There are two key political issues that emerge in the 1790s, and that we need to appreciate in order to understand what happened in 1800. One is that the Federalists, particularly under the Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton, sought to pursue a policy of fiscal development which closely paralleled that of Britain. And so Hamilton, although he was a fervent revolutionary during the War of Independence, was also a great admirer of the British political system, and particularly the British economic system, and he thought the United States should imitate that as far as it could. And so he advocates a plan of promoting manufacturing in the United States. He also wants to create what historians will call a fiscal military state. He wants to give the central government, the federal government, considerable powers over the economy, and he wants to create a national bank modeled on the Bank of England for example, and this Hamiltonian program will prove to be very, very controversial. And the opponents, the Republican opponents of the Hamiltonian program will organize in Congress and coalesce around the leadership of James Madison, who's a member of Congress from Virginia, and also Thomas Jefferson, about whom I'll say more. Jefferson served as the secretary of state early in Washington's administration. So we have a paradox here and this kind of epitomizes the degree to which politics was very different then than now in the United States. Alexander Hamilton is the chief advocate of the Federalist political agenda. He's the Secretary of the Treasury. Within Washington's cabinet, sits, as Secretary of State, sits Thomas Jefferson and Jefferson came to lead the opposition to that. So we have a kind of paradox here, where the leader of the opposition and the leader of the Federalists are co-habiting, if you will, in the same cabinet. And this will be quite important, as we'll see with respect to the election of 1800. The other issue that animates American politics during this time, so apart from these kind of fiscal questions, questions of taxation and things like that, is the question of the French Revolution. The French Revolution, of course, begins in 1789. It spreads rapidly, and embroils Europe in a series of prolonged military conflicts. In fact, Europe will be embroiled in the wars of the French Revolution from 1789 down to 1850 really. And the question of what the United States should do in response to these conflicts is a crucial issue in the United States and in American domestic politics during the 1790s, this is for a number of reasons. On one hand, France had been one of the earliest allies of the young United States back during the War of Independence and French intervention and the French alliance of 1778 had been crucial to the Americans winning their independence and achieving their status as a new republic in the Atlantic world. And so that alliance was still in place in the 1790s when Washington became president. Secondly, or I should say in addition to this, because of this tradition of French support for Republicanism in the United States and then support for the American Revolution, there was a great deal of sympathy in the early days of French Revolution for the French revolutionaries. However, as the French Revolution took a more radical turn, this led to a division within American politics. The Federalists, who are more conservative on social issues in many respects than the Republicans, were less comfortable with the more radical aspects of the French Revolution. As a consequence of this they were inclined in their foreign policy to sympathize with those powers that sought to curb the revolutionary excesses of France, particularly Great Britain. And as a consequence, the Federalists and their orientation were more pro-British than the Republicans, who, because of the revolutionary legacy which they saw binding together the United States and France, we're inclined towards France. So to kind of take a more contemporary analogy, it would be as if during the Cold War, if we looked at British politics, if during the Cold War, one party supported the United States, while the other party, another party supported the USSR. So we have kind of a paradox where American politics, domestic politics, are being determined by overseas events to a very large extent. To an extent which was rather unprecedented in American history. And so the Federalists are more inclined towards the British, and the Republicans, Democratic-Republicans, are more inclined towards France. And during the 1790s, a pendulum is going to swing in America, where the debate over whether the United States should be not quite aligned, but sympathetic to either Britain or France, is going to be a key political issue. Early in the decade, tensions between Britain and the United States were quite high and in fact some people expected that there would be a second war between Britain and the United States in 1794. And President Washington sent John Jay as an emissary to Britain to negotiate a treaty. Jay came back with the treaty which is usually remembered by his name, the Jay Treaty, which kind of smoothed over relations between Britain and the United States. However, once that treaty was concluded and because the United States was seen as cozying up to Britain, France became quite agitated and France adopted a more aggressive, revolutionary France, adopted a more aggressive policy towards the United States. And so this kind of, the United States sought to strike a balance. Nominally, it was neutral. The position of the Washington administration was that the United States should be neutral, officially neutral in the wars of the French revolution, but the United States was inclined towards one or the other.
