Where US Politics Came From: Crash Course US History #9 episode transcript - U.S. History by Crash Course

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Where US Politics Came From: Crash Course US History #9

From: U.S. History by Crash Course

In which John Green teaches you where American politicians come from. In the beginning, soon after the US constitution was adopted, politics were pretty non-existent. George Washington was elected president with no opposition, everything was new and exciting, and everyone just got along. For several months. Then the contentious debate about the nature of the United States began, and it continues to this day. Washington and his lackey/handler Alexander Hamilton pursued an elitist program of federalism. They attempted to strengthen the central government, create a strong nation-state, and leave less of the governance to the states, They wanted to create debt, encourage manufacturing, and really modernize the new nation/ The opposition, creatively known as the anti-federalists, wanted to build some kind of agrarian pseudo-paradise where every (white) man could have his own farm, and live a free, self-reliant life. The founding father who epitomized this view was Thomas Jefferson. By the time Adams became president, the anti-federalists had gotten the memo about how alienating a name like "anti-federalist" can be. It's so much more appealing to voters if your party is for something rather than being defined by what you're against, you know? In any case, Jefferson and his acolytes changed their name to the Democratic-Republican Party, which covered a lot of bases, and proceeded to protest nearly everything Adams did. Lest you think this week is all boring politics, you'll be thrilled to hear this episode has a Whiskey Rebellion, a Quasi-War, anti-French sentiment, some controversial treaties, and something called the XYZ Affair, which sounds very exciting. Learn all about it this week with John Green.

Full Transcript

Where US Politics Came From Crash Course US History 9

speaker01 00:00:00

Hi I'm John Green, this is Crash Course us history and now that we have a constitution, it's United history. We're going look at the birth of America's, not baseball, not football, not eating, I mean politics, which in America has been adversarial since its very beginnings, despite what the founders wanted.

speaker01 00:27:00

We looked at the first big conflict in American politics last week. Constitution or Articles of Confederation. I hope that I convinced you that we made the correct choice, but regardless, we made it. The Constitution passed, but immediately following the passage of the Constitution, a pretty fundamental came up. What kind of country should we be? Mr Mr, the us is supposed to be the policeman of the world and keep all the people in the green parts of not America from hurting themselves. Oh me from the past. We don't get into that stuff until 1823.

speaker01 00:57:00

So one vision of America was put forward by Alex Hamilton, who'd served in the war as Washington's top aid and would go on to be his first secretary of the Treasury and probably would have been president himself had he not been born in the British West Indies.

speaker01 01:09:00

Hamilton had a strong personality, and as you can see, the beautiful wavy hair of a Caribbean god. And he had very definite ideas about what he wanted the future of America to look like. First, Hamilton wanted the country to be mercantile, which means that he believed that we should be deeply involved in world trade. Second, he wanted the us to be a manufacturing powerhouse. We wouldn't just buy and sell, we would make it too. He even invested in a plan to make Patterson New Jersey a manufacturing hub, which of course, ultimately failed because New Jersey. But to make a manufacturing giant, he needed a strong government that could build infrastructure and protect patents. But you already knew that he was in favor of a strong government because, of course, he wrote so many of the Federalist Papers Hamilton also envisioned in America that was governed primarily by the elite.

speaker01 01:48:00

His party, which came to be known as the Federalist Party, would be the one of the rich, the able, and the wellborn. I mean, just think of the Federalist Party survived. We might have had a bunch of Bushes and Kennedy's as president also wanted America to be firmly affiliated with Great Britain, which isn't surprising given his passion for elitism and trade.

speaker01 02:06:00

But there was an opposing view of what America should look like, and it's most associated with Thomas Jefferson. Let's go to the thought bubble. Jefferson wanted an America that was predominantly agrarian, with most people being small scale, subsistence level farmers. Maybe they would produce a little surplus for local markets, but certainly not for international consumers. There would be no international trade, and he didn't want manufacturing either. This small scale local economy could best be served by a small-scale local government.

speaker01 02:32:00

It's not a surprise to find that Jefferson's syms lay with the antique Federer list, even though he benefited from the new constitution a little bit since, you know, he eventually got to be president and everything.

speaker01 02:41:00

Unlike the elitist Hamilton, Jefferson was an avowed Democrat, which meant that he distrusted concentrated power and privilege and believe that the masses could basically govern themselves. To him, government and concentrated economic power were greater threats to liberty than a tyrannical majority.

speaker01 02:57:00

Jefferson was a big fan of the French because he spent a fair amount of time in Paris as our ambassador there. He also liked the French because they fought with us in the War of Independence against the British, and because after 1000 and 780 eight-nine, he liked the way the French treated their aristocrats. That is brutally in General Jeff and his partisans, who call themselves Republicans, although some current textbooks call them Democratic Republicans, just to make things incredibly confusing, preferred France, just as the Hamiltonians preferred Britain. And this was a bit of a problem because France and England were pretty much constantly at war.

