Federalist Party

The Federalist Party was a United States political party in the period 1793 to 1816, with remnants lasting until 1820. Along with the opposition Republican Party, it was the foundation of the First Party System. It was formed by Alexander Hamilton, who, in about 1792, built a network of supporters in the United States Congress and in the states to support his fiscal policies; the party advocated a strong national government, a loose construction of the United States Constitution based on the "Elastic Clause". It believed in rule by the elite, and thus favored merchants, bankers, and industrialists. Its most powerful leader was Hamilton and its hero was George Washington. In the long run, one of the party's most influential members was Chief Justice John Marshall, who made the Supreme Court important.

Although George Washington never officially joined the party, he supported most of its programs and became its hero and symbol.

1792

The elections of 1792 were the first ones to be contested on anything resembling a partisan basis. In most states the congressional elections were recognized, as Jefferson strategist John Beckley put it, as a "struggle between the Treasury department and the republican interest." In New York, the race for governor was organized along these lines. The candidates were John Jay, a Hamiltonian, and incumbent George Clinton, who was allied with Jefferson... ^[1]

The rise of the Federalist Party

With the start of the new government under the Constitution, President George Washington appointed his former chief of staff, Alexander Hamilton, to the office of Secretary of the Treasury. Hamilton wanted a strong national government and decided that required financial credibility and a national network of supporters. Hamilton proposed the ambitious Hamiltonian economic program that involved assumption of the state debts, creating a national debt and the means to pay it off, and setting up a national bank. Hamilton organized alliances, and succeeded in getting Congress to pass these measures. James Madison, Hamilton's ally in the fight to ratify the United States Constitution, dropped his nationalism in response to demands in his Virginia district and joined with Jefferson in opposing Hamilton's program.

By 1790 Hamilton started building a nationwide coalition, Realizing the need for vocal political support in the states, he formed connections with like-minded nationalists, local factions, and used his network of Treasury agents to link together friends of the government, especially merchants and bankers, in the new nation's dozen small cities. His attempts to manage politics in the national capital to get his plans through Congress, then, "brought strong responses across the country. In the process, what began as a capital faction soon assumed status as a national faction and then, finally, as the new Federalist parry."^[2]

By 1792 or 1793 newspapers started calling Hamilton supporters "Federalists" and the opponents "Republicans". Religious and educational leaders, hostile to the French Revolution, joined the Federalist coalition, especially in New England.

The state networks of both parties began to operate in 1794 or 1795, thus firmly establishing what has later has come to be called the First Party System in all the states. Patronage now became a factor. The winner-take-all election system opened a wide gap between winners, who got all the patronage, and losers who got none. Hamilton had over 2000 Treasury jobs to dispense, while Jefferson had one part-time job in the State Department, which he gave to journalist Philip Freneau. In New York, however, George Clinton won the election for Governor and used the vast state patronage fund to help the Republican cause.

Washington tried and failed to moderate the feud between his two top cabinet members. He was re-elected without opposition in 1792. The Republicans nominated New York's Governor Clinton to replace Federalist John Adams as vice president, but Adams won. The balance of power in Congress was close, with some members still undecided between the parties. In early 1793, Jefferson secretly prepared resolutions for William Branch Giles, Congressman from Virginia, to introduce that would have repudiated the Treasury Secretary and destroyed the Washington Administration. Hamilton brilliantly defended his administration of the nation's complicated financial affairs, which none of his critics could decipher until the arrival in Congress of the brilliant Albert Gallatin in 1793.

Federalists immediately claimed the Hamiltonian program had restored national prosperity, as shown in one 1792 anonymous newspaper essay:^[3]

"To what physical, moral, or political energy shall this flourishing state of things be ascribed? There is but one answer to these inquiries: Public credit is restored and ESTABLISHED. The general government, by uniting and calling into action the pecuniary resources of the states, has created a new capital stock of several millions of dollars, which, with that before existing, is directed into every branch of business, giving life and vigor to industry in its infinitely diversified operations. The enemies of the general government, the funding act and the National Bank may bellow tyranny, aristocracy, and speculators through the Union and repeat the clamorous din as long as they please; but the actual state of agriculture and commerce, the peace, the contentment and satisfaction of the great mass of people, give the lie to their assertions."

Party Strength in Congress

Historians have used statistical techniques to estimate the party breakdown in Congress. Many Congressmen were hard to classify in the first few years, but after 1796 there was less uncertainty.

