The greatest obstacle in the path of the people of the United States in their struggle toward national life was the vastness of the territory which they occupied. Even the region between the Alleghanies and the sea was as yet imperfectly subdued. Great tracts of wilderness separated communities beyond the fall-line of the rivers. Intercourse was incredibly difficult even between the commercial ports of New England and the Middle States. Stage-coaches plied between Boston and New York, to be sure, and between New York and Philadelphia. By stage, too, a traveler could reach Baltimore and Washington in the course of time. But beyond the Potomac public conveyances were few and uncertain in their routes. The only public stage in the Carolinas and Georgia plied between Charleston and Savannah. Those whom either public or private business forced to journey from these remote Southern States to Philadelphia took passage in coasting vessels. It is difficult to say which were greater, the perils by land or by sea. Writing from Philadelphia in 1790, William Smith, of South Carolina, described the misfortunes of his fellow Congressmen in trying to reach the seat of government, as follows: “Burke was shipwrecked off the Capes; Jackson and Mathews with great difficulty landed at Cape May and traveled one hundred and sixty miles in a wagon to the city. Burke got here in the same way. Gerry and Partridge were overset in the stage; the first had his head broke and made his entree with an enormous black patch; the other had his ribs sadly bruised and was unable to stir for some days. Tucker had a dreadful passage of sixteen days with perpetual storms. I wish these little contretemps may not sour their tempers and be inauspicious to our proceedings.”

Even in the North, where distances were not so great and where great arms of the ocean did not penetrate so far inland, as in North Carolina, for example, interposing so many barriers to communication, travel was painfully slow and hazardous. Travelers who made the journey from Boston to New York by stage-coach accounted themselves lucky if they reached their destination in six days, for no bridges spanned any of the great waterways and the crossing by ferryboats was uncertain and often dangerous. Many travelers preferred to journey by water from port to port, but coasting vessels, contending with the winds and the tides, were often nine or ten days in sailing from Boston to New York.

The post traveled with somewhat greater speed; yet a letter sent from Portland, Maine, could not be delivered in Savannah, Georgia, in less than twenty days. From Philadelphia a post went to Lexington, Kentucky, in sixteen days, and to Nashville, Tennessee, in twenty-two days. The cost of these posts, like the cost of traveling, was in many cases prohibitive. The rate for a letter of a single sheet was twenty-five cents. News traveled slowly from State to State. The best news sheets in New York printed intelligence from Virginia which was almost as belated as that which the packets brought from Europe.

With such barriers in the way of intercourse, the masses, so far indeed as they possessed the suffrage at all, were not politically self-assertive. Devoted primarily to the pursuit of agriculture and commerce, essentially rural in their distribution, the people had neither the desire nor the means, nor yet the leisure, to engage in active politics. Politics was the occupation of those who commanded leisure and some accumulated wealth. The voters of the several States touched each other only through their leaders. In these early years national parties were hardly more than divisions of a governing class. Party organization was visible only in its most rudimentary form-a leader and a personal following. The machinery of a modern party organization did not come into existence until the railroad and the steamboat tightened the bonds of intercourse between State and State, and between community and community.

In another respect political parties of the Federalist period differed from later political organizations. Under stress of foreign complications, Federalists and Republicans were forced into an irreconcilable antagonism. The one group was thought to be British in its sympathies, the other Gallic. In the eyes of his opponents, the Republican was no better than a democrat, a Jacobin, a revolutionary incendiary; and the Federalist no better than a monocrat and a Tory. The effect was denationalizing. Each lost confidence in the other’s Americanism.

The Federalists, in control of the Executive,-and thus, in the common phrase, “in power,”-were disposed to view the opposition as factious, if not treasonable. Washington deprecated the spirit of party and thought it ought not to be tolerated in a popular government. Fisher Ames expressed a common Federalist conviction when he wrote in 1796: “It is a childish comfort that many enjoy, who say the minority aim at place only, not at the overthrow of government. They aim at setting mobs above law, not at the filling places which have known legal responsibility. The struggle against them is therefore pro aris et focis; it is for our rights and liberties.” Such a state of mind can be understood only by a diligent reading of the newspapers and political tracts of the time. Republican journalists, many of whom were of alien origin, still gloried in the ideals and achievements of the French Revolution. But liberty and democracy, as preached by a Tom Paine and glorified by a Callender and exemplified by the Reign of Terror in France, had caused an ominous reaction in the minds of upholders of the established order in the United States.

