Civics 8-31-12

First Peaceful Transfer of Political Power

1. This was demonstrated by the very first modern new democracy, the United States of America. The Americans first experiences as an independent democratic republic in the 1780’s and 1790’s. However, in 1801 this first modern democratic regime added to its already impressive set of political achievements the first-ever peaceful transition of power after democratic elections had been won by a party in opposition to the government of the day. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, the representative assemblies, especially their increasingly powerful lower houses, dominated colonial politics, disappointing British imperial administrators' hopes that the royally-appointed governors would play the dominant role.

 2. Between 1776 and 1787, American political thinking became even more receptive to the case for energetic government.  To understand the beginnings of party politics in the new nation in the 1790s, it is particularly important to note the lesson about executive power that Americans were beginning to draw from their political experience in the 1770s and 1780s. Here we see them learning from their failures as well as from their successes. Suspicion about and jealousy of power wielded by political executives had become an almost automatic reflex during colonial and revolutionary politics, because colonial governors had been officers with British rather than American political bases and loyalties, and because American Whigs accepted the English Whig tradition that had championed the rights of the legislature over a tyrannical executive.

3.However, by the time that Massachusetts politicians (most prominently and vigorously, John Adams) wrote that state's second constitution in 1780, and even more clearly when the federal Constitution of 1787 was being discussed, it had become evident to thoughtful Americans that it was a serious error to make executives too weak and too subordinate to the legislature. One very good reason why Americans in the eighteenth century found it less easy than we do today to consider political parties as useful and even respectable devices is that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries political parties–and bloody international and civil wars–had been based on religious differences and (as in the English civil war) on conflicts over sovereignty that were inseparable from such religious differences.

4. James Madison's Federalist Number 10 makes it clear that political parties of a kind were (as one would expect) anticipated by the experienced politicians who favored the new Constitution. However, what Madison, like other Federalists, expected to see in American national politics was not parties of principle, but "factions," that is, parties motivated by passions and interests that, if they could have their way, would surely enact policies that are unjust or unwise. In free countries these inevitably try to exert political influence.

Jordan Holley

3^rd&4^TH Period Civics!