Federalist and Republican Strength in Congress

	Election year
House	1788	1790	1792	1794	1796	1798	1800	1802	1804	1806
Federalist	37	39	51	47	57	60	38	39	25	24
Republican	28	30	54	59	49	46	65	103	116	118
% Republican	43%	43%	51%	56%	46%	43%	63%	73%	82%	83%
Senate
Federalist	18	16	16	21	22	22	15	9	7	6
Republican	8	13	14	11	10	10	17	25	17	28
% Republican	31%	45%	47%	34%	31%	31%	53%	74%	71%	82%

Source: Kenneth C. Martis, The Historical Atlas of Political Parties in the United States Congress, 1789-1989 (1989); the numbers are estimates by historians.

French Revolution

The French revolutionaries guillotined King Louis XVI in January 1793, leading the British to declare war to restore the monarchy. The King had been decisive in helping America achieve independence; now he was dead and many of the pro-American aristocrats in France were exiled or executed. Federalists warned that American republicans threatened to replicate the horrors of the French Revolution, and successfully mobilized most conservatives and many clergymen. The Republicans who had been strong Francophiles responded with unswerving support, even through the Reign of Terror, when thousands were guillotined. Many of those executed had been friends of the United States, such as the Comte D'Estaing, whose fleet defeated the British at Yorktown. (Lafayette had already fled into exile, and Thomas Paine went to prison in France.) The Republicans thunderously denounced Hamilton, Adams and even Washington as friends of evil Britain, as secret monarchists, and as enemies of the republican values that all true Americans cherished. The level of violent rhetoric reached a fever pitch.

Paris sent a new minister, Edmond-Charles Genêt (known as Citizen Genet), whose travels through the country in the summer of 1793 were designed to mobilize pro-French sentiment and encourage Americans to support France's war against Britain and Spain. Genet funded the creation of local Democratic-Republican Societies that attacked Federalists; he hoped for a favorable new treaty and for repayment of the debts owed to France. Acting aggressively, Genet outfitted privateers that would sail with American crews under a French flag, and attack British shipping. He tried to organize expeditions of Americans who would invade Spanish Louisiana and Florida. When Secretary of State Jefferson told Genet he was pushing American friendship past the limit, Genet threatened to go over Washington's head and rouse public opinion on behalf of France. Even Jefferson agreed this was blatant foreign interference in domestic politics. The Federalists emphasized that elected representatives expressed the will of the people, not mass rallies. Genet's extremism seriously embarrassed the Jeffersonians, and cooled popular support for promoting the French Revolution or getting involved in its wars. Recalled to Paris for execution, Genet kept his head and instead went to New York, where later he became a citizen and married the daughter of Governor Clinton. Jefferson likewise left office, ending the coalition cabinet and allowing the Federalists to dominate.

The Jay Treaty in 1794-95 was the effort by Washington and Hamilton to resolve numerous difficulties with Britain. Some of these issues dated to the Revolution, (such as boundaries, debts owed in each dfirection, and the continued presence of British forts in the Northwest Territory. In addition American hopes to open markets in the British Caribbean, and disputes stemming from the naval war between Britain and France. Most of all the goal was to avert a war with Britain--a war the Jeffersonians wanted and the Federalists opposed.

As a neutral, the United States argued it had the right to carry goods anywhere it wanted. The British nevertheless seized American ships carrying goods from the French West Indies. The Federalists favored Britain in the war, and by far most of America's foreign trade was with Britain; hence a new treaty was called for. The Jay Treaty of 1794 was probably the best that a militarily weak nation could have secured, but it was of course a treaty of unequals. The British promised to evacuate the western forts, open their West Indies ports to American ships, allow small vessels to trade with the French West Indies, and set up a commission that would adjudicate American claims against Britain for seized ships, and British claims against Americans for debts incurred before 1775. In the long run the Jay Treaty was a brilliant success, for it aligned the U.S. with the winning power in the world wars, and ushered in a decade of friendship with Britain. The alternative had been war with Britain, a war that America would have been ill-preparded to have fought.

The Jeffersonians wanted war and assumed that America could win. Therefore they denounced the Jay Treaty as an insult to American prestige, a repudiation of the French alliance of 1777, and a severe shock to Southern planters who owed those old debts. They lashed away at the treaty, but the Federalists controlled the United States Senate and they ratified it by exactly the necessary ⅔ vote, 20-10, in 1795. The pendulum of public opinion swung toward the Republicans after the Treaty fight, and in the South the Federalists lost most of the support they had among planters.

