That+Devil,+Faction



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On April 30, 1789 on an open veranda near Wall Street in New York, George Washington took the oath of office in front of a cheering crowd of well-wishers. After so much polemic and discord during the "Critical Period" between the end of the Revolutionary War and the passage of the Constitution, the inauguration of George Washington was a moment of unadulterated triumph for the United States of America. April 30, 1789 was a good day for patriots -- everywhere and at all times.

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This lecture explains the divergent thinking that led to the partisan political agitation in President Washington's Administration. We examine how Classical Republicanism gave way to irreconcilable political differences between Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton and Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, and how these differences began to coalesce into the first two party political system in America: the "Federalists" and the "Democratic-Republicans."

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This lecture examines the crucial ideological divide between Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson: their differing visions of national life, economic priorities, views on the rich and the poor, and foreign policy. We look beyond party positions and the 1790s to antithetical views of mankind, the role of government, and the proper vision of what America should be.

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In trying to engage in successful "nation-building," the early United States had two leaders who had starkly different views of what the nation should be. With such fundamental disagreements over so many things, is it a surprise Hamilton and Jefferson almost came to see each other as "evil"?

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Under the ideas of "classical Republicanism" all citizens -- especially high-ranking government officials -- were supposed to subordinate their own private interests to the greater good. Perhaps this is naive. Perhaps it is inevitable that ...disagreements over such foundational beliefs as what is government good for, what vision do we have for the nation, and what is the appropriate use of power would all come to signal open breaches between citizens and the formation of "factions" and then permanent political parties. President Washington's frustration at the squabbling must have been intense.

media type="custom" key="11175384" There comes a time in political intercourse when it gets personal -- when you start to hate the other person, as well as his/her ideas. At a later date Jefferson said, "Every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle. We have called by different names brethren of the same principle. We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists." Jefferson was saying that in 1801 after a victory to make Hamilton and his followers feel better. Jefferson wasn't saying that in the early to mid-1790s. Jefferson was fairly hissing in rage when he was in Washington's cabinet.

media type="custom" key="11175392" One of my college professors claimed Jefferson was an "artist" who had his ideal vision of the young American Republic, and then he spent his entire life trying to make real this vision of freedom, small government, and independent yeoman farmers living in peace with each other. His vision did not easily gibe with Hamilton's vision.

media type="custom" key="11175412" At the very beginnings of the era of finance capital and industrialization, Hamilton saw a future of banks serving as engines of economic growth to serve a dynamic and growing nation that would grow to greatness on the world stage. He claimed agriculture was a failure for the future. How has history judged Hamilton's calculation?

media type="custom" key="11175428" Oh, how some things change so little over time in America! The "talking heads" and "sound bites" of our polarized 24-hour cultural and political news cycle are not so different from the mud-slinging, name-calling, and hate-mongering of the late 18th century. One thing seems clear: the political life of the United States has always been raucous and rough-and-tumble, not for the thin-skinned.

media type="custom" key="11175434" "That Devil, Faction" is the name Mr. Geib has chosen to give to the period in our class spanning from 1789 to 1800. It should surprise no one why he made this choice.

media type="custom" key="11175442" This exchange of political views explains well how the Founding Fathers sought so avidly to create a governmental structure that would allow a republic where the majority could govern while protecting the rights of the minority. Checks and balances within the federal government? Checks between the federal and state governments? It would be a nifty trick to allow the rule of the majority while preserving the rights of the minority...

media type="custom" key="11175462" As President Washington formed his cabinet with the new Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson recently returned from France, there begins to arise tensions as the Secretary of the Treasury explains his vision for the country -- and Jefferson begins to realize how much he dislikes that vision.

media type="custom" key="11175476" Much to his later chagrin, George Washington saw the Franco-American Treaty of Friendship of 1778 come later to bite him in the butt: the French called it in and asked for American aid after the European monarchies attacked the French Revolution in its cradle. What to do? Stand by a fellow republic and fight against the common foe of monarchy? "The cause of France is the cause of America." Washington thought this unwise and made it policy. Genet took strong exception, but nobody goes head-to-head against Washington and wins in 1793...

