Federalists Vs. Democratic Republicans

Forget today’s party machinery. We go back to the 1790s, when “party” meant faction, suspicion, and heated pamphlets rather than primaries and platforms. With constitutional law scholar Dr. Sean Beienberg, we trace how Federalists and Democratic Republicans sparred over the meaning of the Constitution, the reach of federal power, the role of religion in public life, and which European power the young republic should trust.

We unpack the Federalist vision shaped by Alexander Hamilton: a commercial republic anchored by the Bank of the United States, credible public credit, and strategic support for institutions that stabilized civic life. You’ll hear why many Federalists backed state-established churches, preferred Britain as France’s revolution veered into anti-institutional fury, and saw national strength as essential to economic growth. Then we pivot to the Jeffersonian response: strict construction of enumerated powers, deep skepticism of broad “necessary and proper” claims, and a belief that the bank served entrenched elites rather than ordinary citizens. Madison’s rapid move into Jefferson’s camp comes into focus as a defense of federalism, states’ rights, and a narrower reading of the general welfare power.

The story isn’t static. We follow shifting foreign policy—quasi-war with France, embargoes aimed at Britain, and the path to the War of 1812—and show how those choices reshaped domestic alliances. Inside the judiciary fight, we highlight the surprising coalition of moderates who protected judicial independence by resisting partisan impeachments, a decision that preserved the court’s legitimacy. By the end, you’ll see why the Federalist Party declined and how many of its institutional ideas were quietly absorbed into American governance, leaving a legacy that still frames debates over national power, economic policy, and the place of religion in public life.

If you enjoy clear, spirited history that connects founding-era choices to today’s constitutional and policy debates, follow the show, share it with a friend, and leave a quick review to help more curious listeners find us.

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Chapters

• 1:32 Setting The Stage: Early Factions
• 2:17 What “Party” Meant In The 1790s
• 3:22 Defining Federalists And Federalism
• 4:26 Hamilton’s Program And Federal Power
• 5:56 Institutions, Churches, And State Support
• 6:36 Britain Vs. France And The Revolution
• 8:19 Jeffersonians’ Skepticism Of Hamilton
• 10:11 Foreign Policy Shifts And The Embargo
• 11:44 Impeachments, Moderates, And Party Decline
• 13:07 Factions Fade, Parties Evolve

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:46

Welcome back to Civics in a year. Today we are talking about some differences between political parties and not the political parties of today. Because we are kind of going back early American history. We are looking at what the main difference between the Federalists and the Democratic Republicans were. And with us, we have our constitutional law scholar, Dr. Sean Beidenberg. Dr. Beidenberg, what is the difference between these two factions?

