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The Invention of Party Politics
Federalism, Popular Sovereignty, and Constitutional Development in Jacksonian Illinois
By Gerald Leonard The University of North Carolina Press
Copyright © 2002 University of North Carolina Press
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-0-8078-2744-4
Introduction
This is a book about political parties and the American Constitution between the founding of the United States and the Second Party System of the 1840s and 1850s. In those years, and especially between 1820 and 1840, the idea and fact of party organization gained a preeminent place in the American constitutional order, even though the Constitution itself had been designed as a "constitution against parties." In all the massive literature on American political history in that period, however, there was little indication of what I have since come to understand: that the early history of party is best understood within the history of the Constitution, just as the history of the Constitution is best understood within the history of party development.
In the nineteenth century, the mass political party dominated American politics and, in fact, came to be the defining institution of modern "democracy," a status it still enjoys (perhaps in tandem with the market economy). Yet thousands of years of prior human history had yielded practically no efforts to justify party organization or institutionalized opposition. Virtually every political thinker before the nineteenth century condemned "formed opposition" as destructive of the public good and fatal to public peace. The freedom of individuals to express dissent might sometimes be celebrated, but the organization of a political club in continuing opposition to the policies of the governmentperhaps even conceiving of itself as a potential replacement for those currently in power-smacked more of conspiracy and treason than of healthy political competition. In the early nineteenth century, however, all that changed. Americans embraced mass party organization, and politics and governance were altered forever. Eventually, this embrace of party became a commitment to a "party system"-an enduring competition between democratic parties within a basic constitutional consensus, expecting to exchange power and office in indefinitely long cycles-as the sine qua non of democracy in America and much of the world.
This revolution in political structure lies at the foundation of modernity, but it was not America's present two-party system that I wanted to understand through this study. I thought I already knew what I cared to know about that. The necessity of a competitive system of mass parties in a democracy seemed obvious to me, as it did to the many political scientists who had studied the modern system. And the basic character of the major parties as broad coalitions rather than narrowly ideological formations seemed equally natural in a majoritarian system. What sparked my interest, then, was the question of how early Americans could ever have thought otherwise. What assumptions or values could have led them to think that institutionalized party competition might be avoidable in-even antithetical to-free government? Once I had begun to understand this alien worldview, moreover, I wondered how these early Americans had managed to blaze the trail from that strange world of the Founding, in which antipartyism was the unquestioned premise of all political thought, to the world of the 1840s in which party identification had become the organizing principle of democracy.
My investigation of this question soon indicated the prime importance of the Constitution and especially the question of federalism or states' rights: what powers exactly had the Constitution assigned to the new national government and what powers or rights had it reserved to the states and their people? The centrality of the Constitution to the thinking of the "partyists," as I will call the first advocates of party, had not been obvious to me at the outset. Like most Americans, I reflexively understood constitutional history as the history of constitutional litigation in the courts, much as John Marshall, the great chief justice, seems to have intended. The history of parties, on the other hand, seemed a matter of political history rather than the history of constitutional law. Neither the Founders nor many of their immediate heirs, however, understood the Constitution as modern Americans do. For the Founders, the Constitution was a blueprint of a government; they did not expect it to be a subject of litigation, except incidentally. Constitutional law, then, especially the all-important law of federalism, would lie much more in "politics," in the practice of legislatures and executives, in the daily initiatives of government, than in the relatively rare and reactive constitutional holdings of the courts. And this assumption was shared by those who otherwise differed radically on the meaning of the Constitution. Thus for the nationalist Alexander Hamilton, the limits of federalism would be defined more through the national government's brute exercise of specific powers-to charter a national bank, for example-than through any particular judicial rulings. Meanwhile, at the opposite end of the constitutional spectrum, localists expected states' rights to be vindicated by state legislatures' assertions of power-for example, the claimed power to tax the national bank-rather than through judicial review of federal statutes. Those who expected the Constitution to live in the "political" branches of government more than in the judiciary, moreover, were well vindicated in subsequent years, even if, committed to the doctrine of antipartyism, they failed to anticipate that political control of the Constitution would come to mean party control of the Constitution.
