This paper centers on a paradox of early American democratization, namely that as mass party competition got under way, political elitesFootnote ¹ mixed party practices with antiparty rhetoric. In one sense, the intolerance of partisanship is not at all surprising. As Barry Schwartz observes, early America “stressed the republican virtues of obligation, sacrifice, and disinterestedness” and accordingly reserved the terms “party” and “faction” for any unpatriotic group that placed private interests ahead of the public good. For example, because “revolutionary republicans took political economy, citizenship and faction to be inextricably bound together,” among the more hated parties were elusive “aristocrats” who schemed to monopolize the Republic's wealth, rather than “promote widespread landownership as the foundation of republican citizenship.”Footnote ²

However, the pervasiveness of antipartyism bears further analysis because the practitioners of antiparty rhetoric were also prominent party leaders like Martin Van Buren and his compatriots in New York state's “Albany Regency,” the nucleus of the incipient Democratic organization. The puzzle that guides this paper, therefore, is the following: how could mass party competition originate in the interplay of partisanship on the one hand and antipartyism on the other?

Drawing on the papers of national elites and on early nineteenth century Alabama and Illinois party newspapers, I argue that this rhetorical mix was an important part of a larger discursive shift that overcame the inherited antipartyism of the early Republic and thus eased the transition to mass party competition. The first party system (1789–1827), like the second (1828–1860), was rife with interelite conflict, but the former was different in at least two respects. The political elites of the first party system did not see themselves as “parties” but as loose coalitions and used the terms “party” and “faction” to stigmatize their political adversaries. Second, and as a result, the first party system lacked an effective institutional mechanism for managing dissent peacefully. The constitutional phase of democratization had introduced a contradiction into the heart of American government by, on the one hand, furnishing political elites with new resources with which to compete (voters), and on the other hand, opening up elites to public challenge and thus to reoccurring crises of legitimacy.Footnote ³ In order to discipline and capitalize on the expanding franchise without resorting to state violence, political elites had to simultaneously develop institutional structures of party command that could mobilize large numbers of people and also legitimate the existence of an organizational form (parties), which had previously been seen as illegitimate.

The elites of the second party system, I argue, met these demands in part by framing the political struggles of the day as high stakes matters akin to the revolution.Footnote ⁴ Because the revolution was imagined simultaneously as a conflict between British and patriot forces as well as a triumph of patriotic solidarity, the politicians of the second party system deployed partisan (that is, oppositional) and antipartyist (that is, unifying) themes in political contests. The rhetorical invocation of wartime discipline elevated political parties to the status of the revolutionary militia itself, and consequently, the term, party, came to denote a defense against, rather than a source of, corrupt self-interest. The military form therefore did what other arguments for party discipline could not do.

Unlike other partyist discursive currents, which were more formal and legalistic in character, martial discourse had mass appeal. It could connect national elites with local operatives and voters on the ground by offering a new generation of Americans a chance to become soldiers in a revolution that they were simply too young to fight. That is, if the partyist theory of Van Buren and others provided the intellectual rationale for the mass party system, then martial discourse provided its emotional content and thus worked to “recruit” Americans at all levels to participate in a new form of elective politics. In doing so, martial discourse also helped to preclude reoccurring crises of elite legitimacy for a generation.

By addressing the problem of early American democratization in this way, this paper contributes to both the social science and historiographical literatures on the subject. Historians have long known and written about the party-antiparty paradox, but social scientists have yet to incorporate its implications for the study of democratization.Footnote ⁵ Most of this literature suggests that democratic change originates in the presence and relative strength of competing class actors. In contrast, I argue that at least one critical phase of democratization—the advent of mass party competition—is facilitated by the manipulation and deployment of discourses by political elites. In addition, although historians have documented the discursive dimensions of this transition, they have largely focused on the formal theories of party. In this paper, I combine the otherwise isolated literatures on martial discourse and antipartyism to offer a new synthesis, namely that while rational argument undoubtedly worked to overcome antipartyism, martial discourse played a complementary role in this transition by furnishing a language of mobilization that could recruit diverse sets of actors to the practice of mass party politics.

POLITICAL PARTIES AND DEMOCRATIZATION

E. E. Schattschneider once argued, “Political parties created democracy … modern democracy is unthinkable save in terms of the parties.” Indeed, it was the centrality of party competition to democracy that animated V. O. Key's classic critique of the Solid South's one-party system. “The best government,” he wrote, “results when there is free and vigorous competition at the ballot box in contests in which genuine issues are defined and candidates take a stand.” Robert Dahl, whose foundational work on polyarchy remains a touchstone for defining what we mean when we speak of formally existing democracy, similarly defines polyarchies as “highly inclusive and extensively open to public contestation.” That is, to qualify as a polyarchy, it is insufficient to enfranchise the mass public; a regime must allow legal opposition, which, in most known cases of polyarchy, has taken the form of a competitive mass party system.Footnote ⁶

Despite the known links between political parties and democracy, the key controversy in the literature on democratic transitions and expansions has centered on which economic class—landowning, bourgeois, peasant, or working—is the prime mover of democratic change. In this, there are two orienting poles: those who privilege the upper classes in that process and those who privilege the lower classes. The canonical example of the upper-class-driven view is Barrington Moore's claim that “a vigorous and independent class of town dwellers has been an indispensable element in the growth of parliamentary democracy. No bourgeois, no democracy.”Footnote ⁷ In contrast, Rueschemeyer et al. find that when landed classes and the bourgeoisie “felt acutely threatened in their vital interests by popular pressures, they invariably opposed democracy,” leading them to suggest that in fact “the working class was the most consistently pro-democratic force.”Footnote ⁸ The upper-/lower-class divide, in turn, has given rise to attempts at synthesis. Collier, for example, offers “an institutional and path-dependent explanation” in which labor's participation in democratization varies with “the context of prior experience with democratic regimes and the type of antecedent regime.” Accordingly, Collier finds several patterns of democratization, some of which are upper-class-driven, others working-class-driven, and still others “joint projects.”Footnote ⁹