Whiskey Rebellion

The excise tax of 1791 caused grumbling from the frontier including threats of tax resistance. Corn, the chief crop on the frontier, was too bulky to ship over the mountains to market, unless it was first distilled into whiskey. This was profitable, as the United States population consumed, per capita, relatively large quantities of liquor. After the excise tax, the backwoodsmen complained the tax fell on them rather than on the consumers. Cash poor, they were outraged that they had been singled out to pay off the "financiers and speculators" back East, and to salary the federal revenue officers who began to swarm the hills looking for illegal stills.

Insurgents shut the courts and hounded federal officials, but Jeffersonian leader Albert Gallatin mobilized the moderates, and thus forestalled a serious outbreak. Washington, seeing the need to assert federal supremacy, called out 15,000 state militia, and marched toward Pittsburgh to surpess this Whiskey Rebellion. The rebellion evaporated in late 1795 as Washington approached, personally leading the army (the first and only example of a President ever doing so); the affair ended quietly, as the President later pardoned the two ringleaders who had been convicted of treason. Federalists were relieved that the new government proved capable of overcoming rebellion, while Republicans, with Gallatin their new hero, argued there never was a real rebellion and the whole episode was manufactured in order to accustom Americans to a standing army.

Angry petitions flowed in from three dozen Democratic-Republican societies, many of which had been created by Citizen Genet and which were now in the Republican party orbit. Washington attacked the societies as illegitimate, and was now unequivocally in the Federalist camp. He, however, refused to run for a third term, establishing a two-term precedent that was to stand until 1940 and eventually to be enshrined in the Constitution as the 22nd Amendment. Washington warned in his Farewell Address against involvement in European wars, and lamented the rising North-South sectionalism and party spirit in politics that threatened national unity. The party spirit, he lamented:

serves always to distract the Public Councils, and enfeeble the Public Administration. It agitates the Community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms; kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which find a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passions. Thus the policy and the will of one country are subjected to the policy and will of another.

Newspaper editors at war

To strengthen their coalitions and hammer away constantly at the opposition, both parties sponsored newspapers in the capital (Philadelphia) and other major cities. On the Republican side, Philip Freneau and Benjamin Franklin Bache blasted the administration with all the scurrility at their command. Bache in particular targeted Washington himself as the front man for monarchy who must be exposed. To Bache, Washington was a cowardly general and a money-hungry baron who saw the Revolution as a means to advance his fortune and fame, Adams was a failed diplomat who never forgave the French their love of Benjamin Franklin and who cherished a crown for himself and his descendants, and Alexander Hamilton was the most inveterate monarchist of them all. The Federalists, with more newspapers at their command, slashed back with equal vituperation; John Fenno and "Peter Porcupine" (William Cobbett) were their nastiest pensmen, and Noah Webster their most learned; Hamilton subsidized the Federalist editors, wrote for their papers, and in 1801 established his own paper, the New York Evening Post.

John Adams as President, 1797–1801

Hamilton distrusted Vice President Adams, but was unable to block his claims to the succession. The election of 1796 was the first almost totally partisan affair in the nation's history, and one of the most scurrilous in terms of newspaper attacks. Adams swept New England and Jefferson the South, with the middle states leaning to Adams. Thus Adams was the winner by a margin of three electoral votes, and Jefferson, as the runner-up, became Vice President under the system set out in the Constitution prior to the ratification of the 12th Amendment.

Foreign affairs was the central concern of the Adams presidency, for the war raging in Europe threatened to drag in the United States. The new President was a loner, who made dramatic and sometimes rash decisions without consulting Hamilton or anyone else. The late Benjamin Franklin once quipped that Adams was a man always honest, often brilliant, and sometimes mad. Adams was popular among the Federalist rank and file, but had neglected to build state or local political bases of his own, and neglected to take control of his own cabinet. As a result his cabinet was more attuned to Hamilton than to himself.

