More than two hundred years ago, when the republic was young and
republicanism itself was still an untried experiment, American political
culture had yet to come to grips with the idea of a loyal opposition.
Dissent was confused with conspiracy; disagreement with disloyalty;
parties with subversion. Throughout the 1790s, as the republic groped its
way toward an uncertain future, political battles had an almost
breathtaking ferocity, an intensity grounded on a complete distrust of the
motives and integrity of opponents. Otherwise reasonable men believed
conservatives were plotting a return to monarchy, republicans to deliver
the country to France. Today, with more than two centuries of
representative government behind us, it is hard to recapture the fears and
passions that led Virginians to toast “A speedy Death to General
Washington” or the bitterness that led John Adams to maintain his
grudge against Alexander Hamilton’s “infamous calumnies,”
even if, as Adams wrote, “the author of them with a pistol bullet
in his spinal marrow, died a penitent.”

Although American politics have never been a pastime for the
faint of heart, their sheer physical and rhetorical violence in
the 1790s is overwhelming. There were, of course, episodes of
resistance within the several states to the authority of the
central government, most notably in Pennsylvania, which, while
hosting the nation’s capital (1790–1800), also gave rise to the
Whiskey Rebellion (1794) and the revolt of John Fries (1799).
But, faced with the unrest generated by the French Revolution
and the Quasi-War with France, the