The Long History of Partisan Conflict in the USA

Our despair over the rancor and seemingly irreconcilable nature of our current partisan conflict might lead on to suspect that this is an outlier in the history of the republic.  Nothing could be further from the truth.

From the very first days of our founding the United States has been a veritable cauldron of partisan fury.  The mixture of religious zealots, ne’er-do-well misfits who fled their failures in another land, rapacious opportunists, political or criminal exiles, the hopeful poor, the established quasi-aristocracy, the adventure seekers and the idealistic children of the enlightenment created a volatile brew that would never achieve any true equilibrium.

In an effort to better understand our complex history I have been reading the Oxford History of the United States series.  These books, written by eminent historians, each cover a piece of the American story and tend to be in excess of 800 or 900 pages!  I have now read one on the period of reconstruction and the gilded age – 1865 to 1895, one on the revolutionary war up to the writing of the constitution, and am currently reading one on the period that encompasses the years following the constitutional convention up to 1815.  I look forward to reading all of them.

The books are so rich with detail that I will certainly only retain a small portion of what I read.  However, there are distinct themes that one sees throughout our history and these make a deep impression. 

One of these is the depth of disagreement and partisan discord that runs through all of our almost 250 years as a nation.  Whether Federalist versus Democratic-Republican, Whig versus Democratic or Democratic versus Republican, our nation has always divided itself into factions, and these factions are often so passionately at odds with one another that some sort of civil war or other violent episode seems imminent.

The question of slavery and the American civil war are of course the most dramatic examples of this underlying political conflict.  But there have been many times when the issues that divided people into separate camps sparked passionate insults, outraged condemnation and even violent attacks.

Given the romantic ideal of our founding fathers and their colleagues, one might think that the earliest days of our grand experiment in political science was one of harmony and general agreement on the basic principles of our government, and that only with the increasing tensions of slavery did our ancestors begin to have any real conflict.

But before slavery became the primary point of contention there was the profound antipathy between Democratic-Republicans, who feared too much federal control and federal banking as a return to a monarchical and aristocratic society, and Federalists, who feared ‘mob democracy’ and the adoption of ideas from the French revolution.  John Adams and Alexander Hamilton were strident in their condemnation of Jefferson and Madison, and those Virginians returned the enmity with vigor!

Here are some interesting observations from Gordon Wood, who wrote Empire of Liberty, A History of the Early Republic from 1789-1815: 

• In 1809 a Republican minister declared that the “parties hate each other as much as the French and English hate each other in time of war”.
• In 1807, General Solomon Van Rensselaer, a prominent Federalist in Albany, NY, beat the author of a Republican resolution questioning his integrity with a heavy cane and then stomped on him.  Partisans on each side joined in the fray and turned the city into a ‘tumultuous sea of heads, over which clattered a forest of canes’.
• The Federalist press accused the Republicans of being filthy Jacobins and monsters of sedition, and the Republican press denounced the Federalists for being Tory monarchists and British-loving aristocrats.
• By the late 1790’s, both President John Adams and Vice-President Thomas Jefferson believed they had become the victims of ‘the most envious malignity, the most base, vulgar, sordid, fish-woman scurrility, and the most palpable lies that had ever been leveled against any public official.

This historical perspective may perhaps be of little solace in our current atmosphere of distrust, but it is good to remind ourselves of the fact that tumultuous times are not rare, but rather commonplace.  Human beings are mercurial creatures who easily convince themselves that their views and opinions have eternal truth and significance. 

We feel that we are always on the precipice of some great disaster or injustice, and indeed we often are!  But happily, our dramatic differences and disagreements rarely provoke more than sporadic violence and the slow but steady evolution of society continues, however frustrating its glacial pace.