Compare the Federalist and Democratic philosophies of government - Essay Example

With the start of the new government under the Constitution, President George Washington made his former aide de camp, Alexander Hamilton, United States Secretary of the Treasury. Hamilton was immediately tasked with coming up with a plan to restore public credit. Hamilton proposed the fairly ambitious Hamiltonian economic program and organized alliances to get these measures passed through the Congress. The measures he proposed were far from universally popular. In particular, they were well liked by the commercial North, and were heartily disliked by the agrarian South.

This spurred James Madison, Hamilton's ally in the fight to establish the United States Constitution, to join with Thomas Jefferson in opposing Hamilton's program. The Democratic Party evolved from the political factions that opposed Alexander Hamilton's fiscal policies in the early 1790s; these factions are known variously as the Anti-Administration "Party" or the Anti-Federalists. In the mid-1790s, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison organized these factions into a party and helped define its ideology in favor of yeomen farmers, strict construction of the Constitution, and a weaker federal government. . The new party was especially effective in building a network of newspapers in major cities to broadcast its statements and editorialize in its favor.

By 1790 or 1791, coalitions were forming in Congress for and against the Hamiltonian program. These were nameless, shifting ad-hoc factions, not permanent political parties. By 1792 or 1793 newspapers started calling Hamilton supporters "Federalists" and the opponents "Republicans".In 1791, Jefferson and Madison travelled widely looking for alliances with factions and parties at the state level. They had support from the short-lived Democratic-Republican Societies. Their major success came in New York, where long-term governor George Clinton, and ambitious newcomer Aaron Burr, signed up, as Hamilton was the son-in-law of General Schuyler, one of Clinton's enemies.

Hamilton likewise realized the need for support in the states; he formed connections with local factions, and used his network of Treasury agents to link together friends of the government, especially businessmen and financiers in the new nation's dozen small cities (Schlisinger 1992).The state networks of both parties began to operate in 1794 or 1795, thus firmly establishing what has been 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; Madison had none. In New York, however, Clinton used dubious methods to win the election for governor and used the vast