What “Party” Meant In The 1790s

Defining Federalists And Federalism

Hamilton’s Program And Federal Power

Institutions, Churches, And State Support

Britain Vs. France And The Revolution

Jeffersonians’ Skepticism Of Hamilton

Foreign Policy Shifts And The Embargo

Impeachments, Moderates, And Party Decline

SPEAKER_00 1:15

Well, it's and your choice of the word faction is right. And your discussion of how the parties are different is also correct. Because when we think of a party today, we think of a very well-organized, like a formal uh nominating caucus, you know, campaign workers and things like that. And this is not how parties were understood at the time. So the way we understand parties today comes largely from the thinking of like Edmund Burke, who would say, and I know we're going to do a bunch on sort of what's the purpose of parties, but it's worth just showing how it's different here. Burke argued effectively that parties are groups of people who are organized together who have similar views to sort of advance a common political perspective, which is pretty sensible. The way that they thought of parties at the time, though, is closer to what we would think of as factions, but really the term would almost be closer to cabal, right? There was this negative idea about parties, uh that they were effectively cabals of people that didn't have the public interest at heart. And so you see this when Madison talks about faction in the Federalist papers. It's not just a group of people that say we prefer to foreshadow one of the things we talk about, Britain or France in foreign policy. They really have the attitude that these are sort of cabals against the public good. And so it's also worth so we'll start with the federalists. Again, it's worth emphasizing one of the things that we can get confused about is the term federalism, federalists, right? So federalism is a concept in which power is decentralized and the central government has some power, but most power remains at the, in our case, the state level. Federalists are often folks who are defending the Constitution on grounds that it is creating this system with sort of divided power, stronger than the Articles. The Federalist Party, so to speak, is largely, but not exclusively, the people who had defended the Constitution most vociferously. They tended to have a different view of a couple of issues with what then becomes the Democratic-Republican Party. So the Federalist Party, and again, parties, I think is putting quotes here, at least in the early 1790s, tends to be tends to be people who have a more expansive view of federal power. And it's easy to overstate that and say, and therefore this is, say, you know, the post-New Deal Democratic Party with sweeping views of federal power. It was a few particular issues. So they tended to be supportive of Alexander Hamilton's preference for basically doing things to create a commercial republic at the federal level. So they were sympathetic to the creation of a bank of the United States, which would mostly, and we think bank, we think somebody goes there and borrows, you know,$30,000 to start a business or something like that. No, this was supposed to be basically for like major infrastructure and capital kind of stuff. Many of them were sympathetic to Hamilton's idea that he wanted to create, they called them bounties, but they would be basically subsidies. And again, I say many of them because some of these issues fail in Congress because some of the people who are sympathetic to the Federalist program are not willing to go all the way, right? They think Hamilton's view of the Constitution is too expansive. And it's worth emphasizing how centrally Hamilton is the organizer of the Federalist Party, which is another thing that's striking in this era, is in some sense how personal a lot of this is. If you go back and read through the history, you'll have people that will sort of try to sign up with the administration as a federalist, and then they'll get rejected for a job, and suddenly they'll like throw themselves into Jefferson's hands as a protest. And it's not really clearly ideological necessarily. So the Federalists had a more expansive view of federal power. Again, not feds can do anything, but more expansive. A second thing is that the Federalists tended to be more sympathetic to institutions having support of government. So, for example, at the state level, the Federalists tended to support established churches. Everybody agrees the federal government can't do this because of the First Amendment, but the Federalists are generally supportive of the organized congregational church being the official church of many of the states of New England. George Washington and John Marshall are supportive in the 1780s of maintaining the Anglican now Episcopalian Church as the official church of Virginia. And there's other institutions that we can think of along those lines, but they're much more sympathetic to these ideas of sort of mediating institutions that need to have governmental support. And a third thing that I think is quite different between them is that the Federalists end up being much more sympathetic to Britain. And this will become a bigger deal later on with the War of 1812. But originally the Federalists, again, their buddy Lafayette is starting the early stages of the French Revolution. They're okay with it. As the French Revolution becomes more and more across the board anti-institutional, right? It's one thing to just say, all right, now the king is going to be a constitutional monarch and we're going to dissolve formal privileges for the aristocracy. But once you move from that to actually maybe we should eliminate the Catholic Church, actually, maybe we should eliminate the Catholic Church by the guillotine, right? The Federalists are much quicker to turn against the French Revolution. Whereas for quite a while, the Jeffersonians or the Democratic Republicans tend to be more sympathetic to the French Revolution, at least through its sort of early to mid-stages. Again, eventually