Part #103: The Shining City on a Hill
Dr D. Wostyn: I believe I have now ascertained just why Bruno mainly digitised short snippets of books. I don’t know why, but running larger portions of the same book through the digitiser seems to cause the software to crash. It seems all right if you keep switching from one book to another every few pages, though. So I will give it a bit of this next book to chew on...I got quite a few from the political history section in the library.
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From – “New World: A Political History of the Americas and their Peoples” by Sir Liam O’Leary (1960) –
Although the Empire of North America is nowadays thought of as synonymous with the practice of multi-party representative democracy and coalition-building government, this was not always the case. The ENA has gone through several party regimes, from no organised parties to one-and-a-half to two to two-and-a-half to many. The characteristics of these regimes (sometimes referred to as ‘Political Systems’ by the Americans—not to be confused with the actual constitutional methods of governance) are here briefly described.
Colonial Period (1607-1748). Initially the American colonies of England, and later Great Britain, had almost no oversight from home and were free to develop a diversity of methods of governance, usually somewhat inspired by the Parliament of their homeland but often incorporating unorthodox and radical new innovations. In New England, the Colony of Connecticut (the precursor to the modern Province of Connecticut) was one of the first English-speaking institutions to create a written constitution of sorts, the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, which guaranteed the rights of all free men to elect their own magistrates. It is worth noting that this predates the English Bill of Rights that forms the basis of the British Constitution by fifty years.
The Province of Maryland (the name of the separate colonial entity, not to be confused with the Province of Maryland that forms part of Virginia) equally proved fore-sighted when its General Assembly passed laws that treated all Trinitarian Christians equally under law, healing rifts between Anglicans and Catholics. However this law was thrown out at the time of the First Glorious Revolution in England and would not be restored for many years.
Virginia’s House of Burgesses was one of the most influential bodies upon the later constitutional makeup of America, partly due to its association with Prince Frederick. It was also the first unicameral parliament in an English-speaking governmental entity, with the debatable exception of the pre-Union Parliament of Scotland. Early on in its history in the 1620s, it set an important precedent for American law by granting the same ‘rights as Englishmen’ to settlers from the German-speaking lands.
Pennsylvania created an unorthodox type of bicameral assembly, where a 72-man Council proposed legislation and a General Assembly of 500 approved it, rather than the other way around. According to the founding Quaker principles of the colony, religious toleration was implemented. Unusually Pennsylvania’s constitution, the Frame of Government, instituted universal freeman suffrage.
New York was the last of the English colonies in America to gain its own assembly in the colonial period. The New York parliament was a more traditional bicameral setup, with an upper house (the Executive Council) and a lower house (the New York Assembly). As a former Dutch possession with many Dutch inhabitants, New York also gave the same rights to all its Christian inhabitants regardless of creed.
Carolina was originally a proprietory colony ruled by Lords Proprietors. In 1729 it was divided into two colonies, North and South Carolina, each of which had a General Assembly. When the Confederation of Carolina was created as part of the North Commission’s constitutional recommendations for the reform of the Empire, these were re-amalgamated.
Throughout all the colonies, there was no real party identity. Whig and Tory, borrowed from the home country, were occasionally used, but had even less intrinsic meaning than in England and Britain. They were often as not simply labels to mean ‘Faction A and Faction B’ which no connexion for specific policies, ideologies or loyalties of the factions. A more commonly used set of terminology was ‘Court Party and Country Party’. The Court Party referred to the established interests associated with the capital and (lieutenant-)governor of a colony, while the Country Party meant everyone else. This was to be considerably shaken up after the exile of Frederick I and the ensuing events.
Early Empire Period (1748-1788). After the declaration of an Empire of North America by the exiled Frederick I in 1748[1] initially the colonies’ system of goverment was barely changed, save for the fact that colonial governors were expected to go to their posts across the Atlantic rather than sending lieutenant-governors to do it, and that more colonial governors were themselves drawn from American stock. The post of lieutenant-governor, which had once been the most important in the colonies, dwindled to becoming a vestigial appendage whose only usual role was to temporarily take over if the governor died, became incapacitated or resigned for other reasons, until London could appoint a new governor. In practice the British government often allowed the lieutenant-governor to succeed to his post and then choose his own new lieutenant-governor – which normally could only be from among locals. This meant that by 1770 or so all the colonial governors were American-born and had been picked for the job by other Americans, setting the stage for the later post of elected governor.
