The Anti-Administration party was an informal political faction in the United States led by James Madison and Thomas Jefferson that opposed policies of then Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton in the first term of U.S. president George Washington.
Although contemporaries often referred to Hamilton's opponents as "Anti-Federalists", that term is now seen as imprecise since several Anti-Administration leaders supported ratification, including Virginia Representative James Madison.
At the Constitutional Convention in 1787 and during the ratifying process in 1788, Madison was one of the most prominent advocates of a smaller national government.
[8] However, Madison joined with Henry Tazewell and others to oppose Hamilton's First Report on the Public Credit in January 1790.
The deadlock was broken by the Compromise of 1790, a deal between Madison and Secretary of State Jefferson on one hand and Hamilton on the other, which included both assumption and the location of the national capital in the South, which later became the District of Columbia.
[10][11] In the summer of 1791, Jefferson and Madison brought the journalist Philip Freneau, a fiery editor of a New York City Anti-Federalist paper, to Philadelphia to start an Anti-Administration newspaper, the National Gazette.