Under these circumstances, when, in the minds of those in authority, party was identified with faction, and faction was held to be synonymous with treason, the position of the Republicans was precarious. War with France they bitterly opposed, but were powerless to prevent. The path of opposition was made all the more difficult by the well-known attitude of conspicuous Federalist leaders who favored war as an opportunity for discrediting their political opponents, or, as Higginson expressed it, for closing the “avenues of French poison and intrigue.”

Laboring under the conviction that they had to deal not only with an enemy without but with an insidious foe within, the Federalists carried through Congress in June and July, 1798, a series of measures which are usually cited as the Alien and Sedition Acts. The first in the series was the Naturalization Act, which lengthened the period of residence required of aliens who desired citizenship, from five to fourteen years. The Alien Act authorized the President, for a period of two years, to order out of the country all such aliens as he deemed dangerous to public safety or guilty of treasonable designs against the Government. Failure to leave the country after due warning was made punishable by imprisonment for a term not exceeding three years and by exclusion from citizenship for all time. A third act conferred upon the President the further discretionary power to remove alien enemies in time of war or of threatened war. Finally, the Sedition Act added to the crimes punishable by the federal courts unlawful conspiracy and the publication of “any false, scandalous, and malicious writings” against the Government, President, or Congress, with the intent to defame them or to bring them into contempt or disrepute. For conspiracy the penalty was a fine not exceeding five thousand dollars and imprisonment not exceeding five years; for seditious libel, a fine not exceeding two thousand dollars and imprisonment not exceeding two years.

The debates in Congress left little doubt that the Sedition Act was a weapon forged for partisan purposes. The Federalists were convinced that France maintained a party in America which by means of corrupt hirelings and subsidized presses was paralyzing the efforts of the Administration to defend national rights. That there was great provocation for the act cannot be denied. The tone of the press generally was low; but between the scurrilous assaults of Cobbett in Porcupine’s Gazette upon Republican leaders, and the atrocious libels of Bache upon President Washington, there is not much to choose.

What the opposition had to fear from the Sedition Act, appeared with startling suddenness in October, 1798, when Representative Matthew Lyon, of Vermont, an eccentric character who had become the butt of all Federalists, was indicted for publishing a letter in which he maintained that under President Adams “every consideration of the public welfare was swallowed up in a continual grasp for power, in an unbounded thirst for ridiculous pomp, foolish adulation, and selfish avarice.” The unlucky Lyon was found guilty, sentenced to imprisonment for four months, and fined one thousand dollars.

Alarmed by this attack on what he termed the freedom of speech and of the press, Jefferson cast about for some effective form of protest. Collaborating with John Breckenridge, a member of the Kentucky Legislature, he prepared a series of resolutions which were adopted by that body, while Madison, then a member of the Virginia House of Burgesses, secured the adoption of a set of resolutions of similar purport which he had drafted. Both sets of resolutions condemned the Alien and Sedition Acts as unwarranted by the letter of the Constitution and opposed to its spirit. Both reiterated the current theory of the Union as a compact to which the States were parties; and both intimated that, as in all other cases of compact among parties having no common judge, each party had an equal right to judge for itself, as well of infractions as of the mode of redress.

The real purport of these Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions has been much misunderstood. The emphasis should fall not upon the compact theory, for that was commonly accepted at this time; nor yet upon the vague remedies suggested by the phrases “nullification” and “interposition.” With these remedies Jefferson and Madison were not greatly concerned. Protest rather than action was uppermost in their minds. As Jefferson said to Madison, they proposed to “leave the matter in such a train as that we may not be committed absolutely to extremities, and yet may be free to push as far as events will render prudent.” What they desired was such an affirmation of principles as should rally their followers and arrest the usurpation of power by their opponents. The fundamental position assumed is that the Federal Government is one of limited powers and that citizens must look to their State Governments as bulwarks of their civil liberties, whenever the express terms of the federal compact are violated. The Federal Government was not to be allowed to become the judge of its own powers. By recalling the party to its original position of opposition to the consolidating tendencies of the Federalists, the resolutions of 1798 served much the same purpose as a modern party platform. In this light, their ambiguities are not greater nor their political theories more vague than those of later platforms.

