Republicans
...Jefferson, James Madison, and lesser figures in the infant federal government united with, encouraged, and assumed the leadership of popular opposition to Alexander Hamilton's economic and financial programs. As their name implied, the coalition came together out of fear that the American experiment in popular self-governance—a revolutionary vision only twelve years old at the adoption of the Constitution—was profoundly threatened by the policies of the first secretary of the Treasury, the broad interpretation of the Constitution advanced in their behalf, and the antipopulistic sentiments expressed by some of Hamilton's supporters. After 1793, when revolutionary France and Britain entered into twenty years of war, the opposition deepened, broadened into foreign policy, and mobilized a large enough proportion of the population that the Jeffersonians are usually described as the first American political party. They defeated their Federalist opponents in the election of 1800 and vanquished them entirely in the years after the War of 1812. The modern Democratic Party, which celebrated its bicentennial in 1992, claims direct descent from these "Republican" progenitors. Today's Republicans did not originate until the 1850s, but might also fairly claim to be the heirs of Jeffersonian ideas.
Hamilton's proposals for the funding of the revolutionary war debt, federal assumption of the obligations of the states, creation of a national bank, and federal encouragement of native manufactures were intended to equip the new United States with economic and financial institutions similar to those on which Great Britain had been carried to the pinnacle of international prestige. Hamilton expected to secure the nation's freedom, promote prosperity and growth, and thus win the nation's firm allegiance to the fledgling Constitution. But Hamilton's proposals favored certain men...
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