A Republic No More. Jay Cost

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      Historians have remembered the period that spans Jefferson’s inauguration in 1801 to the close of Jackson’s presidency in 1837 in different ways. It has been called Jeffersonian Democracy and Jacksonian Democracy; it has been said to mark the rise of the market economy, the first full flowering of American nationalism, the birth of Manifest Destiny, and so on.

      Here, we have examined it from a different perspective, tracking the demise of the Republicans’ orthodoxy, their embrace of a more expansive government, and the corresponding rise of governmental corruption. The Republican Party had been organized to stop this growth of government, the loosening of the constitutional structures, and ultimately the corruption that followed; yet by the end of Monroe’s tenure, they had accepted all of the Federalist agenda, and more.

      Thus, less than a generation after his death, Hamilton’s ideological triumph was all but complete. The reason for his victory should be clear enough by now: the Republican opposition of the 1790s was never more than that. It was a critique, a dire prophecy of doom and gloom, a jeremiad; it was not a positive program to deal with the nation’s challenges. For all of its faults, at least Hamilton’s agenda realistically addressed the problems facing America. How to establish real independence vis-à-vis the European powers? How to grow the national economy? How to bind the states into a permanent union? These are the questions that Hamilton obsessed over. His Republican opponents were not so burdened because, as an opposition party, they did not have the obligations of governance. When they finally got their hands on the levers of power, and faced the challenges that the former secretary of the treasury did, they discovered—sooner or later—the wisdom of the Hamiltonian perspective.

      But—and herein lies the central paradox at the heart of American political corruption—none of this means the initial Republican critique of Hamilton was wrong. It simply means it was not suited to the demands of a would-be American empire. The Republicans, as we saw in Chapter One, were deeply concerned about retaining the balance among different forces in society for the sake of the public good; this was at the front and center of Madison’s thinking. When Hamilton found its straightforward interpretation to be ill-suited for his national program, the Republicans warned that his innovations threatened the balance and would ultimately lead to corruption as factions within society would gain leverage to implement their own selfish ends. As we saw in Chapter One, that is precisely what occurred.

      And, as we saw in this chapter, it occurred again when the Republicans mimicked Hamilton’s program. Congress quickly turned internal improvements and protective tariffs into opportunities for electoral gamesmanship. Graft became an increasingly common phenomenon in the fast-expanding executive departments. Bad management, stockjobbing, political payoffs, and needless economic pain characterized the early management of the Second Bank of the United States. Jackson—the closest thing America has ever had to a caesar—shoved the Native Americans aside without regard to their treaty rights. And, worst of all, the Bank War between Jackson and Biddle was a fundamentally lawless test of wills that drove the country straight into an economic recession.

      All of this can be traced—either indirectly or, in many cases, directly—to the growth of government beyond the Madisonian vision of the Constitution. Americans may have decided that they had no choice but to grow the government, that the demands of an Empire of Liberty required a more expansive view than that drawn up in Philadelphia in 1787. Nevertheless, in so doing, they effectively threw off a key tenet of Madison’s thinking, that a considered delineation of political power across well-designed institutions was necessary to prevent corruption and protect a true republic. In other words, the problem was not so much that they abandoned their old ideas of limited government; it was, rather, that they did not update the government’s institutions to handle these new powers responsibly.

      Indeed, Jefferson’s demurral from seeking a constitutional amendment for the Louisiana Purchase is illustrative. It was inconvenient for him to pursue such a structural update to the original design; better instead to seize the power before the unpredictable Napoleon changed his mind. While on the extreme end of the spectrum, this was not an isolated incident. In case after case during this period, we see Republicans behaving just as the Federalists did. The political externalities of national greatness were so pressing, they refused to consider whether the old structures of government could exercise these new powers responsibly.

      Indeed, they could not. As a consequence, corruption came to the United States of America—and as we shall see, it was here to stay.

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       “The General Scramble for Plunder”