speaker01 03:29:00

Between 1740 and 1850, banks thought bubbles so winged to these imagined Americas were the questions of how Democratic we should be and how much free speech we should have. Jefferson and the Republicans wanted more democracy and more free speech. Well, sort of.

speaker01 03:43:00

During Washington's presidency Democratic Republican societ sprang up the first opposition political parties, and in 1794, the Democratic Republican Society of Pennsylvania published an address which made the point that, quote, freedom of thought and a free communication of opinion by speech or through the medium of the press are the safeguards of our liberties. The Federalists, on the other hand, saw too much free speech and democracy as a threat. And from this, it sounds like the Republicans were better Democrats, but it's a lot more complicated than I mean for one thing many Republicans, including Thomas Jefferson were slaveholders and slavery is kind of the opposite of democracy. And for another, many were supporters of the French Revolution and supporting the French Revolution after 17790 two-three is pretty problematic.

speaker01 04:28:00

You'll remember from Crash Course World History robes, Speer was guillotining everyone up until the point where he himself was guillotine. OK, so in the first real American presidential election, there weren't any political parties. There wasn't even a campaign. The election was uncontested in George Washington. He didn't even have to run for office, he stood for it. Washington's presidency is important for a number of precedents that he said, including the notion that a president should only serve two terms and the idea that even if he was a general, the president should wear civilian clothing. But he wasn't the real policy brains Hamilton was. Washington probably wouldn't have called him a Federalist, but he backed Hamilton's plan for a stronger nation.

speaker01 05:03:00

And to that end, Hamilton began the great American tradition of having a five point plan.

speaker01 05:08:00

Point one established the nation's credit worthiness. Hamilton realized that the new nation wanted to be taken seriously. It had to pay off its debts, most of which had come during the war. And to do this, Hamilton proposed that the us government assumed the debts, that the states had a mass point to create a national debt. Politicians say these days Hamilton wanted to create new interest bearing bonds, hoping to give the rich people a stake in our nation's success.

speaker01 05:33:00

Point three, create a bank of the United States. This bank would be private and it would turn a profit for its shareholders, but it would hold funds and issue notes that would circulate as currency, and the bank would definitely be needed to house all the money that was expected to be raised from .4. A whiskey tax. Then, as now, Americans like to drink, and one sure way to raise money was to say an excise tax on whiskey, which might reduce drinking on the margins or cause people to switch to beer. But what it would definitely do is hurt small farmers who found the most profitable use of their grain was to distill it into sweet, sweet whiskey. The whiskey tax really upset small farmers, as we will see in a moment.

speaker01 06:11:00

Point five encouraged domestic manufacturing by imposing a tariff. For those of you who think the US was founded on free trade principles, now you'll remember that the Republicans wanted an agrarian republic with freer trade, so they disliked pretty much all of Hamilton's plan. They also argued that none of the this was in the Constitution and they were right. This position of expecting government to be limited by the text of the Constitution came to be known as strict construction. But the Republicans lacked a five point plan of their own, so their only hope of success was to shave Hamilton's five point plan down to four points, which is what they did in 1790 Republicans, many of whom were Southerners like Jefferson, struck a bargain. They agreed to points one through four of Hamilton's plan in exchange for a permanent capital on the Potomac in the South, as opposed to the first temporary capitals of the U in New York and Philadelphia.

speaker01 06:59:00

The Hamiltonian economy won out for a while, probably the most immediately controversial aspect of Hamilton's plan was the whiskey tax, and not just because people love to drink, but also because farmers love to turn their Ryan into whiskey, into profits. In 1794, western Pennsylvania farmers even took up arms to protest the tax, and that clearly could not stand. Washington actually led, at least for part of the way, a force of 13000 men to put down the Whiskey Rebellion, becoming the only sitting president to lead troops in the field. America continued to tax booze, as it does to this day.

speaker01 07:31:00

On the subject of foreign affairs, there was much more agreement just getting Hamilton wanted the us to have close ties to Britain for commercial reasons, but Britain was perpetually at war with France, with whom the us technically had a perpetual alliance, you know, because they helped us win the American Revolution. They gave us the Statue of Liberty and Marion Cote Yard etc, and the French Revolution made things even more complicated because Republicans liked it. But Federalists, being somewhat conservative and elitist, were afraid of it. This was especially true when French Emissary citizen Janae showed up in 1793 and Britain hiring American ships to attack British one. Britain, in response, began impressing American sailors, which sounds fun, but it isn't. It doesn't mean the British sailors wowed Americans with their awesome mermaid tattoos. It means they kidnapped them, forced them to serve in the British Navy.

