The Rise of Political Parties and the Era of Jefferson

By the end of this lesson, students will be able to:

• Explain why the election of 1800 is called the Revolution of 1800 and what the Jefferson-Burr tie revealed about the original Electoral College, the fix the 12th Amendment supplied, and the precedent the peaceful turnover set for the American party system.
• Trace the policy program of Jefferson's Democratic-Republican administration: the reduction of the federal establishment, the repeal of the Whiskey Tax, the Louisiana Purchase, the Lewis and Clark expedition, and the failed Embargo Act of 1807.
• Account for how Marbury v. Madison in 1803 established judicial review and how the Marshall Court used that doctrine to anchor the federal judiciary as the interpreter of the Constitution across the rest of Period 4.
• Identify the causes of the War of 1812 (impressment, British support of Native confederacies, the war hawk demand for action) and the political consequences of the war, including the burning of Washington, the Battle of New Orleans, the Treaty of Ghent, the Hartford Convention, and the demise of the Federalist party.
• Use Skill 2 (Sourcing and Situation) to read at least one primary source from the period for what its author, audience, and historical situation explain about the policy choice it documents.

The election of 1800 was the first contest in modern republican history in which an incumbent party voluntarily handed the federal government to its rival. Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr ran as the Democratic-Republican ticket against the Federalist incumbent John Adams. The Constitution as originally written gave each elector two undifferentiated presidential ballots, with the runner-up taking the vice presidency, an arrangement designed for an era before disciplined parties. Jefferson and Burr each received seventy-three electoral votes; the contest moved to the Federalist-controlled House of Representatives, which deadlocked across thirty-five ballots before Alexander Hamilton's intervention swung enough Federalist votes to make Jefferson president on the thirty-sixth. The republic had survived its first partisan succession (KC-4.1.I.A). In 1804, the 12th Amendment rewrote the rule, requiring electors to cast separate ballots for president and vice president; the modern two-party ticket dates from that fix. Jefferson called the episode the Revolution of 1800 not because anything had been overturned but because the constitutional order had absorbed the shock of a peaceful transfer of power between rival parties (Theme PCE).

Once in office, Jefferson moved quickly to dismantle the Federalist administrative state. The army shrank, the navy was cut, federal civilian employment fell, and the Whiskey Tax that George Washington had used troops to enforce in 1794 was repealed in 1802. Jefferson and his Treasury secretary, Albert Gallatin, set out to retire the national debt rather than spend on internal improvements, and the federal government Jefferson handed to James Madison in 1809 was leaner than the one he had inherited from Adams (KC-4.1.I.B). The political philosophy was equally important: an agrarian republic of yeoman farmers, with power flowing to the states and the people who composed them, and the federal government restrained to the powers the Constitution explicitly named. Federalists charged that Jefferson had abandoned the strong national government that the Constitution made possible; Democratic-Republicans answered that the smaller government Jefferson built was the one the country had ratified.

The signature contradiction of Jefferson's first term was the Louisiana Purchase. Napoleon, with his Saint-Domingue army wrecked by yellow fever and a Haitian revolution he could not crush, abandoned his New World ambitions and offered the United States the entire Louisiana territory for fifteen million dollars. The deal doubled the country's land area, secured the port of New Orleans and the Mississippi outlet that western farmers depended on, and was nowhere among the powers the Constitution explicitly named. Jefferson worried privately that he was overstepping; he accepted the deal anyway, and the Senate ratified the treaty in October 1803 (KC-4.3.I.A.i). The following spring, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark led the Corps of Discovery across the new territory and on to the Pacific between 1804 and 1806, returning with field journals, maps, and the first systematic American account of Native nations and ecosystems west of the Mississippi (Theme WOR).

The constitutional pivot of the same year was Marbury v. Madison. Adams, in his last hours as president, had appointed dozens of Federalist judges under the Judiciary Act of 1801; Jefferson's secretary of state, James Madison, refused to deliver the commissions of those whose paperwork had not yet been completed. William Marbury sued for delivery, and Chief Justice John Marshall, himself a Federalist holdover, used the case to establish a far more consequential doctrine. Marshall ruled that the section of the Judiciary Act of 1789 under which Marbury had brought his suit was unconstitutional, and that the Supreme Court had the duty to say so. Judicial review, the power of federal courts to strike down acts of Congress and the executive that violate the Constitution, dates from this opinion. The decision anchored the federal judiciary as the interpreter of the Constitution and laid the foundation for the Marshall Court's later expansions of federal authority in McCulloch v. Maryland and Gibbons v. Ogden.

