The Boss and the Machine | Page 4

clubs
called "Sons of Liberty." Within a few years, these patriots became the
Revolutionists, and the Tories became the Loyalists. As always
happens in a successful revolution, the party of opposition vanished,
and when the peace of 1783 finally put the stamp of reality upon the
Declaration of 1776, the patriot party had won its cause and had served
its day.
Immediately thereafter a new issue, and a very significant one, began to
divide the thought of the people. The Articles of Confederation,
adopted as a form of government by the States during a lull in the
nationalistic fervor, had utterly failed to perform the functions of a
national government. Financially the Confederation was a beggar at the
doors of the States; commercially it was impotent; politically it was
bankrupt. The new issue was the formation of a national government
that should in reality represent a federal nation, not a collection of
touchy States. Washington in his farewell letter to the American people
at the close of the war (1783) urged four considerations: a strong
central government, the payment of the national debt, a well-organized
militia, and the surrender by each State of certain local privileges for
the good of the whole. His "legacy," as this letter came to be called,

thus bequeathed to us Nationalism, fortified on the one hand by Honor
and on the other by Preparedness.
The Confederation floundered in the slough of inadequacy for several
years, however, before the people were sufficiently impressed with the
necessity of a federal government. When, finally, through the adroit
maneuver of Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, the
Constitutional Convention was called in 1787, the people were in a
somewhat chastened mood, and delegates were sent to the Convention
from all the States except Rhode Island.
No sooner had the delegates convened and chosen George Washington
as presiding officer, than the two opposing sides of opinion were
revealed, the nationalist and the particularist, represented by the
Federalists and the Anti-Federalists, as they later termed themselves.
The Convention, however, was formed of the conservative leaders of
the States, and its completed work contained in a large measure, in
spite of the great compromises, the ideas of the Federalists. This
achievement was made possible by the absence from the Convention of
the two types of men who were to prove the greatest enemy of the new
document when it was presented for popular approval, namely, the
office-holder or politician, who feared that the establishment of a
central government would deprive him of his influence, and the popular
demagogue, who viewed with suspicion all evidence of organized
authority. It was these two types, joined by a third--the conscientious
objector--who formed the AntiFederalist party to oppose the adoption
of the new Constitution. Had this opposition been well-organized, it
could unquestionably have defeated the Constitution, even against its
brilliant protagonists, Hamilton, Madison, Jay, and a score of other
masterly men.
The unanimous choice of Washington for President gave the new
Government a non-partizan initiation. In every way Washington
attempted to foster the spirit of an undivided household. He warned his
countrymen against partizanship and sinister political societies. But he
called around his council board talents which represented incompatible
ideals of government. Thomas Jefferson, the first Secretary of State,

and Alexander Hamilton, the first Secretary of the Treasury, might for a
time unite their energies under the wise chieftainship of Washington,
but their political principles could never be merged. And when, finally,
Jefferson resigned, he became forthwith the leader of the
opposition--not to Washington, but to Federalism as interpreted by
Hamilton, John Adams, and Jay.
The name Anti-Federalist lost its aptness after the inauguration of the
Government. Jefferson and his school were not opposed to a federal
government. They were opposed only to its pretensions, to its
assumption of centralized power. Their deep faith in popular control is
revealed in the name they assumed, Democratic-Republican. They were
eager to limit the federal power to the glorification of the States; the
Federalists were ambitious to expand the federal power at the expense
of localism. This is what Jefferson meant when he wrote to Washington
as early as 1792, "The Republican party wish to preserve the
Government in its present form." Now this is a very definite and
fundamental distinction. It involves the political difference between
government by the people and government by the representatives of the
people, and the practical difference between a government by law and a
government by mass-meeting.
Jefferson was a master organizer. At letter-writing, the one means of
communication in those days, he was a Hercules. His pen never
wearied. He soon had a compact party. It included not only most of the
Anti-Federalists, but the small politicians, the tradesmen and artisans,
who had worked themselves into a ridiculous frenzy over the French
Revolution and who