In the early months of 1799, petitions for the repeal of the Alien and Sedition Acts began to pour in upon Congress from the Middle States; but the Federalists felt secure enough in popular favor to ignore these protests. With a keener ear for the voice of the people, Jefferson summoned his Republican friends to seize the moment to effect an entire “revolution of the public mind to its republican soundness.” “This summer is the season for systematic energies and sacrifices,” he wrote to Madison. “The engine is the press. Every man must lay his purse and pen under contribution.” The response was immediate and hearty. Not only were political pamphlets printed and distributed from Cape Cod to the Blue Ridge, but an astonishing number of newspapers were founded to disseminate Republican doctrine. The three or four years before the presidential election of 1800 are marked by an unprecedented journalistic revival. Instead of being mere purveyors of facts, these newspapers became, as a contemporary observes, “Vehicles of discussion, in which the principles of government, the interests of nations, the spirit and tendency of public measures, and the public and private characters of individuals, are all arraigned, tried, and decided.” Such a systematic attempt to direct public opinion had not been made since the early days of the Revolution.

The Federalists watched this Republican revival with grave misgivings. What Jefferson called “the awakening of the spirit of 1776” was to Fisher Ames an ominous sign of impending “revolutionary Robespierrism.” Federalists of the Hamiltonian brand unhesitatingly held the Republicans responsible for the Fries Rebellion, which occurred in Pennsylvania. The immediate occasion for these disturbances, to be sure, was the federal house tax, but the rioting occurred in those eastern counties which were ardently Republican; hence the outbreak could be denounced plausibly enough as the result of Jacobin teachings. In some alarm the Administration dispatched troops to quell the riots, and prosecuted the leaders with relentless vigor. Fries was condemned to death, and the President’s advisers would have carried out the decree of the court, “to inspire the malevolent and factious with terror”; but President Adams persisted in pardoning Fries, holding wisely that there was grave danger in so construing treason as to apply it to “every sudden, ignorant, inconsiderable heat, among a part of the people, wrought up by political disputes, and personal and party animosities.” Such motives were not appreciated by the circle of Hamilton’s admirers. Why were the renegade aliens who were running the incendiary presses not sent out of the country, Hamilton asked Pickering. “Are laws of this kind passed merely to excite odium and remain a dead letter?”

If the Administration made only a half-hearted effort to arrest and deport aliens, it could at least not be accused of letting the Sedition Act remain a dead letter. Some unnecessary and thoroughly unwise prosecutions in the year 1799 were followed by a series of trials for seditious libel in the spring term of the federal courts. All the individuals indicted were either editors or printers of Republican newspapers. The impression created by these prosecutions was, therefore, that the Administration had determined to crush the opposition. What deepened this impression was the obvious bias of the federal judges and the partisanship of the juries, which it was alleged were packed by the prosecution.

With one accord Republican editors lifted up their voices in defense of freedom of speech, never losing from view, however, the political possibilities of the situation. The more prosecutions the better, wrote one editor significantly to a fellow victim: “You know the old ecclesiastical observation that the blood of the martyrs was the seed of the church.” From the Federalist point of view these editors were “lying Jacobins,” incendiaries, anarchists. “Should Jacobinism gain the ascendency,” an orator at Deerfield, Massachusetts, warned his auditors, in the midst of the elections of 1800, “let every man arm himself, not only to defend his property, his wife, and children, but to secure his life from the dagger of his Jacobin neighbor.” In vain Republicans protested that they had a right to form a party to oppose measures which they deemed destructive to public liberty. They were not opposing the Constitution but the Administration; not government in general, but the existing Government, of men who were employing despotic methods.

In the presidential election of 1800 only four of the sixteen States provided for a choice of the electors directly by the people. The outcome depended upon the action of the legislatures in a comparatively few States. New England was so steadfast in the Federalist faith that the Republicans gave up all hope of contesting the control of the legislatures. After an electioneering tour through Connecticut, Aaron Burr is said to have remarked that they might as well attempt to revolutionize the Kingdom of Heaven. On the other hand, Jeffersonian Republicanism was deeply rooted in Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Georgia. The contestable area lay in the Middle States and in the Carolinas.