This overarching class emphasis has led scholars of democratization, first, to cut across otherwise robust theoretical insights on parties too quickly; second, to settle on an approach to parties that defines their role too narrowly; and third, to assume the legitimacy of parties prematurely. Rueschemeyer and the Stephenses, for example, view party elites as middlemen who regulate the perceived threat posed by the working class to the dominant classes in transitions to democracy. “Political parties,” they find, “emerged in the crucial role as mediators,” tempering the radicalism of the lower classes so as to keep the bourgeoisie from pursuing authoritarian alternatives. Although the “party-as-mediator” approach uncovers some of what party elites do in democratic transition, Rueschemeyer et al. actually offer a potentially broader conceptualization of party practices late in their conclusion, one that treats politics “as a distinct analytical dimension of civil society which is strongly affected by but cannot be reduced to the economic and class structure.”Footnote ¹⁰

Rather than make “an attempt … to explain the origins of party systems,” however, they then quickly cede their ground to exactly the opposite theory of Lipset and Rokkan, in which parties are relegated to the role of expressing the demands of cleavage groups.Footnote ¹¹ The American case involves some mediation to the degree that effective disciplinary rhetoric may well have kept certain sectors of society from abandoning the democratic project in favor of more repressive alternatives. Nevertheless, this arrangement does not emerge in the context of mediation between an upper and a lower class but in a struggle between two factions of the second generation political elite. Nor is the language of this struggle one of mediation but of violent insurrection, channeled into the ritual of mass party competition. Finally, the party-as-mediator framework unduly assumes a) the legitimacy of parties as an organizational form and b) the authority of parties to mediate on behalf of competing class actors. In sum, Rueschemeyer et al., like other scholars of democratization, conceive of party elites in ways that exclude the cultural dimensions of political practice and thereby fall short of explaining how mass party politics become legitimate in the first place.

Like Rueschemeyer et al., others in the field have made important observations about the discursive dynamics of democratic transition only to retreat to more familiar ground. Paige, for example, explains Central America's recent transition to neoliberal democracy in terms of the convergence of liberal and socialist discourses but then concludes by giving most of the credit to a “socialist revolution from below.” Similarly, O'Donnell and Schmitter make the provocative claim that “the key to the party's efficacy … lies in its capacity to generate symbols of partial political identity … which bring together voters and militants across many of the lines which otherwise divide them.” However, in a return to the rational choice basis of their “elite bargaining” approach, the two ultimately confine the role of party elites to a single moment in democratic transition, the “founding election,” in which a “cartel of party elites” are said to forge “pacts” that “(1) limit the agenda of policy choice, (2) share proportionately in the distribution of benefits, and (3) restrict the participation of outsiders in decision-making.”Footnote ¹²

Inattention to political discourse also renders the social science literature on party formation ill-equipped to explain how second party system elites overcame the inherited antipartyism of the early national electorate. John Aldrich holds that American political parties emerged first as legislative coalitions, and then as mass parties, to solve successive collective action problems. Thus, “primarily parties-in-government” surfaced when legislators discovered that their preferences could be realized more efficiently when they aligned themselves with likeminded colleagues. “A series of problems that necessarily arise in elections and in governance,” he writes, “make it possible for politicians to win more of what they seek to win, more often, and over a longer period by creating political parties.” Incipient Democratic Party elites like Martin Van Buren then confronted the free rider problems associated with organizing largely autonomous state elites and a far-flung mass electorate by building the National Alliance and Caucus, which worked in tandem to reduce the costs and maximize the perceived benefits and intrinsic value of mass party affiliation.Footnote ¹³

Another elite-driven approach argues that patronage systems are the prime mover of mass party formation. According to Shefter (1994) elites use parties as vehicles to mobilize mass constituencies either to take, or to secure their hold, over the government. At the core of the mass party system, then, is the mechanism of calculated mutual benefit: parties distribute “divisible benefits” to individuals for their political support or collective benefits “to elicit contributions of money, labor, or votes.”Footnote ¹⁴

In contrast, Lipset and Rokkan's view of party formation holds that parties “have an expressive function” and “develop a rhetoric for the translation of contrasts in the social and cultural structure into demands for action.” Parties reflect the true motor of politics, social differentiation (for example, along class or religious lines), in the legislative sphere. Moreover, cleavages are said to originate in far off “critical junctures” like the Protestant Reformation and Industrial Revolution, such that most political elites often have no temporal access to the historic rifts that supposedly divide their communities.Footnote ¹⁵

The shortcomings of these approaches to party formation mirror those of the democratization literature. First, they assume away the cultural impediments to party formation. For Aldrich, the key challenges to mass party formation were the collective action problems inherent to the organization of rational actors, not the discursive legitimation of political parties as an organizational form. Shefter's approach presupposes that party patronage will be seen as a legitimate practice, presumably because individuals and groups stand to benefit from its enactment. Lipset and Rokkan assume that critical junctures beget new social cleavages and that new social cleavages naturally beget new parties, which represent those competing interests. None of these approaches contemplates a political culture within which parties are so stigmatized that elites would first have to reinvent parties in order to inaugurate mass party competition. Second, the agency of political elites is theorized too narrowly. Lipset and Rokkan in particular only allow politicians to translate ancient social divides into demands for action. Aldrich is better on this score, but for him, and indeed for Shefter, elite agency amounts to rational calculation. There is potential for something more in Aldrich's account of the transition from legislative to mass parties because he views the intrinsic value of voting (“citizen duty” or “being known to be on the right side”) as part of the calculus of the early mass electorate. One might therefore plausibly frame martial discourse as one among a complex of factors that counter the costs of mass party affiliation. However, Aldrich's focus is not on the rhetoric driving mass mobilization but the self-interest of elites, who above all understood that “control of a majority in the public brought control of office, and with that, control of policy and the spoils of office.”Footnote ¹⁶

Even if none of these criticisms held water, however, most of these theories would suffer from the problem of timing. The central controversy in the democratization literature turns on which social class is the most consistent bearer of democratic change, yet as Jackson Turner Main demonstrated long ago, many first and second party system elites were drawn from similar social strata, a fact that gives us little purchase in explaining the differences between the first and second party systems. Lipset and Rokkan hold that social cleavages give rise to new party systems, yet the regional, ethnocultural, and socioeconomic cleavages that divided the first party system also operated in the second. Finally, although the spoils system has become synonymous with the Jackonian Democratic Party, patronage was also part of the first party system's landscape, as in the case of John Adams's infamous “midnight appointments.” There is sufficient doubt, therefore, that these approaches can explain why the first party system suffered from reoccurring crises of elite legitimacy, whereas the second party system did not. Elements of martial discourse had existed in the first party system, but second generation elites would first have to distort and reconstitute them before they could be of service in making the practice of mass partisanship palatable to an otherwise antiparty republic. Of the foregoing hypotheses, then, only martial discourse has the promise of explaining this transition in ways that others cannot and that impart new perspective to our understanding of party development and democratization in the early United States.

THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF ANTIPARTYISM AND MARTIAL DISCOURSE

Scholars of American political history have had a long and extensive engagement with the party-antiparty paradox, and unlike scholars of democratization in the social sciences, they have focused their attention squarely on the discursive shift that gave rise to the mass party system. In that sense, historians are innocent of the theoretical problems enumerated thus far. Instead, the historiographical literature is limited in two other ways. First, the particular aspects of partyist discourse emphasized by the literature lack a mass appeal that could mobilize actors at all levels of the body politic. Second, historians of party have not engaged either with the evidence of martial discourse in their own work or with the literatures that make some effort to explain martial discourse.

The historiography has focused largely on the origins and subsequent evolution of party theory. Hofstadter, for instance, traces the rise and fall of successive schools of thought, from the more uncompromising antipartyism of Bolingbroke and Hamilton, to the Hume-Madison synthesis, which saw parties as an inevitability that must be controlled by institutional checks, and at last to Martin Van Buren and the Albany Regency who “demanded not merely voluntary concurrence” among their colleagues as their pro-party precursor, Edmund Burke, had thought sufficient, “but thoroughgoing subordination.” Similarly, Wilson held that the “defensive prerogative” of the country to form a party in the face of a conspiracy by the kingly court was originally Bolingbroke's formulation and later informed Van Buren's theory of party. Thus, Wilson wrote, “Van Buren took the Bolingbroke rationale for temporary party activity by the Country and turned it into an argument for permanent organization.” Most recently, Leonard has explained the emergence of mass party politics in terms of successive forms of constitutionalism. That account begins with Madison's “Constitution against parties,” continues with the rise of Van Buren constitutionalism, which justified party formation by insisting “the proposed party was to be a party of the whole sovereign democracy,” as opposed to “self-interested minorities” or “aristocrats,” and ends with the unexpected triumph of “the two-party constitution.”Footnote ¹⁷

The decisiveness of formal theories of party in overcoming the inherited antipartyism of the early Republic is now hardly in doubt, but the more pedestrian and perhaps less scholarly discourse of wartime discipline seems to have escaped the attention of historians of party. This paper aims to fill that gap. Martial discourse was no more important than the theories that underpinned the emergence of mass party politics, but it helped to frame partisanship in ways that diverse sets of actors could understand and accept, and it acted as a rhetorical device for the recruitment of these actors into the new form of elective politics. Martial discourse, in other words, complemented the theoretical basis of party discourse. For example, the solidaristic and oppositional strains of martial discourse meshed with the contrast between the indivisible democracy and the minoritarian aristocracy, which was at the core of what Leonard calls the partyist constitution. Thus, while the Van Burenite avant-garde in Illinois no doubt advanced their theories in straightforward constitutional terms as Leonard convincingly shows, they also, I maintain, simultaneously deployed martial discourse as if to translate the party and antiparty pillars of Van Buren constitutionalism into a language of mass mobilization that could hail national elites, local operatives, and rank-and-file voters to action.

This is not to suggest that martial discourse is terra incognita. The historiography of early American politics is littered with martial quotations from antebellum sources, but many historians appear unaware or uninterested in the specifically martial content of their evidence. For example, in one of the foundational essays on mass party formation, Michael Wallace quoted this passage from the National Advocate: “We will surrender nothing voluntarily to our opponents; let them fight and conquer, as the democratic party has done, and we will submit quietly.” The passage is classically martial. The words, “surrender,” “fight,” “conquer,” and “submit,” spring from the page, but rather than explore the implications of martial discourse for the partisan turn, Wallace—like other historians of party—uses this quotation as evidence of something else, namely the majoritarian logic of Van Buren's theory of party.Footnote ¹⁸

A handful of historians have published on martial discourse, though typically not in reference to early mass party formation. Richard Jensen, for example, documents the transition from an older “army style” of political language to a new “merchandising style” in the 1890s. Jean Baker has explored martial discourse as one among several important elements of northern Democratic Party political culture and has argued, in another context, that it was critical to the survival of republican ideology during the rise of liberalism. Finally, though Steven Watts also looks at the role of actual war in forging a peculiarly American brand of liberalism, he explores war as discourse, for instance, in the way that early political elites believed that war regenerated the polity. Among historians in this area, Marc Kruman is perhaps the only synthetic figure in that he uses “martial rhetoric” to demonstrate that the second party system was rooted in the ideology of revolutionary republicanism. Nevertheless, like other historians of party, Kruman's overall focus is the way in which revolutionary republicanism shaped the emerging theory of party.Footnote ¹⁹

The most important gap in Kruman's treatment of martial discourse, however, is the absence of the dynamic tension between antipartyism and partyism that Leonard captures in his account of Van Buren constitutionalism. This paper fuses Kruman's use of martial rhetoric as revolutionary imagery with Leonard's unique interpretation of the party-antiparty paradox. The resulting synthesis highlights the interdependence of partisanship and antipartyism within martial rhetoric and the importance of that interdependence for overcoming antipartyism and stabilizing the political system. This account of martial discourse, then, is not intended to supplant the reigning interpretations of this period, thereby advancing an alternative monocausal (and ultimately unsatisfying) account of the transition in question, but is offered instead as a neglected chapter to be integrated into the existing historiography.

