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

by Martin Van Buren

2. Are those who are elected by the people bound to execute it according to the intention of its framers and the understanding of those who ratified it?

3. Is it in that sense sacredly obligatory upon all who are subject to its authority?

The charge presented against the Federal party and its representatives was that they had trampled upon the sanctity of the Constitution by the application to its construction of principles known to be unsound, by setting at defiance the intentions of those who made it and for whom it was made, and by prostituting it, and claiming the right to prostitute it, to the promotion of their particular views of the public interests, regardless of such intentions, however well understood.

This Report stands as a perpetual record of that issue. The Republicans regarded its decision as involving the existence of republican government, inasmuch as no such government could be sustained for a moment longer than the Constitution was looked to as a sacred and inviolable line of duty for both rulers and ruled. They triumphed in the great contest, and they expelled from power the men who refused to recognize that principle in the administration of the government, and for that reason they placed in their stead those who would recognize it.

Madison's Report presented a faithful synopsis of the principles of the old Republicans upon fundamental questions,—those which relate to the powers of government and to the responsibilities under which they should be exercised,—the only questions which gave rise to permanent political parties. Whilst divisions in regard to particular measures disappear with the falling off of interest in the subjects of them, those which I have described as growing out of such primordial tenets are kept alive as long as the government itself endures. So it has been in all countries where there has been any appreciable degree of freedom of opinion. England is almost, if not altogether, the only country whose institutions are sufficiently analogous to ours to admit of useful comparisons. From the time when her sovereigns traced their authority from God, and acknowledged responsibility to Him alone for the manner of its exercise, to the Revolution of 1688, by which absolutism was forever abolished and government declared to be a trust for the abuse of which the sovereign is responsible to the people, and always since, her party divisions, regarded as national, have had relation to the powers of government and to the degrees of responsibility under which they should be exercised. Whether these parties were called Cavaliers and Roundheads, Presbyterians and Jacobites, Whig and Tory, or Conservatives and Liberals, such have always been the essential dividing points. Like ourselves they have had a succession of exciting public questions not of this character which have for a time divided the community, and were earnestly contested, but which passed away without making material inroads upon ancient party divisions, and the latter resumed their sway when the temporary interruption ceased in much the same general array they would have presented if it had not occurred.

I have said that Madison's report was the flag under which the Republicans conquered. It defines the constitutional creed by which they were influenced in the administration of the government for twenty-four years successively, and under which the Democratic party, their successors, have since held the reins of the Federal Government, with infrequent exceptions—the latter never extending to two Presidential terms, and always the result of special circumstances having little bearing upon general politics.

But the political seed sown by Hamilton has not in other respects proved as perishable as have his teachings in favor of monarchical institutions. The former has never been eradicated—it seems not susceptible of eradication. I have given the reasons why this has been so with a description of the fruit it has continued to produce. These results have fostered kindred doctrines in respect to constitutions, their sanctity, their uses, and their abuses. I have also said that these doctrines have been ever cherished and enforced when circumstances were auspicious, and have constituted the chief element of our party divisions. Hence it has been that those divisions have been so uniform in their general outlines. The opposite dispositions which lead men to take different sides upon such questions have worked to the same ends from the close of the Revolution, and have been developed on all occasions of a nature to call them into action. The execution of the present Federal Constitution presented an opportunity to give them a definite and more permanent form and classification which they have maintained ever since. Individuals have changed from side to side under the influence of what they have regarded as stronger inducements, and when they have been disappointed, have generally returned to their first bias. Questions of public policy, disconnected from considerations of constitutional power, have arisen, been discussed, decided or abandoned and forgotten, whilst the political parties of the country have remained as they were.

With the authentic record before us of the issue, the contest, the result, and the efforts on the part of the defeated party to recover the ground it had lost, the supposition seems preposterous that our party divisions had their origin in the circumstances that occurred on the appointment of General Washington to be Commander-in-Chief of our Revolutionary army, as is alleged by a son of General Hamilton, in his history of the life of his father. Of the same character, though not quite so unreasonable, are the attempts which have been made by several to find their origin in the Federal Convention. That body did indeed present an occasion for the application of different opinions to the original formation of the Federal Constitution, but those opinions grew out of conflicting tenets which had divided the country into parties long before, and they were not then determined either way, but compromised upon grounds of expediency by a result which was not in point of fact satisfactory to any side, but acquiesced in by a majority obtained from the ranks of both. The proposition of President John Quincy Adams in his Inaugural Address, tracing their rise to the opposing sides taken by the people of the United States, as between England and France, and their final discontinuance to the disastrous career and termination of the French Revolution, would seem to be not less wide of the mark. The continuance of the two great parties of the country in the same state, in respect to the principles they espoused and the characters and dispositions of those who composed them, for more than half a century and for a quarter of a century before his address was delivered, is not to be denied. If it was even supposed possible that an intelligent and high spirited people like our own, with traditions and a history so eventful, and with domestic interests so important, could have been arrayed in hostile political opinions and party divisions by the influence of purely foreign questions, the continuance of those divisions in the same form and spirit for so many years after all pretense of the operation of such an influence had ceased would of itself be sufficient to refute the theory. But the objections to it are too numerous, too conclusive in their character, and too obvious to make it necessary to press them farther. The French Revolution had sufficiently developed itself to weaken, if not extinguish, the solicitude of the Republicans for its success, (who, with their leader, Thomas Jefferson, regarded its excesses with abhorrence,) before they expelled John Adams from the Presidency for the aid and sanction which he gave to Hamilton's violations of the Constitution, and his son, John Quincy Adams, was twenty-eight years afterwards driven from power for the same cause and by the same party, a party which he supposed had ceased to exist for some thirty years previous. It was by his latitudinarian avowals in respect to the constitutional powers of Congress,—when he began to talk of erecting "light-houses of the skies," and of the folly of paralyzing representatives by the will of their constituents,—that his political destiny was sealed.

That existing political divisions among the people of the United States induced the formation of preferences and prejudices in respect to England and France, was, doubtless, true, but to suppose that these constituted the foundation of their own divisions is to mistake for the cause one of its least important effects.

The Anti-Federal, Republican, and Democratic parties have been from the beginning composed of men entertaining the same general views in regard to the most desirable form of government, and to the spirit in which, and the objects for which, it should be administered. The morbid feelings of large portions of the old Anti-Federalists produced by their distrust of delegated power, founded on their knowledge of the extent to which it had been everywhere abused, led to a difference between them and the Republicans on the question of clothing the Federal Government with power to collect its own revenues, to regulate commerce, &c., and induced them to oppose the ratification of the new Constitution on that account, and on account of its deficiencies in regard to proper securities for personal rights. Their party was thereby broken down, but Jefferson and Samuel Adams, and men like them, succeeded in satisfying them of their error in respect to the outlines of the Constitution, and Madison procured the adoption of amendments that obviated their other objections and, as I have before said, a cordial and enduring union was formed between them and the Republicans, under the latter name. Since that period the party has undergone no change, either in its organization, its principles, or the general political dispositions of the individuals of which it has been composed. Its name has been changed from Republican to Democratic, in consequence of the increasing popular development of its course and principles, and in some degree by the circumstance that its old opponent had assumed the name of Federal Republican and by a natural desire to keep the line of demarcation between them as broad and as well defined as possible.