Federalists

I came across something the other day that inspired me to refresh my memory on the Federalists. In Howard Dean for King, Douglas points to Is Howard Dean running for king? and closes with:

Dean is exactly the kind of politician our founding fathers abhorred.

Some of them certainly, but by no means all.

Washington was originally a conservative and quite willing to live with the British system as long as it was run on this continent. No more foreign rule was good enough for him; as a local aristocrat, he'd be fine. As it turned out, Washington was the master of the compromise and he helped to set the original tone of basic fairness in our government.

Hamilton and Adams were two other well known known conservatives (although Adams had quite a bit of a liberal republican streak and largely supported States rights). They supported a strong Federal government and were initially against a one man, one vote system. Hamilton pushed to create a strong central banking system, to enact taxes and form a standing army to collect them during the Whiskey Rebellion. Adams was responsible for passing (if not entirely agreeing with) the Sedition Act of 1798 which made criticizing the federal government a criminal act. These are not typical of the actions one would assume a strong supporter of individual and states rights would take.

There were those in the southern states who worried about the power of the federal government to enact laws that would restrict southern behavior but the series of compromises that resulted in our form of democracy muted their protests and those concerns were never acted upon.

Ever since we've had a surging, swirling debate on the balance between the rights of our nation state versus the rights of the individuals states that make up the republic. Among many other subjects, Adams and Jefferson continued to discuss these issues in their letters over the last years of their lives.

We've called upon our system many times to settle our differences, but the civil war was the event that sets the most obvious precedent. A grumpy union was preserved and it only took another hundred years before the issue was finally settled once and for all.

Suggested reading:

A History of the American Revolution is amazingly still in print and makes a good desk reference (although some seem to differ). I've only recently purchased Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation which comes well recommended and purports to cover the territory in a more direct fashion (with a lot less of the historical wandering).