In the early spring, both parties began to burnish their armor for the first encounter in New York. It was generally believed that the May elections to the Assembly would determine the vote of the presidential electors, and that the vote of the city of New York would settle the control of the Assembly. The task of carrying the legislative districts of the city for the Republicans fell to Aaron Burr, past-master of the art of political management and first of the long line of political bosses of the great metropolis. How he concentrated the party vote upon a ticket which bore such names as those of George Clinton, Horatio Gates, and Henry Rutgers; how he wooed and won voters in the doubtful seventh ward among the laboring classes,-these are matters which elude the most painstaking researches of the historian. The outcome was a Republican Assembly which beyond a peradventure would give the electoral vote of the State to the Republican candidates.

In another respect Burr’s victory in New York was important. It made him the logical and most available candidate for the vice-presidential nomination. By general consent Jefferson became for the second time the candidate of his party for the Presidency. On May 11, the Republican members of Congress met in caucus and unanimously agreed to support Burr for the Vice-Presidency. Already wiseacres were figuring out the probabilities of a Republican victory.

It was a chastened group of Federalist Congressmen who met in caucus on May 3, after the disheartening tidings from New York. Though their hearts misgave them, they still supported John Adams. To carry South Carolina, they agreed to support Charles C. Pinckney for the Vice-Presidency; but rumor had it that many Federalists would be glad to see Pinckney outstrip Adams,-a hope which in the course of the summer was frankly avowed by Hamilton. In a letter which he had privately printed for circulation among the Federalists, Hamilton declared without disguise his hostility to Adams. The imprudence of this act was apparent when Burr seized upon a copy of the letter and scattered reprints far and wide as good campaign material.

The effect of Hamilton’s indiscretion was probably slight. Adams carried all the electoral votes in the New England States, leading Pinckney by a single vote. The Federalists were completely successful also in New Jersey and Delaware. Through the tactics of thirteen Federalists in the Senate of Pennsylvania, they won seven of the fifteen electoral votes of that State. In Maryland they divided the electoral vote evenly with their opponents. In North Carolina, they secured four of the twelve votes; but in South Carolina they were completely discomfited. Instead of carrying his own State for the ticket, Pinckney was outgeneraled by the strategy of his cousin Charles Pinckney, who effected an irresistible combination of the Piedmont farmers and the artisans of Charleston. The loss of South Carolina was irretrievable and decisive. The Federalists had to concede the defeat of their ticket.

The exultation of the Republicans was at first unbounded. “The election of a Republican President,” wrote the editor of the Schenectady Cabinet triumphantly, “is a new Declaration of Independence, as important in its consequences as that of ’76, and of much more difficult achievement.” But the elation of the Jeffersonians was somewhat tempered by the information that Jefferson and Burr had an equal number of votes in the electoral college. Adams was defeated, to be sure, but was Thomas Jefferson elected? Neither Jefferson nor Burr had “the highest number of votes” which the Constitution required for an election. The House of Representatives, therefore, must choose between them. But the House was Federalist! Coincidently with these tidings came rumors that the Federalists would prevent an election by the House until the 4th of March passed, when the Presidency and Vice-Presidency would fall vacant, necessitating a new election. Scarcely less ominous was the report that the Federalists would endeavor to seat Burr in the presidential chair.

When balloting began in the House on February 11, 1801, enough Federalists had been involved in an intrigue to defeat Jefferson to give the vote of six States to Burr. Jefferson received the vote of eight States, but not the majority which was needed to elect, inasmuch as the delegations of two States were evenly divided. The result was the same on thirty-five successive ballots. On the thirty-sixth, February 17, Jefferson received the votes of ten States and Burr of four. The votes of Delaware and South Carolina were blank, the Federalists having agreed to produce a tie by not voting. A similar abstention from voting on the part of Federalists from Vermont and Maryland gave the votes of those States to Jefferson.

More than any other man, Bayard, of Delaware, was responsible for the election of Jefferson. Finding that Burr would not “commit himself,” Bayard announced that he would cast the single vote of his State for Jefferson. “You cannot well imagine the clamor and vehement invective to which I was subjected for some days,” he wrote to Hamilton. “We had several caucuses. All acknowledged that nothing but desperate measures remained, which several were disposed to adopt, and but few were willing openly to disapprove. We broke up each time in confusion and discord, and the manner of the last ballot was arranged but a few minutes before the ballot was taken.” How narrowly the Federalists escaped the folly of electing Burr may be inferred from the further statement of Bayard, that “the means existed of electing Burr, but this required his cooperation. By deceiving one man (a great blockhead), and tempting two (not incorruptible), he might have secured a majority of the States.”

