Inquiry Into the Origin and Course of Political Parties in the United States

by Martin Van Buren

The attention of every American community which possessed facilities for foreign commerce or manufactures, or for any of the various pursuits enumerated in his great report, and especially when they possessed also superior skill and enterprise, was at once directed to Hamilton's scheme of government for encouragement, and they certainly were not always indisposed to accept the seductive offers held out to them. But fortunately for the country and for the cause of good government there was a class, happily formidable in numbers and in great and sterling qualities, whom no wiles could win from their devotion to early principles and whom government favors could not corrupt. That class was, singularly enough, the landed interest. I say singularly, not because their fidelity to principle was at variance with their history, but with reference to the circumstance that, whilst in England it had been the principal object in building up the money power to restrict the influence of the landed interest, that power was here destined to be itself kept in check by an interest of the same name, however different in character.

Mr. Jefferson in his celebrated letter to Mazzei, in 1796, gives a description, which could not be improved, of the then political condition of the country and of its political parties: "Against us," he says, "are the executive, the judiciary, two out of three branches of the Legislature, all the officers of the Government, all who want to be officers, all timid men who prefer the calm of despotism to the boisterous sea of liberty, British merchants and Americans trading on British capital, speculators and holders in the banks and public funds,—a contrivance invented for the purpose of corruption, and for assimilating us in all things to the rotten as well as the sound parts of the British model. The whole body of our citizens, however, remain true to their republican principles; the whole landed interest is republican, and so is a great mass of talent." The term "landed interest" in its general signification, and in the sense in which it was used by Mr. Jefferson, referred to those who worked as well as owned the land,—the farmers of the North and the planters of the South,—all who made Agriculture their pursuit; a class which in the earlier periods of our colonial condition constituted almost our entire population, and have at every period in our history vastly exceeded in numbers those engaged in all other pursuits. There is no point of resemblance between them and the landed aristocracy of England, save in that they both represent the landed interest of their respective countries and that they were led in each to oppose the money power. Their difference in other respects is sufficiently manifest.

A more estimable class of men than the farmers and planters of the United States is not to be found in the world. From the landing of the Pilgrims to the present day they have exerted an effective and salutary influence, not only upon the condition of the country, in respect to its material improvement, but upon the character and strength of our political institutions. It was to their sagacity and firmness that the colonies were chiefly indebted for their success in turning away and defeating the fury of the savages, and in baffling the persevering efforts of the mother country to enslave the provinces. For the most part the descendants of ancestors who had been, to an almost unprecedented extent, exposed to the faithlessness and persecutions of power, they seldom failed to be on their guard against its approaches, however artfully disguised. Every attempt to purchase their acquiescence in measures that they regarded as encroachments upon their liberties or subversive of their rights, through governmental favors, proved abortive.

Grenville, when pressed, as prime minister, by the London merchants with the dangers that threatened the collection of their American debts from the effects of the stamp-tax, was prodigal in his offers of governmental favors to secure the submission of the colonists to the odious measure. "If one bounty," said he, "will not do, I will add two; if two will not do, I will add three." But these offers, as well as all the efforts which had been and were subsequently made by the Crown to quiet the Colonies through bounties and commercial privileges, were unavailing. The "landed interest," constituting a great majority of the colonists, was too wise to be duped, and too honest to be corrupted, by special favors of any description. Placed by the nature of their pursuits, in a great measure, beyond the reach of court and official blandishments, and less dependent on the special privileges of the Crown than those who looked to them for their support, they uniformly regarded these offers with distrust rather than desire. They had, from these and other considerations, been led to embrace the principles upon which the Revolution was founded with more earnestness, and to cherish them with a more uncalculating devotion, than many of their Revolutionary associates. The circumstance that a larger share of the defense of those principles had devolved upon them, by reason of the excess of their numbers, naturally commended more warmly to their hearts doctrines for the establishment of which they had suffered so much inquietude and encountered so many perils.

These considerations were alike applicable to, and equally influential upon, the landed interest of the North and of the South. With attachments undiminished and unchangeable to republican principles, pure and simple, subject to such limitations only as were required by convenience in their execution and necessary to deliberation in council, principles the fruition of which had been the day-dream of their ancestors through successive generations, and their own guiding-star in the gloomiest period of the Revolution, the representatives of this great interest, North and South, by large majorities, sustained the Anti-Federal party until that party was overthrown through its great error in respect to the Constitution, and were still ready to take their stand in any organization that should have for its object opposition to the heresies developed by Hamilton in his platform for the government of the administration.

The principles upon which the landed interest acted from the start, have, it must be admitted, been more successfully sustained in the Southern than in the Northern States; not because they were originally embraced with more sincerity, but from very different causes. The commercial, manufacturing, and trading classes, to whom Hamilton's policy was more particularly addressed, and upon whom it, beyond all doubt, exerted a powerful influence, were, at the beginning, far more numerous in the Northern than in the Southern States, and this disparity in their respective conditions has been constantly increasing. It was through the growing power of these classes, and of others similarly, though perhaps not equally, exposed to its influence that the Hamiltonian policy occasionally triumphed in the Northern States, and their politics thus became more unstable than those of the South.

