[38] The italics are mine.
CHAPTER IX.
Effects of our Leading Party Conflicts in the Light of Seventy Years' Experience—Contest as to the Relative Powers of the State and General Governments—Merits and Faults of the Parties to that Contest—The Credit of settling the Struggle upon right Grounds due to Jefferson's Administration—Attempt of the Federalists to give undue Supremacy to the Judicial Department and Failure of that Attempt—Hamilton's Funding System—History of its Establishment, Continuance, and Overthrow—The National Bank Struggle—The Protective System—Clay's American System—Internal Improvements by the General Government—Overthrow of these Measures the beneficent Work of the Democratic Party—No such Contributions to the Public Welfare made by the Opponents of that Party—The Debt of Gratitude due from the Country to Madison, to Jackson, and especially to Jefferson.
IT will not be deemed inappropriate to close this review of the rise and progress of our political parties, and of the principles upon which they have acted, with a fuller notice of the advantages and disadvantages which have resulted to the country from their conflicting acts and pretensions during an experience of more than seventy years. In deciding the character of parties by their works we will but follow the dictates of unerring wisdom, by which we are taught to judge the tree by its fruit.
A great question, and naturally the first that arose in the formation of our political system, related to the power that should be reserved to, and the treatment that should be extended towards, the State governments. Rivalries between them and the Federal head could not be prevented. To mitigate the evil by dealing justly and wisely with the State authorities, was all that could be done. Each of the great parties which have divided the country had, from the beginning, its own, and they were conflicting opinions, in respect to the spirit in which this important subject should be dealt with. These, and the acts and sayings they gave rise to, have been herein freely spoken of, and what has been said need not be repeated. The facts and circumstances brought into view, consisting in a considerable degree of the reiterated declarations of the parties themselves, with a mass of others supplied by contemporaneous history, fully justify the belief that if Hamilton and Morris, and the influential men of the party of which the former was through life the almost absolute leader, could have had their way, the State governments would have been reduced to conditions in regard to power and dignity which would not only have destroyed their usefulness, but from which they must have sunk into insignificance and contempt; to which state it was the avowed wish of those leaders to depress them. This desire was frustrated in the Federal Convention, not so much through favorable feeling towards the State authorities as by a conviction on the part of a majority—a conviction which could neither be disguised nor suppressed—that the old Anti-Federal party would be sufficiently strengthened by a plan of the Constitution, against which a design clearly hostile to the State governments could be fairly charged, to enable that party to prevent its ratification. John Quincy Adams, to his declaration that the "Constitution was extorted from the grinding necessity of a reluctant nation," might have added, with equal truth, that the Constitution, in the form it bore on this point, was extorted from the Convention by a necessity not less effectual. Hamilton's design to attain the object he had failed to accomplish in the Convention, by "administrating" the Constitution, in the language of Madison, into a thing very different from what they both knew it was intended to be, was defeated by the old Republican party.
The lowest point to which the State governments would have been reduced, if the influence that was exerted to lessen their power had not been defeated in the way I have described, must of necessity be matter of speculation only. Hamilton, as we have seen, declared candidly that he knew of no reason why he did not advocate their total overthrow other than the manifest strong desire of the people for their retention; whilst Morris, with equal openness, said that if they could not abolish them altogether, it was nevertheless desirable to pull the teeth of the serpents.
There can be but little doubt that a complete triumph of the Federal policy would have resulted in a decline of the State governments, if they escaped extinguishment, from the condition which they occupied at the period of the recognition of our Independence to mere municipal authorities, without sufficient power to render them extensively useful—fit theatres only for the exercise and enjoyment of the patronage of the Federal government.
The Anti-Federalists, like their opponents, could only look with favor on one side of this great question. I do not complain of their partiality for the State governments, for it was in them a natural and inherited feeling, one which had been cherished with equal ardor from a remote period in our history by men whose places they filled and whom they most resembled. Their fault was the exclusiveness of their preference. They could not and did not deny that a general government of some sort was indispensable, and they should therefore have stood ready to confer upon it such powers as were necessary to enable it to sustain itself and to qualify it for the successful performance of the duties to be assigned to it. This they would not do. They, on the contrary, allowed their local prejudices and their suspicious, in some instances well founded but unwisely indulged, to lead them to persistent refusals to concede to the Federal head means which a sufficient experience had shown to be absolutely necessary to good government. Public and private interests suffered from that cause, and they were justly held responsible for the consequences. Their conduct was as unjustifiable and as suicidal as was the unmitigated warfare waged by leading Federalists against the State governments; and no political course adopted by public men or political parties, of which it could be said that it was intentionally wrong, has hitherto, to their honor be it spoken, long escaped rebuke from the American people.