DATA, CASE SELECTION, AND METHOD

To show how my claims about martial discourse scale up and down the different levels of party organization, I have collected data on three sets of political actors.Footnote ²⁰ First, I make use of the private papers of the period's most prominent national statesmen, the complete collections of which are published in bound volumes. The paper draws on the correspondence of George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe for the first party system and draws on that of John Quincy Adams, Andrew Jackson, Martin Van Buren, and Henry Clay for the transition to the second party system. Secondly, to document the character of martial discourse among local elites, I have collected qualitative archival data with special attention to historical newspapers. Early nineteenth century newspapers were the official organs of the political parties. Saul Cornell's work on Antifederalist dissent suggests that newspapers were the principal means through which the far-flung political elites of the early Republic tied their parties together in a common public sphere. Finally, with respect to voters, Robertson notes, “The principal vehicle for conveying the rhetoric and practice of mass partisanship was a growing network of newspapers” through which “the web of relationships between editors, correspondents, and readers grew and thickened.” For that reason, I draw on the same newspapers for evidence of positive audience reception of martial discourse. I focus in particular on the meetings of local rank-and-file voters, the minutes of which were often published in their respective party organs.Footnote ²¹

This paper is part of a larger research project on the advent of liberal democracy in the United States. It continues similar work by the author on Chicago party politics and democratization by offering a southern comparison case and by outlining the pre-history of Barrington Moore's “last capitalist revolution.” Given the broad framework of which this paper is a part, the immediate question arises, “why examine local cases at all?” The answer in brief is that national parties did not have a separate institutional identity from their state and local affiliates as they do now. National parties were confederations of state and local party machines.Footnote ²² To be sure, Washington and Jackson were not merely the heads of state and local parties (indeed, that is why we draw on their private papers here), but as a general rule, to speak of nationally prominent elites in the nineteenth century was to speak of the most powerful state and local party chieftains.

But why Illinois and Alabama? First, any number of states would have made promising cases, but Illinois and Alabama are better suited than some. In South Carolina, for instance, electoral competition revolved around two factions of the same party, rather than a two-party system as such. Moreover, Illinois and Alabama joined the Republic at roughly the same historical conjuncture (1818–1819), the eve of the Missouri crisis and the Panic of 1819. Additionally, as Formisano rightly notes in his study of the ethnocultural basis of mass party formation in Michigan, the politics of frontier states offer more insight into the character of mass party discipline as it spread and became a more generalized political practice than older states like New York and Virginia where pro-party elites were already concentrated.Footnote ²³ Lastly, Illinois and Alabama were the political epicenters of their sections leading up to the Civil War: Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas, the presidential nominees of the national Republican and Democratic Parties respectively, were both from Illinois, and Alabama was home to the first capital of the Confederacy and arguably its most outspoken proponent, William L. Yancey.

The local cases of Chicago and Tuscaloosa, in turn, were chosen for two reasons. First, in the early Republic the two towns were similarly positioned within their states. Chicago was emerging as the center of political power in northern Illinois and became an important trading center when a harbor and canal were built to connect downstate Illinois to New York and Europe by way of the Erie Canal in the East. Similarly, Tuscaloosa was Alabama's capital until the mid-1840s, and with its position at the head of the Black Warrior River, it linked the yeoman economy of northern Alabama to the plantation economy and Gulf Coast commercial hub of Mobile to the South. At the same time, Chicago and Tuscaloosa's differences provide an opportunity to observe how mass party discipline operated in somewhat divergent contexts, with the former being a mainly urban Democratic stronghold and the latter being a more rural Whig stronghold.

I employ two methodological techniques from comparative and historical research to make claims about the role of martial discourse in mass party competition. First, I use counterfactual reasoning to show not only that the presence of mass party discipline blunted the challenges to elite legitimacy posed by the competition for voters (the proverbial “just so” story), but also that in the absence of mass party discipline, challenges to elite legitimacy deepened to the point of national crisis.Footnote ²⁴ In the first half of the empirical section I describe what American politics looked like without a such a mechanism, paying special attention to two crises: the first culminating in the presidential election of 1800 and the second culminating in the economic panic and Missouri crisis of 1819.

I borrow the second technique from two separate literatures. Research on European class formation has shown that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century workers judged the legitimacy of incipient capitalist practices, not in terms of newer ideas like socialism, but in terms of older, established discourses. Sewell, for instance, held that the ideologies of French workers through the revolutions of 1789, 1830, and 1848 originated, and subsequently evolved out of, “the prerevolutionary corporate system.”Footnote ²⁵ Historiographers of colonial North America have made similar arguments about the staying power of pre-existing cultural idioms, for example, in precipitating the American Revolution.Footnote ²⁶

To give analytical weight to cultural mechanisms, the above analysts often trace the historical pathways through which inherited idioms become distorted and then give rise to new practices. Richard White uses this technique in theorizing the process of accommodation between Europeans and Indians prior to 1815. Each set of actors, White argues, brought to their prolonged encounter preconceived notions of the other, which clashed to produce fruitful misunderstandings:

Taking my cue from White and others, I devote a subsection below to the distortion of inherited discursive practices, namely first-party system electioneering rituals, the defensive prerogative of revolutionary republicanism, and the concept of war as regenerative of the polity. From there I am able to show that martial discourse—an amalgamation of these distorted practices—worked to stabilize the political system by providing an idiom through which a) previously antiparty elites could embrace their turn to party organization, b) local elites could find an identity within the larger mass party apparatus, and c) voters on the ground could actively participate in elective politics.

This is not a “causal” argument in the conventional sense of the term. To my knowledge, there are no transcripts of meetings in which prominent antebellum politicians explicitly proposed martial discourse as a strategy for overcoming antipartyism. However, the evidence does suggest that martial discourse appeared in its partisan form in the second party system, but not in the first; that its use was pervasive in the second party system; that its partyist and antiparty dimensions meshed with the emerging theory of party; and that its effect was to legitimize mass party competition and thus recruit others to the practice thereof.

The fourth kind of evidence bears further clarification here, as it comprises the bulk of the data in the second half of the empirical section below. The available data gesture toward what Althusser has referred to in another context as “interpellation,” defined as the process through which people come to recognize themselves as subjects in ideological practice.Footnote ²⁸ Thus, while the primary sources do not offer any “smoking gun” or moments of conversion, they do reveal an unfolding process in which national elites, local operatives, and the rank-and-file came to recognize themselves as Democrats and Whigs. I argue that martial rhetoric, because of the distinct way in which it articulated the party-antiparty mix, was one element in the overarching party discourse that enabled the process of mass party identification.

One last prefatory remark. Although military references to the American Revolution are plentiful in my sample of primary materials, not all such rhetoric, in my view, need mention Bunker Hill or George Washington explicitly to qualify as a martial reference to the revolution. Moreover, some martial references recall the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812 at the same time. The latter was particularly germane to the second party system because of its partial inducement of electoral reform and its establishment of General Andrew Jackson as a national symbol. Finally, such references were not purely militaristic in character, but rather were used in combination with other tropes to undermine the legitimacy of political adversaries. For instance, class inequality figured prominently in the Democratic deployment of martial discourse, such that the tyrants standing in for King George were bankers, speculators, and their putative allies in the Whig Party. What is more important than providing either explicit or purely military references to the revolution is demonstrating why martial discourse helped to overcome the antipartyism of the early Republic and thus stabilize political conflict.

