Setting the Scene 2: Issues--Hamilton vs. Jefferson; the French Revolution

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Из курса от партнера The University of Edinburgh

The Making of the US President: A Short History in Five Elections

25 оценки

The University of Edinburgh

The Making of the US President: A Short History in Five Elections

25 оценки

As Donald Trump takes office as the forty-fifth president of the United States, this course explores presidential elections in historical perspective, via five case studies. It tells the story of key campaigns in US history, and by doing so it investigates how politics changed over time—and how understanding the past sheds light on the current campaign. From the arrival of "dirty politics" to the impact of the "digital revolution," the course looks at the historical background to some of the key phenomena that shaped the controversy-laden campaign of 2016. The five elections that we'll investigate are among the most significant in American political history. In 1800, Thomas Jefferson won the presidency in a contest that encouraged politicians to reform the electoral college, the system by which presidents are still chosen. The election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860 prompted the outbreak of the Civil War. It's an election that helps us to understand the development of political parties. In 1968, the Vietnam War was a dominant concern for Americans, and yet foreign policy played a secondary role in Richard Nixon's victory. Twelve years later, in 1980, Ronald Reagan won an election that initiated a new era of conservatism. Finally, we'll turn our attention to the election that took Trump's predecessor, Barack Obama, to the White House in 2008. Many saw the Obama's success not only as revealing the impact of the digital revolution on campaign politics, but also as signaling a turn to progressivism. Image credits: Course logo - "Former President Truman holds a copy of the famous Chicago Daily Tribune paper declaring 'Dewey Defeats Truman'" Harry S. Truman Library & Museum (https://www.trumanlibrary.org/photographs/view.php?id=38592). Course banner - "US Flag Backlit" by Joshua Nathanson, CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:US_Flag_Backlit.jpg).

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The Election of 1800

The stormy election of 1800 culminated in the election of Thomas Jefferson as president, but it also played an important role in encouraging American politicians to reform the electoral college, which remains the system by which presidents are chosen.

Setting the Scene 1: Federalists and Republicans6:35

Setting the Scene 2: Issues--Hamilton vs. Jefferson; the French Revolution6:44

Setting the Scene 3: The Election of 1796; the Quasi-War5:01

Познакомьтесь с преподавателями

Frank Cogliano
Professor of American History
School of History, Classics and Archaeology
David Silkenat
Lecturer
School of History, Classics and Archaeology
Fabian Hilfrich
Senior Lecturer in American History
School of History, Classics and Archaeology
Robert Mason
Professor of Twentieth-Century U.S. History
School of History, Classics and Archaeology

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.

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