Ohio History Journal

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DONALD J

DONALD J. RATCLIFFE

 

The Experience of Revolution

and the Beginnings of Party

Politics in Ohio, 1776-1816

 

The American Revolution would scarcely be worth the name if it

signified nothing more than separation from Great Britain. In fact, it was

the beginning of an experiment to create a republic in which a free people

could be governed justly without resort to the traditional sources of state

power: hereditary right and ancient prescription. The new republic,

however, did not take shape overnight; as several recent historians have

argued, domestic politics even after 1800 were still preoccupied with

working out the problems posed by the Revolution. The new nation was

torn by internal rivalries and differing conceptions of what the charac-

ter of the republic should be; at the same time, the United States was

drawn into the revolutionary ferment that enveloped Europe after 1789.

Its integrity was jeopardized as much in 1812 as the colonies' had been

before 1775. Throughout this long period of crisis, Americans were less

united than they had been at the time of independence, and needed to

create a stable order that would hold the nation together without com-

promising the principles of the Revolution. As it happened, Americans

evolved a system of ordering their conflicts that would become the most

distinctive feature of political life in the United States: the American

system of mass political parties, in most of its essentials, was the

creation not of the Age of Jackson, but of the Age of Revolution.2

 

 

 

 

1. For the search for a "republic" during the Revolution, see Gordon S. Wood, The

Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (Chapel Hill, 1969). The theme is continued

into the early nineteenth century by, among others, Roger H. Brown, The Republic in

Peril: 1812 (New York, 1964); David H. Fischer, The Revolution of American Conser-

vatism: The Federalist Party in the Era of Jeffersonian Democracy (New York, 1965);

Linda K. Kerber, Federalists in Dissent: Imagery and Ideology in Jeffersonian America

(Ithaca, 1970); and, especially, Richard E. Ellis, The Jeffersonian Crisis: Courts and

Politics in the Young Republic (New York, 1971).

2. For recent writings on the early party system, see, in addition to works cited below,

Joseph E. Charles, The Origins of the American Party System (Williamsburg, 1956);

William N. Chambers, Political Parties In A New Nation: The American Experience,

1776-1809 (New York, 1963); Paul Goodman, "The First American Party System,"

William N. Chambers and Walter D. Burnham, eds., The American Party Systems: Stages

of Political Development (New York, 1967); and Norman K. Risjord, ed., The Early

American Party System (New York, 1969).