FACTIOUS REVOLUTIONARIES: ANTIPARTYISM AND THE CRISIS OF ELITE LEGITIMACY

In the absence of mass party discipline, political elites failed repeatedly to resolve the contradiction posed by the constitutional phase of American democratization, namely that the Constitution furnished political elites with a new resource—voters—with which to compete, even as it opened elites to unprecedented challenges to their legitimacy from both the electorate and elite challengers. Equipped only with republican ideology and a constitution that was hostile to political parties, post-revolutionary elites plunged the nation into two successive crises of elite legitimacy: the election of 1800 in which nothing less than the threat of civil war secured the accession of Thomas Jefferson to the presidency, and a subsequent period of one-party rule beginning in 1815 that factionalized the Republic along economic and regional lines and ended in a five-way race for the White House, the abortive resolution of which left many wondering whether the election of President John Quincy Adams was in fact a fraud. Like the first, the second crisis demonstrates the absence of any reliable mechanism to resolve dissent peacefully and thereby confer legitimacy upon governing elites.

I frame my account of the crisis of 1800 by dispensing with the alternative hypothesis that the crisis was fundamentally one of partisan succession. Whereas in 1796 the presidency had passed between two leaders of the same party (Washington to Adams, both Federalists), the literature suggests that in 1800 it was passed for the first time from one party to another, that is, from Adams to the Republican, Thomas Jefferson.Footnote ²⁹ In this half of the first empirical section, I argue that the crisis at its core was neither one of succession nor one that gave birth to a mature party system in which competing elites accepted the principle of the alternation of power.

Let us first take up the question of succession. The conflict over succession merely amplified a prior unwillingness on the part of competing post-revolutionary elites to countenance dissent or permit legal opposition. Early elites had assumed that the institutional counterweights of the presidency, Senate, and House would by themselves resolve political conflict without recourse to parties, but the source of conflict lay elsewhere.Footnote ³⁰ Reflecting on Washington's troubled administration, President James Monroe hit closer to the mark:

Sovereignty, in other words, had resided in the single person of the monarch but was now divided between the people and the government, giving rise to “a greater diversity of sentiment” and “strong parties” over the appropriate division of power between the two. The ensuing struggle exposed a tension between the new and the old, for as Goodman writes, on the one hand, “the deferential style of politics lingering from the past assumed that a disinterested, virtuous, and wise few were entrusted with power,” but on the other hand, “party politics assumed that no group had either a prescriptive right to govern or an inherent monopoly of wisdom or incompetence.”Footnote ³²

Though Washington's initial instinct was to make peace among the holders of these diverse sentiments (most famously between Jefferson and Hamilton), he eventually adopted a harder line against the opposition. In his “Farewell Address,” Washington characterized obedience to the government as the duty of a free people:

Washington's wholesale rejection of “combinations and associations” seeking to “counteract” the policies of the Federalist legislative agenda gave rise to state repression under his own administration and eventually set the stage for the Alien and Sedition Laws of 1798 under John Adams. Indeed, the Federalists came to rely increasingly on state repression to manage elite and mass dissent. When farmers in western Pennsylvania and neighboring Virginia and Kentucky rebelled against an excise tax on distilled liquor, Washington raised an army roughly the size of the entire revolutionary militia to crush them, albeit without much incident.Footnote ³⁴

Paradoxically, Washington then blamed the rebellion on “democratic societies,” which were only loosely affiliated with Republicans but were framed by the Federalists as the heart and soul of the party. Alarmed at the prospect of further state repression, even Republicans denounced the societies for handing the Federalists an excuse to smear them as traitors. Jefferson was more sympathetic with the fringe element of his base and denied the existence of a bona fide insurrection, but he admitted privately to Madison that the “occasional riots” had allowed the “employing of military force for civil purposes” and “answered the favorite purposes of strengthening government.”Footnote ³⁵ Thus, although the Federalists suspected the Republicans of inciting rebellion, the situation was in fact far worse than they thought, for Republicans elites had little control over the democratic societies, Whiskey rebels, or Daniel Shays who were challenging the Federalist regime.

Nevertheless, as the Republic braced for war with France, the Federalists maneuvered to break the opposition permanently by raising a standing army and passing the Alien and Sedition Laws. Three alien laws subjected immigrants (a majority of whom were thought to be Jefferson sympathizers) to longer naturalization periods, deportation, and imprisonment, and the Sedition Law further circumscribed the use of libelous words against the government. Madison and Jefferson responded with the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, which skirted the line of secession by declaring the Alien and Sedition Laws null and void. Very soon thereafter, the federal government sent troops to disperse yet another rebellion of Pennsylvania farmers who rose up this time against the newly instituted war tax. President John Adams described this period as a “critical state of things”:

The mounting tension in the lead-up to the crisis of 1800–1801 therefore begs the question: did Jefferson's election represent a break with this trajectory? That is, did it in fact carve out a peaceful, institutional path to mass party competition? Because there was no such path for managing dissent, none, I argue, existed for routine partisan conflict. Indeed, the strategy of the Jeffersonian opposition was to leave the national theater, build their political and military strength at the state level, and threaten secession and civil war if Federalists refused to change their policies.Footnote ³⁷ That strategy finally bore fruit in Jefferson's second run for the presidency.