speaker01 08:15:00

Washington dispatched Secretary of State John Jay to deal with the impressment issue, and he negotiated the boringly named Jay Treaty, which improved trade relations between the us and Britain and said absolutely nothing about impressment or American ship for the rest of his term. Washington just tried to ignore the problem, thereby inaugurating another presidential tradition, kicking big foreign policy problems down the line for future president.

speaker01 08:36:00

By the end of his presidency, George Washington was somewhat disillusioned by politics. His famous call for unity, that with slight shades of difference. You Americans have the same religion, manners, habits, and political principles. Washington warned against the baneful effects of the spirit of party, generally, saying that it agitates the community with ill-starred jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animal of one part against another, foemen occasionally riot and insurrection, it opens the door to foreign influence and corruption. Still, by the time the diminutive John Adams took over as the second president, Americans had already divided themselves into two groups, elitist federalists and Republicans, who stood for freedom and equality.

speaker01 09:19:00

And, oh, it's time for the mystery document. The rules here are simple. I guess the author of the mystery document, if I am right. I do not get shocked. If I am wrong, I do get shocked. All right, let's give it a go.

speaker01 09:31:00

Yes, ye lordy, ye haughty sex, our souls are by nature equal to yours. The same breath of God animates, enlivens and invigorates us, Were we to grant that animal strength proved anything, taking into consideration the accustomed impartiality of nature, we should be induced to imagine that she had invested the female mind with superior strength as an equivalent for the bodily powers of man, But waiving this, however palpable advantage for equality, only we wish to. So the author of the mystery document is a badass woman. So we have here an argument, and a bit of a snarky one, for equality between men and women. Aren't I can do this? Elizabeth Cady Stanton is too young. Also, probably not funny enough Stan, my official guess is Sarah grimke .

speaker02 10:25:00

it .

speaker01 10:26:00

Judith Sergeant Murray?

speaker02 10:30:00

Well.

speaker01 10:31:00

you know, as part of the patriarchy, I probably deserve this anyway. So Judith Sergeant Murray reminds us that once unleashed, ideas like liberty and equality spread to places where neither the male Federalists nor the male Republicans wanted them to go.

speaker01 10:45:00

But back to Adams. His election in 1796 exposed a big flaw in our electoral system because the vice presidency went to whomever had the second highest total number of electoral votes. And that person happened to be Thomas Jefferson. We ended up in a situation where the president and the vice president were on opposite sides of the political spectrum, which was not good. So they changed the constitution, but not until after the next election, which featured another screw up. We are awesome at this side note, the Electoral College system would continue to misrepresent the will of the American voters, most notably in 1876, 18888 and 2000, but also in every election domestically, Adams continued Hamilton's policy, but Adam's presidency is best known for foreign problems, especially the way Adam's administration totally overreacted to problems with France because we were trying to maintain good commercial relationships with England and England was perpetually at war with France, France ended up in a quasi war with the United States despite our eternal alliance, they disrupted our shipping, we felt nervous about their increasingly violent revolution. French emissaries tried to extort a bribe from the us government as part of negotiations, the so called the XYZ affair because we didn't want to give the names of these bribe seeking French scoundrels, the American public turned against France somewhat hysterically as it will taking advantage of the hysteria, Adams pushed through the Alien Sedition Act, the Alien Act lengthened the period of time it took to become a citizen, and the Sedition Act made it a crime to criticize the government among the more famous people prosecuted under the Sedition Act was Matthew Lyon a congressman from Vermont who was jailed for saying that John Adams was maybe not the best president ever and while in jail Lyon won reelection to Congress, which might indicate just how popular this law wasn't. It was so unpopular that Virginia and Kentucky's legislatures passed resolutions against it, claiming that it VI Americans liberties and that state legislatures had the power to overturn or nullify any federal law that they found to violate the Constitution the whole business of nullification and state rights it will return the alien Institution Acts were allowed to lapse under, and they didn't lead to widespread arrests of everyone who called Adams a tyrant or expressed admiration for the French Revolution, even though they weren't popular, They didn't doom the Federalist Party either, even though no Federalist was elected president after Adams the Alien X in to them from Virginia and Kentucky are important because they show us how settled American politics were in the first decade of this country's existence, even something as basic as freedom of speech was up for grabs as America tried to figure out what kind of country it was going to be that's important to think about when studying American history, but it's also important to think about when looking at new democracies you might think that Thomas Jefferson winning the presidential election of 1800 settled all this stuff, but it wasn't so simple, it never is, for I'll you next week crash course is produced and directed by muer our script supervisor.

speaker01 13:29:00

Johnson written Raul our. Today's video, particularly if there are actual questions and not passive aggressive attempts to impose your ideology upon other people, leave them in comments where they will be answered by our team of historians. We're also accepting your submissions for liveage captions. Thanks for watching Crash Course, and we say in mind hometown, don't forget to be awesome.