Foreign policy was harder. The Napoleonic wars had reorganized European commerce around blockades, and both the British Royal Navy and Napoleon's Continental System treated American merchant ships as legitimate targets. British warships boarded American vessels and impressed sailors they claimed were Royal Navy deserters into service. The 1807 attack on the USS Chesapeake, a humiliation in American waters, brought the country to the edge of war. Jefferson chose economic coercion instead. The Embargo Act of December 1807 banned virtually all American exports, on the theory that British and French manufacturers depended on American raw materials and would force their governments to respect American neutral rights. The plan failed. American merchants, especially in Federalist New England, lost their markets; smuggling boomed along the Canadian border; British and French shippers picked up the trade Americans surrendered. Jefferson signed the repeal in March 1809, three days before James Madison succeeded him.

Madison's first term continued the slow drift toward war. British impressment did not stop. British agents in Canada were arming the pan-tribal confederacy that Tecumseh and his brother Tenskwatawa had built across the Old Northwest, and General William Henry Harrison's destruction of the Prophet's Town at Tippecanoe in 1811 hardened both sides. A new generation of younger Republicans entered Congress in 1810, the so-called war hawks led by Henry Clay of Kentucky and John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, who argued that another decade of British harassment would destroy the country's republican honor and continental ambitions. Madison signed the declaration of war in June 1812 (KC-4.1.I.B, Theme PCE).

The War of 1812 went badly for two and a half years. American invasions of Canada failed; British forces sailed up Chesapeake Bay in August 1814 and burned the Capitol and the White House while Dolley Madison saved the Stuart portrait of George Washington from the executive mansion. The republic's prospects looked grim. Then a series of late shocks reversed the political verdict. Andrew Jackson destroyed a Creek force at Horseshoe Bend in March 1814, opening the Old Southwest to American settlement. American and British negotiators signed the Treaty of Ghent on Christmas Eve 1814, restoring the prewar status quo and saying nothing about impressment, which had become moot once Napoleon was beaten at Waterloo. And Jackson, who had not yet learned of the treaty, annihilated a British army at the Battle of New Orleans in January 1815, producing the most lopsided American victory of the war and the political career that would dominate the next twenty years.

The political consequence at home was the collapse of the Federalist party. New England Federalists, who had opposed the war as a Republican project that ruined their commercial interests, met at the Hartford Convention in December 1814 and January 1815. The convention's resolutions called for constitutional amendments to weaken the South's three-fifths representation and to require supermajorities for declarations of war and the admission of new states. By the time the delegation reached Washington with its demands, news of the Treaty of Ghent and the Battle of New Orleans had arrived. The Federalist party never ran another competitive presidential candidate. James Monroe carried every state but one in 1820, and a Boston newspaper coined the label that has stuck to his administration ever since: the Era of Good Feelings. The label was misleading. The arguments did not stop; they simply moved inside the surviving Democratic-Republican party, where regional disagreements over the tariff, the bank, internal improvements, and slavery's expansion would produce the Second Party System that Topic 4.3 will trace.

The three excerpts below frame the political opening, the constitutional pivot, and the territorial expansion that defined the Era of Jefferson.

1. (Causation) Account for the chain of events that turned the Jefferson-Burr deadlock of 1800 into the 12th Amendment of 1804. What does the speed of that constitutional response suggest about how seriously the founders took the threat the deadlock had revealed?
2. (Causation) Jefferson believed the federal government should exercise only the powers the Constitution explicitly named. The Louisiana Purchase was nowhere on that list. Account for how Jefferson reconciled the purchase with his constitutional principles, and decide whether the reconciliation holds up.
3. (Comparison) Compare Marbury v. Madison with the Embargo Act of 1807. Both were Jeffersonian-era responses to a foreign or domestic problem; one became a cornerstone of American constitutional government, the other a textbook policy failure. What accounts for the difference?
4. (Causation) The Federalist party survived the Revolution of 1800, the Louisiana Purchase, and the Embargo Act, but it did not survive the Hartford Convention. Account for the chain of events between June 1812 and February 1815 that ended the party. Was the timing of the convention's resolutions the decisive factor, or were the resolutions themselves out of step with the country?
5. (Continuity and Change) The Era of Good Feelings is often described as a period without political conflict. Identify two pieces of evidence from the years 1817 to 1825 that complicate that label, and explain why the term has nonetheless stuck.

Draft alignment — pending educator review. AP USH codes correspond to the official College Board Course and Exam Description (Effective Fall 2023, Version 1). Statements below are paraphrased in the CountryReports voice; refer to the College Board's published CED for verbatim wording.