The Michelle Smith Lecture Series
Founding Partisans: Hamilton, Madison, Jefferson, Adams and the Brawling Birth of American Politics
To the framers of the Constitution, political parties were a threat to republican virtues. Yet parties emerged even before ratification of the Constitution, and they took firmer root in the following decade. Founding Partisans offers a fresh and lively narrative of the early republic as the Founding Fathers fought one another with competing visions of what our nation would be.
The first party, the Federalists, formed to overthrow the Articles of Confederation and make the federal government more robust. Its opponents, the Antifederalists, feared corruption and encroachments on liberty by a strong central government. The Antifederalists lost but regrouped under the new Constitution as the Republicans whose bruising contest against Federalist John Adams marked the climax of this turbulent chapter of American political history.
The country’s first years unfolded in a contentious spiral of ugly elections and blatant violations of the Constitution. Still, peaceful transfers of power continued, and the nascent country made its way towards global dominance, against all odds. Founding Partisans is a powerful reminder that fierce partisanship is a problem as old as the republic.
H. W. Brands
H.W. Brands is the Jack S. Blanton Sr. Chair in History at the University of Texas at Austin. He writes on American history and politics, with books including The Last Campaign, Our First Civil War and The Zealot and the Emancipator. Several of his books have been bestsellers; two, Traitor to His Class and The First American, were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. He lectures frequently on historical and current events and can be seen and heard on national and international television and radio. He publishes history-themed poetry on Twitter and “A User’s Guide to History” on Substack.