media type="custom" key="11175486" There was a price to be paid by President Washington in delivering up to the American people a treaty he did not like but considered to be the best of bad choices for the country: Jay's Treaty, which promised peace with Great Britain but appeared to give in cowardly to what many Americans considered to be a deadly and hated enemy. Many Americans hated the treaty which passed after Vice President Adams broke a tie in the Senate. "I am weary of the task - most weary," President Washington is here claimed to have said.

media type="custom" key="11175540" A full generation older and a father figure to both, Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson could not put their own wishes aside to sacrifice and reach consensus for the sake of the common good -- the "classical republicanism" that Washington sought in his cabinet. His famous self-control might slip here and there, and Washington was to grow very weary of the presidency -- and even to look forward to the end of his second term.

media type="custom" key="11175544" As the elected President of the United States, John Adams was the putative leader of the Federalist Party in 1797. But many (most?) of his cabinet members (retained from George Washington's cabinet) actually held loyalty to Alexander Hamilton, the REAL leader of the Federalist Party. Hamilton and Adams hated each other intensely, a BAD sign for the Federalist Party. And Hamilton wanted war with France badly. Hamilton saw himself winning more martial glory at the head of American armies against France. Adams was of a different mind with regard to France, as history has recorded and we have seen in our class.

media type="custom" key="11175552" The two former friends square off in this encounter over whether there is wisdom and need for such drastic measures as the Alien and Sedition Acts passed by Congress and signed by the President into law in 1798. Is the measure plainly "unconstitutional" and a threat to the rights of the people fought for in the Revolution, and hence needs to be countered by "the people" in their States through something like is seen in the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions? Or did "the people" speak in favor of these wartime measures as seen by their vote through representatives in Congress? An abuse of power and oppressive of natural rights? A wartime measure needed to ensure unity and discourage sedition? By the late 1790s even old friends like Adams and Jefferson were becoming political and personal enemies because of "that devil, faction" -- not a happy time for the United States.

media type="custom" key="11175576" The removal of the Federalist Party from majorities in Congress and from the White House in the elections of 1800 signaled the end of one regime and era in American history and the beginning of another: that of "Jeffersonian Democracy." It was supposed to signal the arrival of "the people" into power -- the recapture of government from the "reign of witches" which was the Federalist elite in the previous 1790s. For sure it was a switch in tone and tenor, but how "revolutionary" was the "Revolution of 1800" is open to debate. But Thomas Jefferson endeavored to put his stamp on American government and engineer his artistic vision of a society of small farmers moving away from the predations of Europe and the past and toward "America," the West, and a happier future. Enigmatic and self-contradictory, Thomas Jefferson is in so many ways a mirror in which America can hold up and look at itself, both in the good and the bad.

media type="custom" key="11175598" In his self-described “Revolution of 1800” Thomas Jefferson and his Democratic Republican Party swept the Federalists from power and captured the presidency and held a strong majority in Congress. According to Jefferson, the “people” had spoken and captured power back from the “few” who were ready to sell out the country to British banking interests and monarchy. The Federalists were never able to regain their footing when it came to winning elections against the Jeffersonians. But it didn’t matter: they had Chief Justice John Marshall and other Federalist judges in the judiciary who were appointed for life. Jefferson was forced to confront Marshall and his “twistifications” of the law into shapes that thwarted Jefferson and the mandate he saw the American people giving him in election after election. Jefferson saw the “dread clutch” of the judiciary in almost apocalyptic forms as a dangerous form of undemocratic elitism, but Marshall might lecture him about majority rule and minority rights – the checks and balances that were designed to divide government to prevent it from becoming tyrannical. “What the people choose to do, they have a right to do,” Jefferson might claim. Marshall might (disingenuously?) reply the following: “We are a nation of laws, not men and their mobs.”