they will also sort of taper off and be horrified by it. So that's sort of what the Federalists are. And so you can imagine from their perspective, they tend to look at Jefferson and his allies who become the Democratic Republicans as people who are fundamentally hostile to institutions. They're basically people who are pulling everything down. One of my favorite things to do, go back and look on YouTube for the Reason magazine advertisements from the 1800 election. It's amazing. It's exact quotes from Jefferson versus Adams and the slurs that they're flinging at each other. It makes anything of politics today look pretty tame. But the core of those critiques are the Jeffersonians are crazy atheists who will destroy the Constitution, who will destroy the government, who will destroy the economy, they'll destroy everything, they'll destroy commercial interactions. So that's sort of the Federalist take. The Jeffersonians tend to and it's worth also noting one thing. Again, I tried to say at the beginning that the Federalist Party tends to be the people who have been part of the Federalist group trying to get the Constitution passed, but it's not one-to-one. There are people who are skeptical of the Constitution that then decide, actually, we're we're happy with the limits, we're okay. Or there are people who say, you know what, I'm I'm skeptical of the Constitution, but the French Revolution is crazy. And I don't want part of a faction that's sympathetic to that. So for the foreign policy side, kind of make some people switch as well. The Jeffersonians, I mean again, they don't have formal names. They're originally called sort of democratic-republican societies, but they're more like little clubs, which the Federalists understand as basically conspiracies. So the Jeffersonians tend to be skeptical that Hamilton is effectively pulling a bait and switch. You promised this constitution would have all these limits on federal power, and suddenly now you're calling for a loose construction of the necessary and proper clause, and especially for the ability of the federal government to tax and spend on anything that it wishes to is general welfare, that that's not an enumerated power attached to an enumerated power, but is its own power. So this is partly why Madison switches very quick, very hard, very quickly, to become effectively the number two of the Jeffersonians or the Democratic Republicans. So they think what they're doing is organizing a group of people who are defending the Constitution, defending federalism, defending states' rights, defending faithful interpretation of it, against effectively what they see as a quasi-monarchical, quasi-aristocratic, pro-bureaucracy, pro-big institutions. Like that, you know, their view is normal people can't borrow money from this bank. So why are we creating government protection for it? This is basically just rich people creating institutions that other rich people will borrow from. And so they tend to be much more skeptical on that. Historians will often oversimplify this to say that the Jeffersonians are an agricultural faction and the Federalists are a commercial faction. As sort of, I guess, overall averages, that's perhaps true. But I think it's a mistake to just say if you're an agricultural, if you're if you're, you know, there are people who are agriculturally inclined in New England who are Jeffersoni, right? So it's not, it's not one-to-one. So another thing that Jeffersonians, again, they're skeptical of Hamilton. In some sense, they're almost an anti-Hamilton faction. But they also tend to be more sympathetic to the French, insofar the French Revolution. You know, it's again easy to overstate this. Jefferson doesn't want Washington to intervene proactively militarily on behalf of the French Revolution or anything. But Jefferson basically wants a to our friends who were fighting for liberty kind of a message, but we still can't help you, right? So it's again easy to overstate this. They are skeptical when the Federalists start spooling up the when Adams is president, the material to fight the quasi-war, sort of naval construction, which is basically an undeclared war with France. And then later on, the Jeffersonians and the Devlash Democratic-Republicans push through the embargo, uh, which is mostly designed to stop the British or to push back against the British, which then sort of leads into the War of 1812. I'm oversimplifying a little of that history, but it leads into the War of 1812, which is prosecuted by Madison, Jefferson and Madison, and which you see Federalists again taking a few positions, which are kind of interesting, very states rights-y, but they're very critical of uh of Jefferson uh and Madison. So I would say those are their sort of main differences. There's shifting over time. It's a 20-year window, but and there are people hopping uh back and forth between them. And there are, and it's worth emphasizing again, there are moderate factions within them. So the Jeffersonians want to impeach a Federalist judge. The first judge to ever get impeached is a Supreme Court justice, uh Justice Chase. And Jefferson, once these folks win the elections, they close the Supreme Court at one point, and they're also going for straight-up impeaching justices. And a moderate faction of Jeffersonians agrees with the moderate faction of Federalists to say we don't want to create this precedent where we're canning judges for being jerks or a couple bad rulings. So, and this will end up sort of being partly why the Federalist Party will decline. Part of it's the wake of 1812, but part of it is that the Jeffersonians will end up adopting some of their views later.

Factions Fade, Parties Evolve

SPEAKER_01 12:16

And I'm glad that you pointed out that these are they're not political parties as we know them today. They are more of fashions, which is why they don't last long. And we're gonna dig into you know the kind of rise of different political parties as we go through American history, as we kind of go on later. So, Dr. Beinberg, thank you so much.