The history of the Constitution, then, which had once seemed to me synonymous with the history of judicial politics, now seemed largely the history of electoral politics. And the importance of the Constitution was not simply that it provided a starting point for the American experiment in electoral democracy, nor even that its majoritarian electoral structure encouraged presidential candidates to organize grand coalitions. Rather, fundamental as these aspects were, it was the problem of federalism that preoccupied those who actually built the bridge from antipartyism to partyism. And intimately related to the meaning of federalism was the meaning of the Constitution's principle of popular sovereignty. Was this principle to reflect a merely nominal sovereignty in the people, with real power residing in the distant institutions of the national government? Or was it to reflect a genuine retention of effective power in the people, acting in their local communities? The nation's break from England had ultimately represented both a rejection of centralized, distant, imperial government-thus the importance of states' rights in the new order-and a removal of sovereignty from an elitist Parliament to the people themselves. It was only in defense of this localist, democratic model of the Constitution that a justification for party organization-as an organ of the Constitution itself-began to crystallize. It may or may not have been the case that the development of a party system was in some sense inevitable, but I discovered that those who created the first mass parties did so not by invoking modern explanations of the system's inevitability but by trying to figure out how to implement the Constitution's promise of democracy through federalism-even as that Constitution ostensibly rejected party.
The constitutional history offered here, then, is not primarily a history of constitutional litigation or judicial politics-the history that John Marshall and Joseph Story sought to give us and that Supreme Court interventions from McCulloch v. Maryland to Dred Scott to Bush v. Gore have made out as the history of the Constitution. Rather, it is a history of an alternative vision of constitutional development, rooted in the Framers' own understanding of the Constitution as a charter of governance rather than a subject of adjudication. The history of the legitimation of the political party turns out to be a history of the invention of party control of the Constitution (in uneasy negotiation with the courts). What once appeared obviously to be a problem of political history-how did antiparty Americans invent the mass political party?-ultimately revealed itself as hardly political history at all, but constitutional history played out in election campaigns. The partyists did not self-consciously design the mass political party as a way of building electoral coalitions; instead, they gradually found it implied in their ballot-box defense of a democratic, states'-rights Constitution against that Constitution's supposedly aristocratic enemies.
The historiography of party as an element of the American constitutional order has been surprisingly slight. Fifty years ago, in his pioneering "prospectus" for an American legal history as a history of governance, James Willard Hurst wondered at the failure of the Framers of the Constitution to specify the place of parties in American governance. They had, of course, specified the places of most other governmental institutions: a national legislature, a national executive, and a federal judiciary. They had further divided lawmaking authority between the national government and republican state governments. To Hurst, however, it seemed obvious that political parties were lawmaking institutions as central as any of those provided for in the Constitution: "For most of the nineteenth century, the parties furnished legislative direction. They did this mainly outside the regular legislative machinery, through the inner circle of party leaders, the boss, and the caucus." They also controlled the legislatures through control of the legislature's own committee structure and other "machinery." And these facts highlighted for Hurst "one of the most puzzling features of our constitutional history"-that "no constitutional provision was made to fit the party into the structure of government."
In observing the dominance of the political parties across the last two-thirds of the nineteenth century, Hurst has been joined by such scholars as the political scientist Stephen Skowronek, who has famously characterized that constitutional system as a "state of courts and parties." Skowronek's phrase suggests an underdeveloped American state, in which legislatures and executives were controlled by party organizations, with courts alone retaining significant lawmaking authority independent of party organization. In narrating the history of party conflict, moreover, a multitude of political historians has detailed the mass political parties' domination of American governance between the 1830s and the 1890s. In the twentieth century, public authority has in some measure migrated away from the weakening parties to other abodes, including new institutions like the modern administrative agency. But for the last two-thirds of the nineteenth century-the "party period" in American history-institutionalized parties held effective control over much lawmaking.