The outcome of the 1800 Electoral College vote was as follows: Jefferson (73), Burr (73), Adams (65), Pinckney (64), and Jay (1). In the absence of an Electoral College majority, the Constitution mandates that the House of Representatives decide which of the top two candidates should become president, in this case, Jefferson and his running mate, Aaron Burr. The crisis developed when one portion of the lame duck Federalist majority (the Jeffersonians would control the incoming Congress) threw their votes to Burr to deny Jefferson the presidency, producing a deadlock on the first thirty-five ballots.Footnote ³⁸

It was the threat of civil war that ultimately compelled the Federalists to acquiesce on the thirty-sixth ballot and elect Jefferson president. Governors McKean and Monroe mobilized the Pennsylvania and Virginia militias respectively to prevent “Federal usurpation,” and there were reports that the Maryland militia had planned to join them. Republicans talked openly of a convention to reorganize the government. The Federalists for their part proposed to send troops to put down the Virginia militia; some blustered that the central government could count on the 70,000 men of the Massachusetts militia.Footnote ³⁹

Private post-mortems of the crisis underscore the decisiveness of the military threat in bringing about a resolution. Jefferson wrote, “The certainty that legislative usurpation would be resisted by arms … brought over to us the whole body of Federalists, who being alarmed with the danger of a dissolution of the government, had been made most anxiously to wish the very administration they had opposed.” Madison likewise described the vulnerability of the Federalists not in political, but in military, terms: “It was thought not probable that the phalanx would hold out agst. the general revolt of its partizans out of doors & without any military force to abet usurpation.” On the other side of the aisle, James A. Bayard, head of the Federalist delegation from Delaware and the crucial swing vote during the crisis, wrote this of its resolution: “The step was not taken until it was admitted on all hands that we must risk the Constitution and a civil war or take Mr. Jefferson.” To suggest, then, that parties had come of age and inaugurated a period of routinized mass party competition is to ignore the very real threat of civil war, which was greater in 1801 than in any other period except 1860 to 1861.Footnote ⁴⁰

In addition, as I have hinted earlier, competing post-revolutionary elites did not consider themselves members of parties, but of temporary coalitions forged for the purpose of destroying their adversaries and wiping out parties forever. Sharp notes, “The republicans believed that they and they alone were the interpreters and translators of the wishes of a fictive sovereign people. But so did the Federalists. Under such circumstances, there could be little tolerance of opposition, for each proto-party was dedicated to the ultimate destruction of its political enemies, who were enemies of the people.” Hamilton, for instance, asserted “the duty of a wise people to discountenance and repress” what he called “the common and continual mischiefs of the Spirit of Party.” In the flush of Republican ascendancy, Jefferson likewise expressed satisfaction that the Federalists' “treasonable combinations” had at last “consigned them to the tomb of the dead.” There were thus no pretensions of institutionalizing a legal opposition because Federalists and Republicans alike viewed themselves not as parties but as “embodiments of the nation's will.” As Henry Adams once observed, “To crush democracy by force … was the ultimate resource of Hamilton. To crush that force was the determined intention of Jefferson.” This unyielding antipathy to parties eventually gave rise to a one-party system and a second crisis of elite legitimacy.Footnote ⁴¹

That mass parties had not taken hold explains why the first party system disintegrated in the aftermath of the 1801 crisis. If the political elites of the early Republic did not see themselves as members of parties, neither did they see themselves as professional politicians. Public service was not a career, but a duty and oftentimes a burden. Those like Aaron Burr who saw it the other way were suspected, as parties were, of pursuing a private agenda that was dangerously at odds with the public good. Even Hamilton, whose adversaries condemned him as the worst partisan of them all, wrote privately to his Federalist associates in favor of Jefferson's election over Burr in 1800. To Treasury Secretary Oliver Wolcott, Jr., Hamilton expressed his preference in this way: “There is no doubt but that upon every virtuous and prudent calculation Jefferson is to be preferred. He is by far not so dangerous a man and he has pretensions to character. As to Burr there is nothing in his favour … If he can, he will certainly disturb our institutions to secure to himself permanent power and with it wealth [his emphasis].” Because the elites of the first party system were not professional politicians, many either retired abruptly from public life (satisfied, for instance, that they had defeated the Federalists once and for all), or in the case of the post-1801 Federalists, defected to the Republicans. The eventual result was the fulfillment of the founders' republican ideal: a one-party system.Footnote ⁴²

However, the one-party system, grounded as it was in a suspicion of party discipline, merely permitted an explosion of factions, which further undermined elite legitimacy because no one faction recognized another's prerogative to rule. The tail end of the Madison administration (1808–1816) had prefigured the fall of the Republican consensus. Antiwar New England Federalists, now nominally Republican, gathered in Hartford to threaten disunion as the War of 1812 came to a close. Once a favorable peace was made, the Federalists were disgraced as traitors but were nonetheless permitted to remain in the Republican Party. Additionally, in chartering the Second Bank of the United States in 1816, Madison simultaneously co-opted pro-bank Federalists under the banner of “National” Republicanism and alienated the adherents of “Old” Republicanism who clung to Jefferson's longstanding opposition to a strong central government.Footnote ⁴³

If the Madison administration planted the seeds of internecine rivalry, however, then it was the Monroe administration that encouraged it to grow and entangle postwar politics. Amidst the brief consensus and prosperity of the immediate postwar era, the new president expressed gratification at “the increased harmony of opinion which pervades our Union.” He added, “Discord does not belong to our system,” and “the American people … constitute one great family with a common interest.” Accordingly, Monroe eschewed appeals to party discipline as a means of advancing his legislative agenda, preferring instead to hammer out a consensus among his cabinet secretaries before presenting his initiatives to Congress. This method was intermittently effective because each secretary commanded his own personal following in Congress, and consensus in the cabinet typically precluded dissent in the legislative branch. However, Monroe's so-called “consolidation” policy was more often ineffective for the same reason. In his orthodox rejection of political considerations, Monroe had knowingly chosen cabinet members who were presidential aspirants, chief among these being William H. Crawford (treasury), John Quincy Adams (state), and John C. Calhoun (war). Each, in turn, used their position to cultivate surrogates in Congress, undermine the stature of the others, and contradict the president in order to appear independent and therefore presidential. Adams described the factional rancor in this way, with special attention to Crawford, who was rapidly emerging as his arch-nemesis:

The effect of Monroe's consolidation policy, then, was partly to replace the erstwhile Federalist-Republican divide with personal factionalism. The new terrain was all the more obvious when irreconcilable differences made consensus impossible because the president in these cases often advanced a bill without consulting the cabinet, whereupon the secretaries and their respective factions felt at liberty to attack the administration.Footnote ⁴⁴

The problem of elite legitimacy was further complicated by the doctrine of congressional superiority, a longstanding Republican orthodoxy that confined executive power to foreign affairs and assumed the primacy of the legislative branch in all other matters. The doctrine led legislators to gratuitously oppose the administration so as not to be accused of being stooges of the executive branch—this, the worst possible insult in congressional politics. John Forsyth, chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs and ardent supporter of the administration, thus sponsored a resolution to seize Florida against the president's wishes to refute Henry Clay's charge that he was a White House lackey. Indeed, Monroe could prevent the consideration of a bill merely by expressing an opinion on the matter. Accordingly, John Quincy Adams observed “a perpetual struggle in both Houses of Congress to control the Executive—to make it dependent upon and subservient to them.”Footnote ⁴⁵