Alien and Sedition Acts

After an American delegation was insulted in Paris in the XYZ affair (1797), public opinion ran strongly against the French. There was an undeclared "Quasi-War" with France from 1798 to 1800, in which each side's warships attacked the other's shipping, and a few naval fights took place. The Federalists, at the peak of their popularity, took advantage by preparing for an invasion by the French Army (a very unlikely possibility, as it was involved in major combat in Continental Europe for much of this period, and the French Revolutionary government was almost broke). To silence newspaper dissent the Federalists passed the Sedition Act, and imprisoned several opposition editors, whereas the Alien Act empowered the President to deport such aliens as he deemed to be dangerous. Jefferson and Madison secretly wrote the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions passed by the two states' legislatures, that declared the Alien and Sedition Acts unconstitutional, and insisted the states had the power to nullify federal laws. These resolutions became known as the "Principles of 1798" and were the foundation of the "Old Republican" states' rights, anti-nationalist factions' ideologies for the next 63 years.

Undaunted, the Federalists created a navy, with sleek new frigates, and a large new army, with Washington in nominal command and Hamilton in actual command. To pay for it all they raised taxes on land, houses and slaves, leading to serious unrest. In one part of Pennsylvania the Fries' Rebellion broke out, with people refusing to pay the new taxes. John Fries was sentenced to death for treason, but received a pardon from Adams. In the elections of 1798 the Federalists did very well, but the tax issue started hurting the Federalists in 1799. Early that year Adams stunned the country and threw his party into disarray by announcing a new peace mission to France. The mission eventually succeeded, the "Quasi-War" ended, and the new army was largely disbanded. Hamiltonians called Adams a traitor, and in turn Adams fired Hamilton's supporters still in the cabinet.

Hamilton and Adams disliked one another, each finding much in the other's character and politics to loathe, and during Adams's Presidency the Federalists split between supporters of Hamilton ("High Federalists") and supporters of Adams ("Low Federalists"). Hamilton did not want Adams re-elected, and wrote a scathing criticism of his performance as President of the United States in an effort to throw Federalist support to Charles Cotesworth Pinckney; inadvertently this split the Federalists and helped give the victory to Thomas Jefferson.

File:~tj2.JPG

Federalist newspaper cartoon in 1800 attacks a drunken Jefferson for trying to pull down the pillars of the Washington-Adams Federalist achievements with the aid of the devil and devilish ideas in his pocket

Election of 1800

Adams' peace moves proved popular with the Federalist rank and file, and he seemed to stand a good chance of reelection in 1800. Jefferson was again the opponent and Federalists pulled out all stops in warning that he was a dangerous revolutionary, hostile to religion, who would weaken the government, damage the economy, and get into war with Britain. The Republicans crusaded against the Alien and Sedition laws, and the new taxes, and proved highly effective in mobilizing popular discontent.

The election hinged on New York: its electoral votes were cast by the legislature, and given the balance of north and south, they would decide the presidential election. Aaron Burr brilliantly organized his forces in New York City in the spring elections for the state legislature. By a few hundred votes he carried the city—and thus the state legislature—and guaranteed the election of a Republican President. As a reward he was selected by the Republican caucus in Congress as their vice presidential candidate. Hamilton, knowing the election was lost anyway, went public with a sharp attack on Adams that further divided and weakened the Federalists.

Due to the Republican's failure to plan by instructing at least one of their electors to vote for Jefferson but not Burr in the electoral college, Burr and Jefferson received the same vote, 73each so it was up to the House of Representatives to break the tie. There the Federalists were strong enough to deadlock the election, with some talk of their throwing their support to elect Burr. Hamilton knew Burr was a scoundrel and threw his weight into the contest, allowing Jefferson to take office. (This unintended complication led directly to the proposal and ratification of the 12th Amendment.) "We are all republicans—we are all federalists," proclaimed Jefferson in his inaugural address. His patronage policy was to let the Federalists disappear through attrition. Those Federalists such as John Quincy Adams and Rufus King willing to work with him were rewarded with senior diplomatic posts, but there was no punishment of the opposition.

Jefferson had a very successful first term, typified by the Louisiana Purchase. The thoroughly disorganized Federalists hardly offered an opposition to his reelection. In New England and in some districts in the middle states the Federalists clung to power, but the tendency from 1800 to 1812 was steady slippage almost everywhere, as the Republicans perfected their organization and the Federalists tried to play catch-up. Some younger leaders tried to emulate the Republican tactics, but their overall distrust of democracy, and the upper class bias of the party leadership, never allowed much progress. In the South, the Federalists steadily lost ground everywhere.