media type="custom" key="11175608" Washington and Jefferson were roughly contemporaneous with the music of Mozart and the "classical era." Gone are the olden days of "baroque" counterpoint and demanding polyphony -- music for experts, specialists, and "elites." Now we have a more "natural" music that a middle-class burgher might enjoy after a long day of work. There is melody and pleasure and enjoyment. Like Monticello itself, the "classical" style hides any complexity. The music wants to appear as "natural" as the assertion that all men are supposedly born with the same "natural" rights.

media type="custom" key="11175616" As Halloween rapidly approaches, Mr. Geib once more asks himself why there is so much attention given to trashy and cheesy horror – to caricatures that embody stereotypes and clichés while boasting so little real artistry. There exists, after all, a long tradition of very good horror stories. Why not go to them? For example, the final scene of Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” where the famous lover but unrepentant sinner Don Juan is pulled down into hell by a man he himself murdered – watch him there at the end, screaming as demons pull him down to his fiery punishment forever. Mr. Geib always watches to see how the conductor choreographs the human screams at the end… now this is good horror! Happy Halloween everyone… and get ready to read some Edgar Allen Poe when we return from vacation.

media type="custom" key="11175622" One more “dark” piece of art as we prepare to celebrate Halloween and study Edgar Allen Poe, that master stylist. Here we shall see, from Virgil’s “Aeneid” the tragic end of Dido, Queen of Carthage in the music from Henry Purcell’s opera of the same name. After betting everything to take the exile Aeneas as lover, Queen Dido is forsaken and abandoned. Heaping all his possessions onto one big funeral pyre, she stabs herself and burns to death. As with Don Giovanni, I think we can safely say the following: NOW THAT IS AN EXIT! The sensitive listener will not fail to hear the descending tone of the music – the tomb awaiting, death nearing, the curtain closing -- just as she will have not failed to hear the swirling panic of Giovanni’s building defiance and final descent. Remember: sensitivity to tone and mood! (Remember also our earlier lesson on tone and mood: van Gogh’s impending suicide and his “Wheat Field with Crows.”) “How does the author use tone to convey his message?”

media type="custom" key="11175626" The main theme of our "That Devil, Faction" unit deals with the disunion and bitterness that grew from an idea of disinterested "classical republicanism" to the development of a two-party political system -- and the bitter enmity that grew larger in the 1790s towards the climactic election of 1800, and the first removal from office in American history of one party by another. Check out this video clip from the November 2, 2010 midterm elections and reflect on how little changes sometimes in history.

media type="custom" key="11175634" The War of 1812 was a messy, complicated phenomenon – a really muddled affair in a variety of ways. The previous three presidents (Washington, Adams, and Jefferson) had judged the country too new and fragile to endure something as wrenching as a war with a European superpower. James Madison, in contrast, gave in to demands from “war hawks” and asked Congress to perform a first: declare war officially in Congress, as the Constitution stipulated. But sectionalism was to raise its ugly head in the federalist discontent in New England and the subsequent Hartford Convention, and this sectionalism threatened the entire American experiment. Despite the messiness and disgraces visited by the War of 1812, the conflict triggered an explosion of patriotism, the beginning of the “era of good feelings,” and a new respect on the world stage for the independence and legitimacy of the United States of America.

media type="custom" key="11175640" As explained multiple times in class, the first form of American literature was the sermon. The second was the political tract. We didn’t have any really “American” poetry or imaginative literature until the 1840s and 50s. Earlier Americans like Washington Irving wrote still in the European idiom. American artistic culture was so immature, in fact, that we had to steal our future national anthem from a traditional English drinking song, as the music put to Francis Scott Key’s famous poem penned outside Fort McHenry near Baltimore during the War of 1812.

media type="custom" key="11175650" After an often dismal performance in the War of 1812, the United States ironically exited the war with a rosy hue of patriotism and “good feeling.” Maybe a young country like the United States finds encouragement from any victory at all against the most powerful military in the world, and so merely holding the fort guarding Baltimore becomes a major symbol of American power and patriotism. At least the British didn’t burn Baltimore to the ground like they did Washington D.C., right?