Finally, elite legitimacy was undermined still further by the debate over states' rights. Whereas Madison, Monroe and the National Republicans believed that the federal and state governments each had ultimate authority within their own spheres of influence (the doctrine of dual sovereignty), the Old Republicans articulated a confederated theory of sovereignty in which the federal government was merely the creature of the several states. Thus, when the nationalist Marshall Court denied the right of the states to tax a local branch of the Bank of the United States in McCullough v. Maryland, the Old Republicans revolted. Recalling the crisis of 1801, Virginia Judge Spencer Roane threatened armed defiance, and the Baltimore editor, Hezekiah Niles, urged all people who hated monopoly and privilege to rise up and “purge our political temple of the money-changers.” The Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois legislatures acted in kind and demanded a constitutional amendment forbidding Congress to incorporate a bank.Footnote ⁴⁶

The factious effects of these practices—the consolidation policy, the doctrine of congressional superiority, and the clash over states' rights—would eventually be blunted by mass party discipline because the structure and discourse of party command would stretch from the White House, through Congress, across regions and states to the rank-and-file and back again. However, in the absence of mass party discipline, these practices precipitated another crisis of elite legitimacy.

If National Republicanism remained a formidable political force through the Madison administration and Monroe's first term, it became utterly defunct with the Panic of 1819, the first peacetime depression in U.S. history. Though the causes of the panic were primarily geopolitical in nature as former stockpiles of manufactures and raw materials overwhelmed American producers after the War of 1812 and the Napoleonic Wars, the enemies of the administration could justifiably point their fingers at the mismanagement of the Bank of the United States (BUS). Through pure negligence the BUS had allowed its local branches to extend credit to land speculators and farmers beyond the amount of gold specie they had to back those loans, creating a bubble in property values that burst when the price of cotton fell to reflect the postwar glut. The resulting depression unleashed a torrent of divisions to add to the already factious soup of presidential aspirants and Old and National Republicans: hard versus soft money, pro- and anti-bank, advocates and opponents of economic retrenchment, tariff and anti-tariff. The absence of party command deepened the financial debacle. The president had attempted to mitigate the crushing influx of cheap imports by presenting a tariff bill to Congress, but because the cabinet was divided on the issue, Monroe did not consult them, releasing his secretaries and other adversaries to finally scuttle the bill in the Senate. Henry Clay, then Speaker of the House, mocked Monroe's consolidation policy as he clamored for economic retrenchment:

The absence of mass party discipline likewise permitted sectional conflicts to emerge as the Congress considered the admission of Missouri to the Union. Three parties were active in the dispute, the Federalist, National Republican, and Old Republican, and these in turn split into geographical factions that either opposed or advocated the right of the central government to “restrict” slavery in the territories. Thus, otherwise nationalist elites like John C. Calhoun and William Lowndes of South Carolina became anti-restrictionists, and longstanding inter-regional alliances like that of Pennsylvania and Virginia fractured.Footnote ⁴⁸

Though the Missouri Compromise was eventually reached, it was not party discipline that made it possible but rather the same kinds of threats that resolved the crisis of 1801. In private correspondence, Henry Clay wrote, “The words, civil war, and disunion, are uttered almost without emotion, and a Senator of the United States, in this place, as I understand, said the other day that he would rather have both than fail in the resolution.” Echoing the sentiments in the Senate, Judge Spencer Roane warned the president that he would rather take the South out of the Union than be “damned up in a land of slaves by the Eastern people.” The rationale that congressmen gave for switching their votes to compromise suggests that the prospect of civil war and disunion was once again the decisive factor leading to the end of a national crisis. Representative Charles Kinsey of New Jersey said to his colleagues, “Should we persist to reject the olive branch now offered, the most disastrous consequences will follow.” Jonathan Mason of Massachusetts “was also distraught at ‘one half of the Union in complete array against the other, by a geographical line.’” Mark Hill, Mason's colleague in the Massachusetts delegation, said he “would do whatever he could to restrict slavery, but ‘without setting the United States on fire.’” Congressman Bernard Smith explained, “I did what I considered necessary to prevent a dissolution of the Union.”Footnote ⁴⁹

In his diary, John Quincy Adams summed up the so-called Era of Good Feelings in this way:

It should be no surprise, then, that the election of 1824, in which Adams himself was a player, produced no fewer than five major candidates for the presidency, each representing personal and regional factions too weak to carry a majority of Electoral College votes. Though Calhoun eventually dropped out of the race, the remaining four-way split threw the election to the House of Representatives for the first time since 1801.Footnote ⁵¹ Such was the normal and expected state of things that most partisans, including Martin Van Buren, acquiesced to the will of Congress despite murmurings that President-Elect Adams had promised Henry Clay the position of secretary of state in exchange for his support in the House, the so-called “corrupt bargain.” Andrew Jackson, the front-runner in the late election before its congressional phase when Adams prevailed, was decidedly not acquiescent however, and it was around this sentiment that Van Buren and his cohort coalesced to form a permanent Jeffersonian party.

VICARIOUS REVOLUTIONARIES: MARTIAL DISCOURSE AND THE STABILIZATION OF MASS PARTY POLITICS

The first party system, then, was not a mass party system. Instead of mass mobilization, early national elites depended on violence, threats of civil war and disunion, and the federal courts to decide the political questions of the day. All these factors made elites vulnerable to successive crises of legitimacy. At that moment, however, the political operatives of the second party system recuperated and reconstituted the quasi-military discursive practices of their predecessors to craft an idiom for mass politics that turned on the binary struggle between the putative descendants of the British aristocracy on the one hand and the undivided ranks of second generation patriots on the other. Thus, together with the theoretical strands of party discourse, martial rhetoric helped to stabilize the party system by providing an acceptable framework through which a) antiparty national elites could embrace their turn to party organization, b) local elites could find their identity in the emerging mass party apparatus, and c) voters could participate actively in elective politics. Martial discourse, in other words, aided in recruiting these different sets of political actors to the practice of mass partisanship and thereby contributed to the stabilization of partisan conflict.

