Politics and the Public:
The Federalists and Popular Politics in the Early 1790s

Todd Estes
Oakland University

Contrary to much of the prevailing historiography, the Federalist party in the early 1790s frequently engaged in the practices of popular politics.  Furthermore, Federalists were highly successful as they managed to build public support for President George Washington and his administration's policies in three key issues: the Neutrality Crisis and the Genet affair, the Whiskey Rebellion and the Democratic Societies, and the Jay Treaty debate.  In all three episodes Federalists deployed similar tactics and struck recurrent themes as they successfully elicited public support for their positions.  Yet in a few short years, of course, Federalists found themselves turned out of office, their views and methods rejected by the very public that they once so effectively persuaded.

This paper will explore these three cases and will argue that the Federalists were able to frame issues in a way that had popular appeal and developed public support.  However, the methods and symbols they used and their conception of the public, the duties of citizens, and the responsibilities of elected officials were increasingly anachronistic in a democratizing political culture.  Thus, Federalists were not incapable or unwilling to engage in popular politics; rather, what constituted popular politics as well as popular political culture and the public sphere was shifting in the dynamic 1790s in such a way as to quickly render obsolete the Federalists' more traditional, old-fashioned practices.  While they were able to take advantage of a number of other factors to succeed in the short run, they were eventually enveloped by the changes in politics and a defensiveness and a reactive posture which further hastened their decline.  In a few years the drift of democratization carried the nation's political culture well beyond the point where Federalists were comfortable going.  This paper argues that Federalist efforts at popular politics in the early 1790s should be examined closely to understand their logic, not dismissed or explained away as mere anomalies.