Perhaps even more important was foreign policy, where the Federalists favored Britain because of its political stability and its close ties to American trade, while the Republicans admired France and the French Revolution.

[2] The First Party System ended during the Era of Good Feelings (1816–1824), as the Federalists shrank to a few isolated strongholds and the Democratic-Republicans lost unity.

The Anti-Federalists were deeply concerned about the theoretical danger of a strong central government (like that of Britain) that someday could usurp the rights of the states.

[4] The Anti-Federalist argument influenced the drafting and eventual passage of the Bill of Rights,[5] which the Federalists agreed to add to the Constitution.

In most states, the congressional elections were recognized in some sense, as Jefferson strategist John Beckley put it, as a "struggle between the Treasury department and the republican interest".

[9] The Jeffersonians vehemently denounced the treaty, saying it threatened to undermine republicanism by giving the aristocratic British and their Federalist allies too much influence.

[10] The fierce debates over the Jay Treaty in 1794–96, according to William Nisbet Chambers, nationalized politics and turned a faction in Congress into a nationwide party.

Editors directed much abuse toward opposition politicians—the fatal duel between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr was incited by their own personal newspaper attacks on each other.

H aunted by whores—he haunted them in turn A ristocratic was this noble Goat M onster of monsters, in pollution skill'd I mmers'd in mischief, brothels, funds & banks L ewd slave to lust,—afforded consolation; T o mourning whores, and tory-lamentation.

The most heated rhetoric came in debates over the French Revolution, especially during the Reign of Terror of 1793–94, which saw huge numbers of executions of the revolutionary government's political opponents.

Some of them had the ability ... to not only see and analyze the problem at hand but to present it in a succinct fashion; in short, to fabricate the apt phrase, to coin the compelling slogan and appeal to the electorate on any given issue in language it could understand.

[citation needed]Outstanding phrasemakers included editor William Duane, party leaders Albert Gallatin and Thomas Cooper, and Jefferson himself.

[28] Meanwhile, John J. Beckley of Pennsylvania, an ardent partisan, invented new campaign techniques (such as mass distribution of pamphlets and of handwritten ballots) that generated the grass-roots support and unprecedented levels of voter turnout for the Jeffersonians.

With the world thrown into global warfare after 1793, the small nation on the fringe of the European system could barely remain neutral.

[29] In 1798 disputes with France led to the Quasi-War (1798–1800), an undeclared naval war involving the navies and merchant ships of both countries.

The Alien and Sedition Acts (1798) clamped down on dissenters, including pro-Jefferson editors, and Vermont Congressman Matthew Lyon, who won re-election while in jail in 1798.

In the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions (1798), secretly drafted by Madison and Jefferson, the legislatures of the two states challenged the power of the federal government.

Burrows says of Gallatin: His own fears of personal dependency and his small-shopkeeper's sense of integrity, both reinforced by a strain of radical republican thought that originated in England a century earlier, convinced him that public debts were a nursery of multiple public evils—corruption, legislative impotence, executive tyranny, social inequality, financial speculation, and personal indolence.

[32] In an analysis of the contemporary party system, Jefferson wrote on February 12, 1798: Two political Sects have arisen within the U. S. the one believing that the executive is the branch of our government which the most needs support; the other that like the analogous branch in the English Government, it is already too strong for the republican parts of the Constitution; and therefore in equivocal cases they incline to the legislative powers: the former of these are called federalists, sometimes aristocrats or monocrats, and sometimes Tories, after the corresponding sect in the English Government of exactly the same definition: the latter are styled republicans, Whigs, jacobins, anarchists, dis-organizers, etc.

[33]Madison worked diligently to form party lines inside the Congress and build coalitions with sympathetic political factions in each state.

Jefferson's foreign policy was not exactly pro-Napoleon, but it applied pressure on Britain to stop impressment of American sailors and other hostile acts.

By engineering an embargo of trade against Britain, Jefferson and Madison plunged the nation into economic depression, ruined much of the business of Federalist New England, and finally precipitated the War of 1812 with a much larger and more powerful foe.

That year the semi-secret "Hartford Convention" passed resolutions that verged on secession; their publication ruined the Federalist party.

While Federalists helped invent or develop numerous campaign techniques (such as the first national nominating conventions in 1808[36]), their elitist bias alienated the middle class, thus allowing the Jeffersonians to claim they represented the true spirit of "republicanism".

Some newspaper editors became powerful politicians, such as Thomas Ritchie, whose "Richmond Junto" controlled Virginia state politics from 1808 into the 1840s.

[38]Religious tensions polarized Connecticut, as the established Congregational Church, in alliance with the Federalists, tried to maintain its grip on power.

The First Party System was primarily built around foreign policy issues that vanished with the defeat of Napoleon and the compromise settlement of the War of 1812.

The little state of Delaware, largely isolated from the larger political forces controlling the nation, saw the First Party System continue well into the 1820s, with the Federalists occasionally winning some offices.

Call them, therefore, liberals and serviles, Jacobins and Ultras, whigs and tories, republicans and federalists, aristocrats and democrats, or by whatever name you please, they are the same parties still and pursue the same object.

At best according to many historians, the Jeffersonians were reactionary utopians who resisted the onrush of capitalist modernity in hopes of turning America into a yeoman farmers' arcadia.