by having each state cast one vote to break the tie. The Federalists still controlled

11 From http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/religion/f0603s.jpg

Congress at this time (though a new class with a Republican majority was being seated in

Congress a few short months later) and they wanted to block Jefferson from the presidency at all

costs. They initially tried to strike a bargain with Burr, wherein they would get him the

presidency if he promised to do some things the Federalist way. After casting thirty-five ballots

that didn’t break the deadlock, the Federalists eventually decided that Burr was too unreliable of

a guy, anyway, and finally granted Jefferson the presidency on the thirty-sixth ballot.

So by the end of the presidential election of 1800, the Federalists didn’t have much left.

The president was Republican, the Congress was soon to be Republican; all they had was the

judiciary and they decided to make something of that before they left Congress and the

presidency. They passed an act called the Judiciary Act of 1801, which reduced the number of

Supreme Court justices from six to five, but increased the number of federal judges across the

nation. Not surprisingly, they appointed all Federalists to these new positions. Republicans

vowed to get rid of this Act—these “midnight appointments,”—which they did once Jefferson

took over the presidency (we’ll talk about the accompanying problems with this reversal later).

At any rate, to get back to Jefferson winning the election… you might remember from earlier

that Jefferson had proposed focusing the nation’s efforts on a more agrarian economy made up

mostly of self-sufficient farmers. Well, during his presidency, Jefferson worked to put his vision

into place. Jefferson and the Republicans wanted a society that was free of dirty, industrial

towns—like those towns that were spread across Europe—and instead hoped for a society of

peaceful, pastoral farmers and a federal government with limited power.

This concept seemed to fit in with Jefferson’s personality. Though he was a wealthy and

aristocratic planter, he saw himself as a regular guy. He hated pretension, and even walked to his

own inauguration like an ordinary citizen would have rather than riding in a coach or being

escorted by a group. Even in foreign affairs, he brought this commoner’s attitude, failing to

dress up when ambassadors from other countries came to the presidential mansion, not yet called

the White House. His speech and skills were far from a commoner’s however. “He was a

brilliant conversationalist, a gifted writer, and one of the nation’s most intelligent and creative

men,” with a wide range of interests and achievements, including his being “an active architect,

educator, inventor, scientific farmer and philosopher.” While these skills were all very

interesting and made Jefferson a very well-rounded person, his greatest skill truly lie in being a

politician. Jefferson worked hard to be the leader of his party and sometimes even tended to

micromanage his party, his cabinet and Congress, watching over their actions and letting them

know when they weren’t on the same page as him. Jefferson appointed men to cabinet positions

and federal jobs that were sympathetic to his ideas and extremely loyal to him and by the end of

his second term, he had filled almost every available federal position with a loyal Republican.

One of his first matters of business as President had to do with federal expenditures. He

was a proponent of small government and he felt that under the Washington and Adams

administrations, the federal government had been spending too much. There was a high public

debt and a great deal of taxation, including that whiskey tax that we talked about earlier, and

Jefferson immediately set out to remedy these things. In 1802, Jefferson convinced Congress to

abolish federal taxes and have only customs duties—those taxes paid by people who were

importing goods to the US—and the sale of Western lands be the source of federal revenue. This

cut in revenue had to be accompanied, of course, by a cut in federal spending, which was

achieved by cutting staff size, among other things. Jefferson was able to cut down the national

debt considerably with these measures. Another way Jefferson cut spending was to decrease the

size of the armed forces, though he was no pacifist. In fact, when overseas military trouble

began brewing, Jefferson quickly built up the armed forces again.

So Jefferson quickly achieved his goal of limiting the size of the federal government and

decreasing both taxes and federal spending. Having made these gains, Jefferson and his fellow

Republicans looked to repeal the odious “midnight appointments” from the Federalist Party’s

Judiciary Act of 1801, that law that reduced the number of Supreme Court justices from six to

five, while increasing the size of federal courts dramatically. Congress repealed the Judiciary

Act and eliminated those federal judgeships. However, one of the judges who had been

appointed under the Judiciary Act of 1801 challenged this reversal.

In the case of Marbury v. Madison, Judge Marbury sued Secretary of State James

Madison for failing to hand over the commission Adams had signed appointing Marbury to a

federal judgeship. The Supreme Court made a landmark decision in this case: they said that the

Judiciary Act, in itself, was unconstitutional because with that law Congress had expanded the

number of federal judges and, more importantly, changed the makeup of the Supreme Court.

This was not okay because the set-up of the Supreme Court was defined in the Constitution,

remember—the Supreme Law of the Land. So the Court really said that Congress had done

something unconstitutional and the Judiciary Act was repealed. But what’s so remarkable about

this case (what you should remember about the case), is that Marbury v. Madison gave the

Supreme Court the right (or at least the precedent) to declare any acts of Congress

unconstitutional—a power that was never given to the Supreme Court in the Constitution!

This gave the Supreme Court a lot of power, power it appears, that the founding fathers didn’t

really anticipate giving them.

This clearly made the federal government much stronger, w hich was the exact opposite

of what Thomas Jefferson had planned, right? Well, Jefferson would take his presidential power

even farther in a land purchase to rival all other land purchases—but to the story of the Louisiana

Purchase and a continuation of our assessment of Jefferson’s presidency, we’ll turn next time.

As a quick addition, if you’d like to recap this lecture and listen to some amazing music

alongside it from Hamilton: The Musical, please check out the File “Hamilton Musical and

History Recap”!