In this episode, Ken Owen, Michael Hattem, Roy Rogers, and Lindsay Chervinsky discuss the development of political parties and political organization from the colonial period through 1800.
TOPIC
Political parties are the accepted form of political organization in the United States, but that has not always been the case. Political parties as institutions did not emerge until after the Revolution despite a longstanding rhetorical aversion to political parties and factions. By 1800, the “First Party System” contested by Federalists and Democratic-Republicans was solidified, but it was short-lived and ultimately replaced by a new system when the Federalist Party died and was replaced by the Whig Party.
QUESTIONS
- What are “political parties?”
- How did the development of political parties in England affect colonial politics?
- Were the colonial “Whigs” and “Tories” political parties?
- Why did the 1780s and 1790s give rise to the First Party System?
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RELATED EPISODES
- Ep. 23: The Election of 1800
- LIVE: Elections in Early America
- Ep. 21: The Bill of Rights
- Extra!, Ep. 3: The Hamilton Moment
- Ep. 20: Alexander Hamilton
- Ep. 9: The Early American Presidency
FURTHER READING
Banning, Lance. After the Constitution: Party Conflict in the New Republic. Belmont: Wadsworth, 1989.
Beeman, Richard R. The Varieties of Political Experience in Eighteenth-Century America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004.
Bonomi, Patricia U. A Factious People: Politics and Society in Colonial New York. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971.
Chervinsky, Lindsay M. The Cabinet: George Washington and the Creation of an American Institution. Harvard University Press, 2020.
Elkins, Stanley and Eric L. McKitrick. The Age of Federalism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.
Pasley, Jeffrey L. First Presidential Contest: 1796 and the Founding of American Democracy. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2016.
Rao, Gautham. National Duties: Custom Houses and the Making of the American State. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016.
Sharp, James Roger. American Politics in the Early Republic: New Nation in Crisis. Yale University Press, 1995.
Tully, Alan. Forming American Politics: Ideals, Interests, and Institutions in Colonial New York and Pennsylvania. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994.
Waldstreicher, David. In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776-1820. Chapel Hill: Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia, by the University of North Carolina Press, 1997.
Wood, Gordon S. The Creation of the American Republic 1776-1787. Chapel Hill: Publ. for the Institute of Early American History and Culture at Williamsburg, Va. by the University of North Carolina Press, 1969.
–––––––. Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.
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