When the news reached the American shores, Federalists decried the purchase for three primary reasons. Holding true to the Federalist tradition of Anglophilia, they opposed the purchase in favor of close relations with Britain over Napoleon. They feared secondly for the security of the political power of New England bankers and merchants along the Atlantic seaboard states, now in opposition to the Republican-inclined Western farmers. The Federalists’ other principal grievance ran contrary to their traditionally loose constructionist proclivities – by which the Constitution was deemed merely a broad framework implicitly holding powers for the central government – that the purchase was unconstitutional, as the Constitution does not specify how the United States is to procure foreign territory. Here the Federalists exhibited pragmatism in their crossing of ideological party lines for their practical endeavor to preserve their power, a course of action later seen in the Hartford Convention of 1814.
Jefferson initially held misgivings about the unconstitutionality of the purchase. Encouraged by Thomas Paine to adhere to his strict constructionist views, Jefferson drafted two amendments to the Constitution to cover the issue of acquiring new territory. Under the advice of his constituents, however, Jefferson never submitted the amendments to Congress and entirely avoided the issue of constitutionality in his address to the Eighth Congress. With the Republicans outnumbering the Federalists in both houses of Congress, the purchase was ratified. Jefferson had compromised the strict constructionism, which had been his political aegis in the fervently polarized Federalist Era of the 1790’s, for the practical outcome of territorial expansion and increased support in the West. Regarding the perspective Jefferson developed towards the Constitution, Richard Hofstadter asserts in The American Political Tradition: “[Jefferson’s] differences with the political theory of the Constitution-makers were differences of emphasis, not of structure” (37).
In 1806, furthermore, Jefferson and Madison signed a decree authorizing the exceedingly wealthy Joseph deVille Degoutin Bellechasse, Jean Baptiste Macarty, Jean Noel Destrehan, and Pierre Sauve to organize a provisional government for Louisiana. In a private correspondence to De Witt Clinton, Jefferson said of the new territory: “Our new fellow citizens are as yet as incapable of self-government as children.” Again his treatment of the Louisiana Territory defied his well-established commitment to limiting executive power for a more pragmatic plan of action.
Keeping his word for a government “rigorously frugal and simple,” Jefferson cut government expenditures on the army and navy upon his assumption of the presidency. His reduction of expenditures and national debt allowed him in 1802 to eliminate the excise taxes, including the controversial whiskey tax. He attempted, to little avail, to divest of power the sixteen Federalist “midnight judges” appointed after the Judiciary Act by the preceding President John Adams. Under Jefferson’s presidency, the First Bank of the United States and the Alien, Sedition, and Naturalization Acts expired.
In a 1792 letter to George Washington, Jefferson ventured that Hamilton’s financial system “flowed from principles adverse to liberty, and was calculated to undermine and demolish the Republic.” Jefferson’s practical aims as a president, nevertheless, consistently derailed his own emotionally charged anti-Federalist invective, for the aforementioned accomplishments of his first term proved his only appreciable changes to the Hamiltonian system. “He believed in those [liberating] ideas… but he was not in the habit of breaking lances trying to fulfill them” (Hofstadter 33). Undermining his reputation for advancing local banks, a loose financial system, and individual states’ payment of Revolutionary War debt, Jefferson chose to avoid intervening in the Federalist programs for funding national debt at par and federally assuming the state debts.
As local banks chartered by Republican state legislatures aligned their financial support with Republican Party, “soon the Republican machines began flirting with the financial interests they had sworn to oppose” (Hofstadter 47). In defense of this burgeoning fiscal elite of Republicans, Jefferson declared to Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin: “A merchant is naturally a Republican, and can be otherwise only from a vitiated state of things” (Hofstadter 47). Jefferson, furthermore, did not temper public land speculation or take steps in reforming the limitations on suffrage. Such a democratization of suffrage was clearly not one of Jefferson’s priorities, as revealed in a July, 1808, letter from Jefferson to Meriwether Lewis: “It is very possible that the suffrage of the nation may be undivided. But with this question it is my duty not to intermeddle.”
During the presidency of Jefferson’s Republican successor James Madison, the financial demands of the War of 1812 waged against Britain required that the Madison administration seek a new source for revenue. The administration’s decision to print interest-bearing treasury notes and borrow paper money from banks and individuals created an extraordinary inflation of credit and money. In reaction to the financial difficulties caused by the collection of federal revenue in devalued bank paper and the irregularity of exchange rates across the country, Madison proposed the Second Bank of the United States (B.U.S.) to bolster the credit of the government and unify the national currency. In 1816 the new B.U.S. received its charter, and by the end of 1817 the bank authorized nineteen branch offices, which accumulated large balances overpowering state banks. During the Federalist Era, Jefferson’s initial outcries against Hamilton’s first B.U.S. shaped the first political distinctions of the Republicans. In his exchange of the traditional Republican ideology that favored local banks for the most practical solution as dictated by circumstance, Madison established his role in the Virginia Dynasty as a pragmatist.