Federalists in opposition

The Federalists continued for several years to be a major political party in New England and the Northeast, but never regained control of the Presidency or the Congress. With the death of Washington and Hamilton (the latter being shot to death by a vengeful Burr in a duel), and the retirement of Adams, the Federalists were left without a strong leader, and grew steadily weaker. A few younger leaders did appear, notably Daniel Webster. Federalist policies favored commerce and trade over agriculture, and thus became unpopular in the growing Western states. They were increasingly seen as aristocratic and unsympathetic to democracy. In the South the party had lingering support in Maryland, but elsewhere was crippled by 1800 and faded away by 1808. [1]

Massachusetts and Connecticut were the party strongholds. One historian explains how well organized the party was in Connecticut:

It was only necessary to perfect the working methods of the organized body of office-holders who made up the nucleus of the party. There were the state officers, the assistants, and a large majority of the Assembly. In every county there was a sheriff with his deputies. All of the state, county, and town judges were potential and generally active workers. Every town had several justices of the peace, school directors and, in Federalist towns, all the town officers who were ready to carry on the party's work. Every parish had a "standing agent," whose anathemas were said to convince at least ten voting deacons. Militia officers, state's attorneys, lawyers, professors and schoolteachers were in the van of this "conscript army." In all, about a thousand or eleven hundred dependent officer-holders were described as the inner ring which could always be depended upon for their own and enough more votes within their control to decide an election. This was the Federalist machine. ^[4]

After 1800 the major Federalist role came in the judiciary. Although Jefferson managed to repeal the Judiciary Act of 1801 and thus dismiss many Federalist judges, their effort to impeach Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase in 1804 failed. Led by the last great Federalist, John Marshall as Chief Justice from 1801 to 1835, the Supreme Court carved out a unique and powerful role as the protector of the Constitution and promoter of nationalism.

President Jefferson imposed an embargo on Britain in 1807; the Embargo Act of 1807 prevented all American ships from sailing to a foreign port. The idea was that the British were so dependent on American supplies that they would come to terms. For 15 months the Embargo wrecked American export businesses, largely based in the Boston-New York region, causing a sharp depression in the Northeast. Evasion was common and Jefferson and Treasury Secretary Gallatin responded with tightened police controls more severe than anything the Federalists had ever proposed. Public opinion was highly negative, and a surge of support breathed fresh life into the Federalist party. The Republicans nominated Madison for the presidency in 1808. Federalists, meeting in the first-ever national convention, considered the option of nominating Vice President George Clinton as their own candidate, but balked at working with him and again chose Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, their 1804 candidate. Madison lost New England but swept the rest of the country and carried a Republican Congress. Madison dropped the Embargo, opened up trade again, and offered a carrot and stick approach. If either France or Britain agreed to stop their violations of American neutrality, the U.S. would cut off trade with the other country. Tricked by Napoleon into believing France had acceded to his demands, Madison turned his wrath on Britain.

Thus the nation was at war during the 1812 presidential election, and war was the burning issue. In their second national convention, the Federalists—now the peace party— nominated DeWitt Clinton, the dissident Republican mayor of New York City, and an articulate opponent of the war. Madison ran for reelection promising a relentless war against Britain and an honorable peace. Clinton, denouncing Madison's weak leadership and incompetent preparations for war, could count on New England and New York. To win he needed the middle states and there the campaign was fought out. Those states were competitive and had the best-developed local parties and most elaborate campaign techniques, including nominating conventions and formal party platforms. The Tammany Society in New York City went all out for Madison; the Federalists finally adopted the club idea in 1809. Their Washington Benevolent Societies were semi-secret membership organizations which played a critical role in every northern state in holding meetings and rallies and mobilizing Federalist votes. New Jersey went for Clinton, but Madison carried Pennsylvania and thus was narrowly reelected.

Opposition to the War of 1812

The War of 1812 went poorly for the Americans for two years. Even though Britain was concentrating its military efforts on its war with Napoleon, the United States still failed to make any headway on land, and was effectively blockaded at sea by the Royal Navy. The British raided and burned Washington, D.C. in 1814 and sent a force to capture New Orleans.

The war was especially unpopular in New England: the declaration of war had been driven by Westerners and Southerners looking to grab more land from the Spanish in Florida and the British in Canada and to destroy the British-backed American Indians in the Northwest and Southwest Territories. Moreover, the New England economy was highly dependent on trade, and the British blockade threatened to destroy it entirely. In 1814, the British finally managed to enforce their blockade on the New England coast, so the Federalists of New England sent delegates to the Hartford Convention in December 1814.

