756 Chapter XXXI
eign powers, which were very real, may have contributed, by creating national par-
ties to debate national issues and elect candidates to national office in an atmo-
sphere of public involvement, to the solidarity of the union, the maintenance of the
constitution, and the survival of the republic.
There was, to be sure, something peculiar in the entire phenomenon. Hamilton,
who loathed the French Revolution, was more of a revolutionary than Jefferson
both in temperament and in the policies that he espoused. He was more impatient
of the compromises on which the federal constitution rested, he wanted to make
over the country, and he would have liked, if he could, to abolish the states (espe-
cially Virginia) and replace them with small départements created by a national
government, as in the French and other revolutionary republics in Europe. Jeffer-
son, who sympathized with the French Revolution, was actually a good deal of a
moderate, both in personality and in his ideas of what should be done. He spoke
for a kind of liberty and equality that had long existed in America, and did not
have to be fought for as in Europe, a liberty that meant freedom from government,
and an equality of the kind that obtained among yeoman farmers—a way of life
that had been threatened by British policy before 1775, and was threatened by
Hamiltonian policy after 1790, in each case with the support of American “aristo-
crats” or persons aspiring to become such. Because of their different views on the
need of change, it was Hamilton who was the “unitarist,” and Jefferson the “feder-
alist,” in the sense then current in Europe, where, as has been seen, the radical
democrats were unitarists, and the moderates inclined to the decentralization of
power. The unitarist and “revolutionary” Hamilton was certainly no Jacobin, but he
was the nearest that the United States ever produced to a Bonaparte.
On a more general plane, also, the kinds of people who in the United States
favored the French Revolution were not the same as in Europe. Nor were conser-
vatives in America socially akin to those of Europe. There was a curious reversal or
transposition. In Europe, on the whole, those who favored the French Revolution
were middle- class people living in towns, including a good many bankers and
businessmen, especially those interested in the newer forms of economic enter-
prise and development. Among the rural population, on the Continent, it was the
landowners and property- owning farmers living nearest to the cities, most in-
volved in a market economy, and enjoying the best communications with the out-
side world, who were most receptive to the Revolutionary ideas. In America the
opposite was more nearly true. The business and mercantile community, and the
farmers who lived nearest to the towns, or along the rivers and arteries of traffic
and communication, were generally Federalist, and they became anti- French and
anti- Republican. The same inversion holds for the counterrevolution, which in Eu-
rope was essentially agrarian. It drew its strength from the landed aristocracy, and
from peasants who were politically apathetic, or looked upon cities as the abodes
of their enemies. In the United States the Virginia gentry, and the farmers farthest
from towns, along the frontier from Vermont through western Pennsylvania into
Kentucky, were strongly Jeffersonian, Republican, anti- British, and partisan to the
French Revolution. To this broad generalization various exceptions must be recog-
nized, since in America (as in Europe) many urban “mechanics” and many of the
professional classes, notably doctors, favored the newly forming republicanism; but