Mr. Bancroft happily and truly describes the peculiar condition of Southern men in this regard. "An instinctive aversion," says he, "to too much government was always a trait of Southern character expressed in the solitary manner of settling in the country, in the absence of municipal governments, in the indisposition of the scattered inhabitants to engage in commerce, to collect in towns, or to associate in townships under corporate powers. As a consequence there was little commercial industry; and on the soil of Virginia there were no vast accumulations of commercial wealth. The exchanges were made almost entirely—and it continued so for more than a century—by factors of foreign merchants. Thus the influence of wealth, under the modern form of stocks and accumulations of money, was always inconsiderable; and men were so widely scattered—like hermits among the heathen—that far the smallest number were within the reach of the direct influence of the established Church or of Government."[24]

In this description of the early, which is also measurably and comparatively true of the present, state of the South, we find a solution of the circumstance that the failure of Hamilton's policy was so much more signal there than in other quarters, and that the principles upon which it was founded have there been since so perseveringly and unitedly resisted. The political principles of the landed interest, constituting an immense majority of their people, have prevailed in the administration of their State governments, save in regard to the ratification of the Federal Constitution, from the recognition of our Independence to the present day. There has also been a remarkable consistency in the political positions of their public men. In Virginia, which State has done so much to give a tone to national politics, Patrick Henry has been almost, if not quite, the only prominent man who abandoned the principles by which he had been governed during the Confederation, and embraced those of Hamilton at the coming in of the new government. Always admiring his character and conduct during the Revolutionary era, and strongly impressed by the vehemence and consistency with which he had, during the government of the Confederation, opposed every measure that savored of English origin, I pressed Mr. Jefferson, as far as was allowable, for the reasons of his sudden and great change. His explanation was, "that Henry had been smitten by Hamilton's financial policy."

The Republican party, forced into existence by Hamilton's obnoxious measures, sprang chiefly from the landed interest. The declaration of its illustrious founder, in his letter to Mazzei, that the country would yet preserve its liberties, was mainly based on the fact that "the whole landed interest was republican," and he could not have placed his reliance on a surer foundation. Farthest removed, as has been already said, from the seductive influence of the money power, abounding in strong common sense and love of country, and always greatly superior in numbers to the business men of all other classes, it constituted then, and has ever since constituted, the balance wheel of the Government. All it asks from administration is the maintenance of order, protection in the enjoyment of its civil and political rights, and the management of public affairs in a spirit of equal justice to all men. Whilst the commercial and manufacturing classes are annually approaching the National Legislature with appeals for aid and encouragement, and whilst the Congressional committees charged with their interests are from time to time convulsing the country with their measures, that which is nominally the representative and guardian of agriculture not being asked to do any thing for its support, very properly does nothing; having, indeed, no power under the Constitution to do any thing for it, the advantages of which are not common to all classes. What the farmers and planters desire more than this are "the early and the latter rain," for which they look to a source purer and more powerful than human legislation.

Thus sustained, the Republican party of 1790, headed by Thomas Jefferson, with the 'laboring oar' in the hands of James Madison, warmed into action by Jefferson's more fervent though not more deeply seated patriotism, and embracing "a great mass of talent," determined to oppose every measure of Washington's administration which they believed to be unauthorized by the Constitution, or anti-republican in its tendencies. This resolution was carried out with unflinching firmness, but, whatever has been said to the contrary, was made and designed to be performed in a manner consistent with the respect they entertained for the character and feelings of President Washington, and without even a desire to displace him from the high office with which they had contributed to invest him. It would have been strange if, in a state of party violence so excited as that which naturally sprung up, the dominant party should have refrained from aspersing the motives of their opponents by attributing to them personal hostility to a chief so justly beloved by the people as was Washington. Mr. Jefferson, in his letter to me, referring to similar charges but speaking of a subsequent period, says "General Washington, after the retirement of his first cabinet and the composition of his second, entirely Federal, and at the head of which was Mr. Pickering himself, had no opportunity of hearing both sides of any question. His measures consequently took more the hue of the party in whose hands he was. These measures were certainly not approved by the Republicans; yet they were not imputed to him, but to the counselors around him; and his prudence so far restrained their impassioned course and bias that no act of strong mark during the remainder of his administration excited much dissatisfaction. He lived too short a time after, and too much withdrawn from information to correct the views into which he had been deluded, and the continued assiduities of the party drew him into the vortex of their intemperate career, separated him still farther from his real friends, and excited him to actions and expressions of dissatisfaction which grieved them but could not loosen their affections from him."[25]