Having recognized the ascendancy of parties, however, neither the legal/political historians nor the political scientists have adequately addressed the larger question behind Hurst's concern: where did the parties come from and why were they embraced? If parties were not only absent from any formal frame of government but in fact one of the chief diseases against which the Framers of the American Constitution sought to inoculate republican governance, then how did they insinuate themselves into the Constitution's institutions? How did they come to control the lawmaking of the legislative and executive branches in both the states and the nation?
Part of the answer, of course, lies in the obvious electoral advantages that accrue to a politician who can command a large-scale organization. These advantages make it appear inevitable that politicians would build parties, and this apparent inevitability seems to underlie most accounts of Jacksonian politics, which tend to slight the developing theory of party. But the mass party did not appear inevitable at all to the antiparty Americans of the 1820s, as historians have often recognized. Rather, its invention and ultimate legitimation were matters of protracted struggle in the political press and on the stump circuit. First and foremost, therefore, an adequate explanation for the rise of party must explain both the genesis and the subsequent history of partyist theory-the theory by which the partyists sold the idea of party organization and party authority to a largely antiparty electorate.
The central idea in partyist theory was that there existed a body called "the democracy" and that the Constitution made the democracy sovereign. Party came into the picture as the institutional device by which the democracy might exercise its sovereignty in practice. Even the partyists, however, rejected party division within the democracy; and so they reaffirmed a kind of antipartyism, by which they meant to connect themselves to the still dominant antiparty tradition. It is this idea-party as the embodiment of the undivided democracy-that has been largely missing from the historiography of party.
What exactly was the democracy? Like the idea of "the aristocracy," it denoted a constitutional stratum in society. Contrasted with an American aristocracy of commerce, the democracy was that "immense majority" of the people characterized by a commitment to radical political equality, consequently to the Constitution's principle of majority rule, and, somewhat more tenuously, to the independence of agricultural life rather than to the dependencies of commerce. But that was not all. The democracy was also characterized by its localism and so, under the American Constitution, by its attachment to states' rights, because any unnecessary centralization of power threatened to distort democratic decisionmaking. To the modern mind, it is perhaps not obvious that majoritarianism and localism (and attachment to the land, for that matter) necessarily go together. Presumably, a majority of "the democracy" could choose to centralize power in the national government without losing its commitment to equality and majoritarianism. In partyist thinking, however, a genuine majoritarianism depended absolutely on localism. A decision to forsake states' rights could not be a truly democratic decision, even when made by an electoral majority, in the same sense that a majority decision to disfranchise the population generally or to sell the majority into chattel slavery could not really be thought democratic. Any evidence that a majority had abandoned the principle of states' rights, therefore, was only evidence that something-whether outright corruption or more subtle forms of influence-had "biased" the processes of democratic choice.
In the partyists' commitment to the idea of an indivisible constitutional unit-comprising the vast majority of the people and invested with a complete sovereignty-lay their paradoxical perpetuation of an antipartyist constitutional tradition. And in their commitment to the defining localism of the democracy lay their preeminent devotion to states' rights. Thus, for example, when the Democratic party of the 1830s made a party test of its proposal for an "independent treasury" to replace the national bank, it justified its position not simply as good economic policy but as the necessary position of "the democracy" as a whole, the only position consistent with continuing equality and states' rights, the policy of the Constitution itself. And, to the partyists, it was only this identification of the party with the entire democracy-itself sovereign and internally free from party-that could reconcile party organization to a still dominant antiparty tradition.
The partyist theory just sketched has largely escaped historians. Even those who have examined parties in great detail have been little concerned with antipartyism and its continuing connection to the Constitution after 1820 or so. The emergence of the party system, after all, has seemed so inevitable to modern eyes that any lingering antipartyism has seemed uninteresting, even though it was, in fact, a central preoccupation of the partyists themselves. And "the democracy" is so thoroughly lost as a constitutional category that its implications for antipartyism and for states' rights must be doubly lost to modern thinkers.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Invention of Party Politics by Gerald Leonard Copyright © 2002 by University of North Carolina Press. Excerpted by permission.
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