America 773
ble to practice these irenic virtues. The fact that the central government had little
power anyway, in contrast to Europe, likewise made its transfer to new hands less
alarming.
The “Revolution of 1800” hardly lay in the acts of the new administration, which
repealed the war taxes of 1798, reduced the army, allowed the Alien and Sedition
Acts to expire, effected a few changes in the judiciary, and made it easier for small
farmers to acquire land in the West, where Ohio became a state in 1803, and the
whole of the former Louisiane soon stood open to settlement. The “revolution”
consisted in the repudiation of pretensions to which the Federalist chieftains had
become victims.
The Federalists had fallen from a precipice of their own making, as Elihu Palmer
had somewhat floridly predicted in 1793. A party which had begun with construc-
tive economic and fiscal ideas wound up ten years later crying for military demon-
strations. A party that had at first stood for national unity in ten years brought the
country to the brink of civil war. Men who claimed to be the best friends of the
constitution, and to be consolidating the American Revolution, now disparaged
the sovereignty of the people and denounced liberty and equality as delusions.
Gentlemen hardly known for their own piety called republicanism atheistic. Those
who happened to be manning the government identified themselves with govern-
ment itself. The prominent Federalists, at least in their own estimation and their
attitudes, became, under stress of the world ideological conflict, so much like the
privileged classes of Europe that Americans turned against them in disgust. Plain
farmers who had voted Federalist in 1796 voted Republican in 1800. Many who
had never voted before now came to the polls. The Federalists never again elected
a president or had a majority in Congress. That was the Revolution of 1800. It was,
in its way, a considerable “revolution,” for it gave answers to two of the great ques-
tions posed during the decade. It showed that the constitution was becoming au-
thoritative, generally accepted above the strife of parties. And it showed the direc-
tion in which the new nation would develop.
In this vindication of democracy in America it is hard to disentangle what was
indigenous and what was owing to influences from abroad. It is clear that the for-
eign influence was very great. The division into Federalists and Republicans was
itself the consequence of war and revolution in Europe. Federalism suffered from
too close an association with the European counter- revolution. Republicanism, or
the ideology of American democracy, gained in range and drive from association
with the European revolutionary forces. Never again could American democratic
ideas be ethnocentric or backward- looking, dwelling on good old Saxon liberties
in the far- off days of King Alfred, nor predominantly defensive, complaining of
innovations and protecting simple farmer folk from the wiles of cities. Henceforth,
there would be a belief, more than in 1776, that democracy was a matter of con-
cern to the world as a whole, that it was a thing of the future, that while it was
blocked in other countries the United States should be its refuge and its example,
that Americans had a kind of duty meanwhile to develop it and to promote it, so
that peoples of other nations, old and new, might someday move in the same di-
rection. Both the successes and the reverses of the Revolution in Europe helped to
fix this attitude in the American mind. There is something in the paradox pro-