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Book Review
| Gerald Leonard, The Invention of Party Politics: Federalism, Popular Sovereignty, and Constitutional Development in Jacksonian Illinois, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. Pp. ix + 328. $45.00 (ISBN 0-8078-2744-4).
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| As the recall election in California made clear, partisan politics are alive and well in America. Indeed, since the mid-nineteenth century, most of the nation's electorate has readily accepted the principle that competitive mass parties are a necessity in a democratic form of government. This embrace of partisan organization, however, was not shared by the founding generation who "condemned 'formed opposition' as destructive of the public good and fatal to public peace" (1). |
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Confronted with these paradoxical historical perspectives, Gerald Leonard's Invention of Party Politics explores "how these early Americans ... managed to blaze the trail from that strange world of the Founding ... to the world of the 1840s in which party identification [became] the organizing principle of democracy" (2). Though not the first scholar to examine this transition, Leonard's work represents an important and innovative departure from the established historiography and stands as a major contribution to our understanding of the formation of America's party system. |
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Moving deftly beyond the Hofstadter/Wallace thesis and its portrayal of the Jacksonian parties as vehicles for building coalitions and managing competition among rival interests, and the more recent socioeconomic/ideologically focused "market revolution" consensus, Leonard argues that "it was the problem of federalism [and the closely connected principle of popular sovereignty] that preoccupied those who actually built the bridge from antipartyism to partyism" (3). Stated plainly, Leonard contends that it was the electorate's determination to defend a "democratic, states' rights Constitution" (4) against its supposedly aristocratic, consolidationist enemies that led to the formation and acceptance of party politics. |
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The roots of the "partyist" ethos, Leonard insists, can be traced to the antipartyist tendencies of the founders. Imbued with the belief that factionalism—party conflict—denoted corruption of the sociopolitical order, the founders interpreted their imperial struggle with Great Britain as an endeavor to thwart the ministerial faction's [both in Parliament and the imperial bureaucracy] effort to pervert a balanced constitution to advantage the rich and powerful. Similar fears then led the founders to construct "constitutions against parties" in order to protect the nascent republic and its democratic ideals from the baneful and selfish effects of party. The rapid ascendancy of Hamilton's consolidationist agenda, however, aroused antipartyists such as James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, who feared that an organized and aggressive aristocratic estate stood ready to extinguish the rights of the popular sovereign. In response to the perceived threat of faction, antipartyists organized a constitutional opposition to curb the epidemic of special privilege. Sustained electoral success after 1800, war, and the demise of the Federalists, offered convincing proof to the antipartyists of the success of their crusade and represented the culmination of their long struggle to overcome faction and to secure the republic. |
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As Leonard makes clear, it was this tradition of constitutional, "democratic single-partyism" (36) that inspired Martin Van Buren, the architect of the modern American party system. Importantly, as Leonard notes, this "supposed prophet of the party system was imbued with antipartyism's condemnation of parties as enemies to the general interest" (39). Indeed, Van Buren "aspired only to perpetuate what he saw as the grandest of Jefferson's achievements: the structural dominance of the ... democracy—the Constitution's only sovereign body—over the small, anticonstitutional party of the monied aristocracy" (39). Thus, Van Buren's insistence upon the spoils system, strict party loyalty, and nomination by party convention were not mere partisan actions but rather stand as republican measures, designed to ensure the supremacy of the constitutionalist partyists over selfserving, antipartyist, protoaristocrats such as John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay. Likewise, organization was justified by the antipartyist supporters of Adams and Clay, as the only means of protecting a tenuous democracy from the rapacious grasping of Van Buren's cabal. "In a world [seemingly] dominated by aristocracies," Leonard writes, "America struggled [via partisan organization] for the means to give the Constitution life and thus to keep the partyless democracy's hands on the lever of government" (50). |
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Specifically, The Invention of Party Politics traces the dynamics of this struggle in Jacksonian Illinois. Prior to the 1830s, Leonard attests, an "antiparty consensus ... infused Illinois political culture" (53). In short order, however, debate over issues such as slavery, the Corrupt Bargain, proscription, the bank war, and Van Buren's independent treasury initiative raised the specter of impending factional subversion of the democracy and produced the first tentative partyist efforts (grounded in the antipartyist tradition of the founders) in the state. The fallout associated with the Panic of 1837 and the forthcoming presidential election of 1840 intensified the level of political debate in Illinois and paved the way for more permanent organization and an undiluted, democratic, two-party system with "each party pos[ing] as a defender of the state's and the common citizen's independence against an anticonstitutional structure supposedly advocated by the other" (204). |
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In the end, Leonard convincingly demonstrates, the partyist reforms advocated by Van Buren and his allies did not produce the singular ascendant constitutional party of the sovereign that he envisioned. On the contrary, "the effort to do so provoked a sustained politics of competitive parties" (267). Sectionalism further undermined the partyists' efforts to preserve constitutional democracy, producing instead factional movements pursuing sectional agendas. The ascendancy of "the politics of faction rather than constitutional principle," Leonard affirms, thus "left the Constitution [according to Van Buren] without its legitimate interpreter—the embodied people ... [and] ceded control of the Constitution to the worst possible institution: the federal judiciary, unelected, lifetenured, and irresponsible" (268). The result, Leonard insists, marked the failure of the national party system and opened the door for the consolidation (epitomized by Dred Scott) long feared by the partyists. |
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The Invention of Party Politics stands as a lucid and provocative study of the emergence of modern party politics in the United States. Its impact upon the historiography of Jacksonian politics will be a profound and long lasting one. |
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| Martin J. Hershock
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| University of Michigan–Dearborn |
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