Jefferson’s militaristic treatment of the Barbary pirates reveals in his thinking a unique stripe of principled pragmatism. At the end of the American Revolution, the United States was guaranteed neither Britain’s nor France’s naval protection in the Mediterranean, whose North African Barbary pirate kleptocracies ransomed American merchants and plundered their goods. In 1784, Congress apportioned money for the payment of tribute to the Barbary pirates. By the next year, the dey of Algiers held hostage the crew of two American ships and demanded a ransom of $60,000. Thomas Jefferson, then the ambassador to France, argued out of principle against paying the ransom. The United States paid the ransom nonetheless and proceeded to pay to Algiers up to $1 million per year for the next fifteen years.
Upon his inauguration, however, Jefferson refused to pay the $225,000 the pasha of Tripoli had demanded. On May 10, 1801, the pasha consequently declared war on the U.S., with the support of Algiers, Morocco, and Tunis soon following. Sidestepping Constitutional bounds, Jefferson responded by sending a group of frigates to Tripoli before acquiring the consent of Congress. After the fleet of Tripoli was able to seize the USS Philadelphia intact, Jefferson sent Lieutenant Stephen Decatur, Jr., on the Intrepid to invade the harbor of Tripoli and burn the Philadelphia. The Americans’ resumption of the slogan “Millions for defense, but not one cent for tribute,” first declared by Charles C. Pinckney during the XYZ Affair, illustrates the extremism of Jefferson’s motives. The First Barbary War saw a rare preservation of one facet of Jefferson’s ideology. Jefferson was, however, faced with the necessity to compromise his strict constructionism to maintain this principle.
Due to its effects of crippling the economy of the Northeastern trading cities, Jefferson’s “one doctrinaire and impractical measure” (Hofstadter 51), the Embargo Act of 1807, planted in the New England Federalists a current of acrimony exacerbated by the statistical disadvantage at which Western immigration placed them. Adhering to their pro-British ideological tradition, the New England Federalists bitterly protested the War of 1812. Especially when threatened with invasion in 1814, the New England states resisted the enlistment of their militia into the national service. In October, 1814, Massachusetts legislature called for a clandestine conference of the New England states in Hartford, Connecticut. Moderate Federalists discussed the proposal to secede from the Union, markedly belying the previous Federalist opposition to such radical claims of state rights.
The Hartford Convention’s delegates asserted the Eighth and Ninth Amendments to support the previously Jeffersonian compact theory of government, by which the individual states were the final arbiters of the constitutionality of federal laws. The delegates, furthermore, proposed amendments to: apportion representatives and direct taxes to the states based on their proportionality to their populations of freemen; forbid naturalized citizens from holding Congressional membership or civil office; require a two-thirds Congressional approval for all foreign trade, declarations of war, and state admissions; divest Congress of its power to lay embargoes for more than sixty days; and limit all succeeding presidents to one term. The Federalists had embraced the Old Republican view of furthering states’ rights as a final recourse to salvage their waning influence. By the time the Hartford delegation arrived in Washington with its proposals, the Treaty of Ghent had already terminated the War of 1812. As was manifest in the following elections, the humiliation of the Hartford Federalists proved to be the terminus of the Federalists as a political entity. In 1816, James Monroe took office with 183 electoral votes, the Federalist Rufus King losing with a scant thirty-four votes. In 1820, Monroe was reelected with 231 votes over John Quincy Adams – who entirely dropped the political appellative Federalist and ran as an Independent Republican -- holding merely one vote.
Richard Hofstadter asserts, “When [Jefferson] entered the White House it was after satisfying the Federalists that he and they had come to some kind of understanding” (44). After winning the support of moderate Federalists by means of his pliant ideology, however, Jefferson had not merely brought about an understanding; he had set the precedent for their political eradication. Jefferson became a loose constructionist in order to rationalize the Louisiana Purchase and his unapproved military measures in the First Barbary War, and Madison had completely echoed the structure of Hamilton’s financial system in his creation of the Second Bank of the United States. With their political identity thereby obviated, the Federalists were forced into assuming the stances of strict constructionism, as in their reaction to the Louisiana Purchase, and the compact theory of government, as in the Hartford Convention. As Josiah Quincy declared, the Republicans had “out-Federalized Federalism” (Hofstadter 54). The Virginia Dynasty’s defeat of the Federalists not only proves that “power promotes pragmatism”; it reciprocally proves that pragmatism promotes power.
Works Cited
Hofstadter, Richard. The American Political Tradition. NY: Random House, Inc., 1973.