The Invention of American Democracy:
The Pennsylvania Federalists and the New Republic
Owen S. Ireland,
SUNY College at Brockport
President John Murrin once asked me what I saw as the implications of my
work on Pennsylvania politics in the 1780's for our understanding of national
politics in the 1790's. This paper, a long-delayed and highly speculative
answer, argues that:
-
In the 1780's the Federalists in Pennsylvania learned how to govern a culturally
heterogeneous and democratic polity.
-
The ratification of the Constitution in 1788 created a new polity that
resembled Pennsylvania. It united into a single political unit a number
of quite different, and often suspicious and sometimes hostile, political
cultures.
-
The Washington and Adams administrations failed to the degree that they
ignored the lessons learned a decade earlier by their fellow Federalists
in Pennsylvania. Indeed, the national Federalists in the 1790's, sinned
in much the same way that Pennsylvania's Antifederalist had sinned in the
1780's, and with much the same result. They lost because they equated one
particular people with the American people, and thus spoke for and to a
narrow constituency while alienating all others.