In after years Jefferson was wont to speak of his election as “the Revolution of 1800.” To his mind, it was “as real a revolution in the principles of our government as that of 1776 was in its form; not effected, indeed, by the sword, as that, but by the rational and peaceable instrument of reform, the suffrage of the people.” In one sense, at least, Jefferson was right. Taken collectively, the events of 1800 do constitute a revolution-the first party revolution in American history. For a season it seemed as though the Republican party was to be denied the right to exist as a legal opposition, entitled to attain power by persuasion. At the risk of incurring the suspicion of disloyalty, if not of treason, the Republicans clung tenaciously to their rights as a minority. By persistent use of the press, by unremitting personal efforts, and by adroit electioneering, the leaders succeeded in arousing the apathetic masses and converted their minority into an actual majority. They won, therefore, for all time that recognition of the right of legal opposition which is the primary condition of successful popular government.

The change in political weather was foreshadowed during the summer of 1800 by the removal of the seat of government to the banks of the Potomac. For ten years Philadelphia had been the center of the political and the social worlds, which for the only time in American history were then identical. Even those who knew the court life of Europe marveled at the display of wealth and fashion at this republican court. Of this social world, the “President and his Lady” were not merely the titular and official leaders, but the real leaders. Between the Virginia aristocracy and the wealthy families of Philadelphia there were natural affinities. And if the second Federalist President and his consort did not become leaders in quite the same sense, it was because John and Abigail Adams belonged temperamentally to a more restrained society.

Those who had enjoyed the hospitalities of the Morrises, the Binghams, and the Willings, and the bodily comforts of Philadelphia hotels and inns, were not likely to find any compensations in the unkempt, straggling village which the Government and private speculators were trying to convert into a fitting abode for the National Government. There were few comfortable private dwellings. Most of the houses were mere huts occupied by laborers. Great tracts were left unfenced and uncultivated, in the firm expectation that an extraordinary rise in land value was about to take place. That craze for speculation in land which had possessed those with any idle capital afflicted every landowner in or near the new city.

When Mrs. Adams finally reached the city, after a difficult journey through the forest between Baltimore and Washington, she met with anything but a cheering welcome. The President’s house was not yet finished: the plaster was not even dry on the walls. It was built on a grand and superb scale, but the thrifty New England spirit of the President’s wife was appalled at the prospect of having to employ thirty servants to keep the apartments in order and to tend the fires which had everywhere to be kept up to drive away the ague. The ordinary conveniences were wanting. For lack of a yard, Mrs. Adams made a drying-room out of the great unfinished audience room. And the only society which she might enjoy was in Georgetown, two miles away. “We have, indeed,” she wrote, “come into a new country.” But with true pioneer spirit, she added, “It is a beautiful spot, capable of every improvement, and, the more I view it, the more I am delighted with it.”

The gloom which enveloped the Federalists after the elections of the year deepened as they straggled into the new capital in November. They approached their labors as men who would save what they could of a falling world. For some time there had been an urgent demand for the reorganization of the federal judiciary. The justices of the Supreme Court objected to circuit duty and urged the erection of a circuit court with a permanent bench of judges. Such a reform was inevitable, it was said; therefore let the Federalists find what consolation they might from the possession of these new judgeships. Patriotism, too, suggested the wisdom of filling the judiciary with men who would uphold the established order. “In the future administration of our country,” President Adams wrote to Jay, “the firmest security we can have against the effects of visionary schemes or fluctuating theories will be in a solid judiciary.”

The Judiciary Act of February 13, 1801, which embodied these aims, added five new districts to those which had been established in 1789, and grouped the twenty-two districts into six circuits. The amount of patronage which thus fell into the President’s hands was very considerable, though it was grossly exaggerated by Republicans. The partisan press pictured President John Adams signing the commissions of these new judgeships to the very stroke of twelve on the night of March 3, and then entering his coach and driving in haste from the city.