Social Change on the Ground

Martial discourse also allowed voters a way to participate in elective politics as the foot soldiers of their respective parties. In this, electoral parades provide a crucial data source. We begin with examples from outside Illinois and Alabama to give a sense of the nationwide acceptance of martial practices among voters. In Tennessee, grassroots Whig activists, called “Bell Guards,” were said to number around 10,000, and the voters and precinct captains of both parties were reportedly “organized into uniform companies and regularly drilled.” According to the same report, 17,000 people joined a recent procession, while an estimated 60,000 to 70,000 looked on. (Chicago American, 2 September 1844) Similarly, in the District of Columbia, the Independent Monitor reported, “Young Men formed a procession, and with their banners and emblems raised on high, marched in fine order through the principal avenues of the city.” (Independent Monitor, 20 March 20 1840) Martial discourse therefore manifested itself on the ground in the literal regimentation of the mass electorate. Voters enthusiastically embraced the military aesthetic, plugging themselves into the political process as the infantrymen of the respective parties. Figure 1 is an artist's depiction of a Whig procession during the 1840 presidential campaign. The piece reveals all the trappings of an antebellum professional army, including flags, weapons, the fife and drum, horses, and uniformed horsemen and marchers, offering voters any number of “positions” to take up in the course of just one political event. Note, too, that party headquarters were located not at a church, city hall, or other civilian building, but at “Northern Military Hall” where the candidate, General William Henry Harrison, is pictured on his horse as the leader of the army and party and the people's standard-bearer.Footnote ⁵⁸

Fig. 1.

Whig Procession, 1840.

Tuscaloosa had its share of martial processions. In the editorial below, the Whig Monitor chides the Democrats for complaining about a local parade for Harrison during the 1840 presidential campaign. The parade of the Whig ranks is clearly martial in character, as this passage suggests:

How the Democrats of Tuscaloosa wail and deplore the Whig spirit which could so far leap over all decency in the late procession in this city, as to induce one of the Marshals of the day to carry holsters at his saddle bow. Come, ye civil and peace-loving Democrats, do not be frightened at this display of the trappings of war … The “holsters” which you have thought proper to embody in your address, were only part of a saddle covering intended for military occasions, and had no pistols in them—not even were they surcharged. (Independent Monitor, 12 June 1840)

The significance of this editorial is two-fold. First, if by 1840 it had become a common practice for the rank-and-file to “drill” during the course of the campaign season, then the Whig ranks had become so enthusiastic in their embrace of the martial form that they were now displaying “holsters” and other “trappings of war,” much to the dismay of even the Democrats. Second, that this argument over the proper conduct of political parades took place in Tuscaloosa, Alabama suggests, with the foregoing example from Tennessee, that the martial mobilization of voters had now reached the capital cities of the western states and thus were likely in operation even in the capillary locales of the body politic.

What seemed to animate this enthusiasm for the martial form was a sense of kinship with the original revolutionary patriots. When the Democrats celebrated their victory in the 1844 presidential election at a martial procession in Washington, DC, the Illinois rank-and-file delegation, which was said to include a contingent of “day laborers,” carried a banner that was described as follows:Footnote ⁵⁹

Col. Ezekiel Polk, mounted as an officer in the revolutionary army. Motto: “He dispersed the tories in the snow campaign of '76; his grandson will scatter them in the fall campaign of '44.” Reverse motto: “Infamy to the catiff slanderers of the departed patriot hero of the revolution. (Chicago Democrat, 25 December 1844)

The banner tells of President-elect Polk's grandfather, a veteran of the revolutionary war who was allegedly slandered in the course of the election campaign. The text is a classic martial reference to the American Revolution, in which a direct line is drawn from the revolutionary generation's military conquests to the second generation's conquests on the field of political battle. More importantly for our purposes, the rank-and-file appear to have internalized the binary logic of martial discourse. They view themselves as soldiers in this new political army, commanded by Ezekiel Polk's grandson, and view their counterparts in the Whig Party as the descendants of the “tories in the snow campaign of '76.”

Martial discourse therefore provided voters with a language for participating in, and celebrating, their activism on behalf of the political parties. A rank-and-file Chicago Democrat named John Moore, for instance, wrote this letter to the editor, describing his plans for handling the Whigs in the upcoming presidential election: “The whigs of this district are already beginning to rally their scattered forces for the coming contest; but we will again meet the enemy and make them ours.” (Chicago Democrat, 20 March 1844) The author proudly promises to deliver the votes of his district to the Democratic Party, and does so by using the rhetorical tools of local and national party elites. In a single sentence, he, too, manages to repeat the binary logic of martial discourse. Moore conveys a kind of wartime urgency by announcing that the Whigs have begun to “rally their scattered forces” and then states his and his fellow Democrats' determination to “meet the enemy and make them ours.”

The sentiments of Tuscaloosa Democrats were no different at this time. At a local meeting, Democratic voters vowed to maintain martial unity for the remainder of the 1844 presidential campaign: “Resolved, … we pledge ourselves to enter into the coming canvass as a band of brothers, bound together by the ties of principle, and animated by the confident hope of obtaining glorious victory.” (Democratic Gazette, 13 June 1844) In this passage, the Democratic ranks articulate their mission in the coming months, not in organizational, but in martial terms. They pledge to be soldiers like the original “band of brothers,” a reference to the martial unity of the revolutionary patriots, and to march toward “glorious victory,” a common rhetorical phrase for equating electoral success with military renown.

The capacity of the martial form to provide voters with a way to participate actively in elective politics contributed to party stabilization on the ground, a finding that is reflected in the rise in voter turnout for the major party candidates after 1824 when martial rhetoric and the theoretical strands of partyist discourse became entrenched. Table 1 compares voter turnout for the 1824 and 1844 presidential elections in Alabama, Illinois, and Tuscaloosa's and Chicago's home counties. Recall that the 1824 contest was notable for its lack of party discipline, with the five personal factions of the Monroe years each putting up their own candidate. In 1844, turnout in Alabama rose 26 points or by about half the 1824 figure. In Tuscaloosa, turnout increased by 80 percent. The effect of mass party discipline was even more marked in Illinois, where turnout tripled statewide and went from virtually nil to an astonishing 92 percent in Chicago's home county.Footnote ⁶⁰

Table 1.

State and County Level Estimated Voter Turnout for the 1824 and 1844 Presidential Elections