758 Chapter XXXI
The point is, of course, that both parties in America, far from being interested in
an exact understanding of events, were using the current ideological arguments for
their own purposes. Nor, for all the reversal of roles, were those arguments irrele-
vant to American issues. The bankers, merchants and shipping magnates who sup-
ported the Federalist party would not have been considered really high- class in
Europe. In the class structure of America, however, they were upper crust; and the
fact that there was no higher or older aristocracy for them to rebel against is what
made it possible for them to be so conservative. The High Federalists seem to have
thought ( John Adams and merely moderate Federalists were not so sure) that the
upper classes of the United States and Great Britain had a great deal in common.
Aspiring to be aristocrats, they made themselves into legitimate targets for demo-
crats. Appropriating the language of the European counterrevolution, they natu-
rally found “republicans” arrayed against them. The great dispute in America was
no mere comedy of errors, nor incongruous shadow- boxing; it was, as in Europe, a
contest between different views on right and justice, on the form of the good soci-
ety, and on the direction in which the world in general, and the new United States
in particular, ought to move.
The Impact of the Outside World
Before more is said on internal divisions, it is important to point to a few ways in
which there was no division at all.^16 There was no revolutionary extremism in
America. Not only did no one propose “communism”; no one had even officially
proposed, as in France, a comprehensive system of public schools. Truly counter-
revolutionary opinion was equally absent. No one called for a restoration of King
George, or a return to subordination under the Parliament of Great Britain. No
American of any importance would have accepted the Canada Act of 1791. Na-
tives of the old colonies who preferred such arrangements had departed; those who
returned either changed their minds or kept silent. The United States had no party
of returned émigrés. Such “counter- revolution” as had occurred was purely relative.
The Pennsylvania constitution of 1776, with its resemblances to the French Jaco-
bin constitution of the Year I, was replaced by a new one in 1790; but the new
Pennsylvania plan, in which the governor, senate, and lower house were all directly
elected by a wide suffrage, was exceedingly democratic, not only by European stan-
dards of the 1790’s, but also in the light of American experience before 1776. The
federal constitution was “conservative” in that it created a national government, in
1285–86; on de Broeta, E. Discailles, “Un négociant anversois à la fin du XVIIIe siecle,” in Académie
royale de Belgique, Bulletin de la classe des lettres (Brussels, 1901), 505–58.
16 For the present section it is hardly necessary to cite the abundant bibliography, of which a good
recent summary is given by Chambers, op.cit., 209–16. I have drawn especially on Chambers; on J.
Charles, Origins of the American Party System (Williamsburg, 1956); A. DeConde, Untangling Alliance:
Politics and Diplomacy under George Washington (Durham, N.C., 1958); D. Malone, Jefferson and the
Ordeal of Liberty (Boston, 1962); J. C. Miller, Alexander Hamilton, Portrait in Paradox (New York,
1959); and have attempted to point up what is commonly known with observations arising from a
comparative view of Europe and America.