During the proceedings of the Hartford Convention, some extremists discussed secession, either to become independent countries or to rejoin Great Britain, but the moderates took control of the convention and generated a report that was relatively mild. The report listed a set of grievances against the Republican federal government and proposed a set of Constitutional amendments to address these grievances. It also indicated that if these proposals were ignored, then another convention should be called and given "such powers and instructions as the exigency of a crisis may require". Three Massachusetts "ambassadors" were sent to Washington to negotiate on the basis of this report.

By the time the Federalist "ambassadors" got to Washington, the war was over and news of Andrew Jackson's stunning victory in the Battle of New Orleans had raised American morale immensely. The "ambassadors" slunk back to Massachusetts, but not before they had done fatal damage to the Federalist Party. The Federalists were thereafter associated with the disloyalty and parochialism of the Hartford Convention, and destroyed as a political force. They fielded their last presidential candidate in 1816, and their last vice presidential candidate in the following election. The last traces of Federalist activity came in Delaware localities in the 1820s.

Interpretations

A member of the official Federalist Party was essentially a conservative in the traditional sense, that is, a supporter of the party of government, as the Federalists originally controlled all three branches. More specifically, the term came to be associated with the modernizing, urban, industrial policies of Alexander Hamilton. These policies included the funding of the national debt, the assumption of state debts incurred during the Revolutionary War, the incorporation of a national Bank of the United States, the support of manufactures and industrial development, the use of a light tariff and domestic incentives to encourage economic growth, opposition to France in the French Revolutionary Wars, and the creation of a strong army and navy. Generally speaking, Hamiltonian policies were pursued in the Washington Administrations, and to a lesser extent, the Adams Administration. Ideologically the controversy between Republicans and Federalists stemmed from a difference of principle. For Madison, republicanism meant the recognition of the sovereignty of public opinion and the commitment to participatory politics;above all it meant the states should be more important than the national government. Hamilton advocated a more submissive role for the citizenry and a more active role for the political elite, all looking toward a powerful nation state. In the end, the nation synthesized the two positions, adopting democracy and a strong nation state. Just as important American politics accepted the two-party system whereby rival parties stake their claims before the electorate, and the winner takes control of the government.

The Federalists were generally not equal to the tasks of party organization, and grew steadily weaker as the fortunes of the so-called Virginia Dynasty grew. For economic reasons, the Federalists tended to be pro-British – the United States engaged in more trade with Great Britain than with any other country – and vociferously opposed Jefferson's ill-advised Embargo Act of 1807 and the seemingly deliberate provocation of war with Britain by the Madison Administration. During "Mr. Madison's War", as they called it, the Federalists were on the verge of a comeback but the euphoria that followed the war undercut their pessimistic appeals.

The Federalists limped into the 1820s no longer a national party, but retaining some local strength in New England and New York, around Philadelphia, and in the border states of Maryland and Delaware. After the collapse of the Republican Party in the course of the 1824 presidential election, most surviving Federalists (including Daniel Webster) joined former Republicans like Henry Clay to form the National Republican Party, which was soon combined with other anti-Jackson groups to form the Whig Party. Some Federalists like James Buchanan and Roger B. Taney became Jacksonian Democrats. The name "Federalist" came increasingly to be used in political rhetoric as a term of abuse; one popular attack on Whigs was that they were really "Wigs", being nothing but aristocratic Federalists and Tories with powdered wigs and knee-breeches (cf. the Whigs' popular reference to Andrew Jackson as "King Andrew I").

Ironically, The "Old Republicans" complained that Jefferson, Madison, Gallatin, Monroe and Henry Clay had in effect adopted Federalist principles by purchasing the Louisiana Territory, chartering the Second national bank, promoting internal improvements (like roads), and promoting a strong army after the failures of the militia in the War of 1812.

Presidential candidates

Election year	Result	Nominees
Election year	Result	President	Vice President
1789	won	George Washington*	John Adams
1792	won	George Washington*	John Adams
1796	won**	John Adams	Thomas Pinckney
1800	lost	John Adams	Charles Cotesworth Pinckney
1804	lost	Charles Cotesworth Pinckney	Rufus King
1808	lost	Charles Cotesworth Pinckney	Rufus King
1812	lost	DeWitt Clinton	Jared Ingersoll
1816	lost	Rufus King	John Eager Howard

* George Washington was personally nonpartisan, but his name was adopted by the Federalists. His administration in his second term was increasingly dominated by Federalists.

** Adams became President, but Thomas Jefferson became the vice-president, not Pinckney.