While in terms of structure the colonial legislatures were not directly affected, the effect on their makeup was tumultuous. Frederick’s return to power had largely been the result of gaining support among disaffected Americans—the Country Parties in other words, meaning that the former Court Parties had largely been displaced. The Court Parties had naturally contained many aristocratic and powerful men, meaning that the opposition to government in the colonies, disorganised as it was, was nonetheless more potent than one might otherwise have expected. It was in this climate that party names first vaguely took hold among Americans. The term Patriot originally meant a supporter of Prince Frederick, and it had started in Britain before making its way across the Atlantic. In Britain it described a faction of the Whigs, but in America ‘Patriot’ was often regarded as being synonymous with ‘Tory’, as Tory was generally used to describe someone close to the (in this case exilic) crown. The Patriots, who went on to be the ENA’s oldest organised political party, therefore began as an eclectic mix and in reality this has never truly changed. They were made up of many upper-class politicians and businessmen who had seen which way the wind was blowing when Frederick I began his undercover campaign to be restored to his throne, but they also had support from a large part of the lower classes who liked Frederick and liked the idea of having a king who had lived beside them. This was generally the most true of lower-class Americans who lived along the eastern seaboard as it was in this area that Frederick had lived and travelled as Lord Deputy. Further west, lower-class Americans were less likely to have such beliefs. The former Court Party members thrown out by Frederick’s movement coalesced around such people and formed the first crude opposition to the Patriots, which were generally just known by such vague names as ‘Oppositionists’ or ‘Western Whigs’ to balance the Patriots being known as Tories.
The Oppositionists’ first ideology beyond being sore losers was to embrace the Troubled Sixties: for that reason they were also often called Troublemakers. After the Third War of Supremacy and the triumphs of the Empire over the French in Canada, an undercurrent of public feeling arose, beginning in 1765. In the wake of its victory, London had seen fit to raise the taxes of its colonial subjects, reasoning that as the Americans shared in the spoils of war, so too they should share in its cost. This was however an unwelcome shock to the Americans, who had grown use to a very lightly taxed regime, and caused public unrest such as the so-called Hartford Tea Revolt in 1767 and the Pittsburgh Whiskey Riots of 1768, protesting about the raised taxes on the respective products. The Oppositionists helped ride a tide of public anger and, borrowing a phrase from New York’s constitution, argued that there should be ‘no taxation without representation’. The Patriot response to this was to form the Franklin Committee, so named after its leader Sir Benjamin Franklin, in order to approach London’s Department for Home and Colonial Affairs for direct negotiations. Thanks to a sympathetic King George III and a reformist Prime Minister (the Marquess of Rockingham) the committee was received well and a new commission was drawn up incorporating important figures from both the British government and the Imperial colonies. This was in turn called the North Commission after its leader Lord North.
It was the North Commission, acting primarily on suggestions made by Franklin, that drew up the new plan of Imperial governance known as Five Confederations and One Empire. This set up the idea of a single central Imperial assembly, the Continental Parliament, and to reorganise the twelve existing colonies into five Confederations of comparable population. This was generally regarded as a victory for the Oppositionists, who had advocated a local assembly with the power to tax under London’s ultimate auspices, whereas the Patriots had mostly favoured the idea of the colonies electing MPs and sending them to London as part of an expanded British Parliament. The North Commission’s plan was used to draw up the Constitution of the Empire of North America, which the Oppositionists therefore largely took credit for and used for their new name: the Constitutionalist Party. However, the New England colonies disliked the plan due to the fact that they would be amalgamated into a single Confederation. While the colonies eventually grudgingly went along with it, this helps explain why the the Constitutionalists found it hard to get elected in New England ever afterwards.
Constitutional Period: Two-Party System (1788-1803). Initially it seemed obvious that, like her home country, the ENA should have a basic two-party system with each party—the Patriots and Constitutionalists—consisting of a broad church of interests. This period lasted from the first opening of the Continental Parliament in 1788 until the formation of the American Radical Party in 1803.
The first Continental Parliament was led by George Washington[2] as Lord President, a notable general who had recently become a war hero through his service in the Second Platinean War. Almost as importantly, he was a childhood friend of the King and thus could be expected to be able to go over the heads of the British Government if they started trying to force legislation on the ENA. Washington governed as a cross-bencher, professing a personal dislike of political parties. In practice his presidency was made up mostly of Patriots, the party that his father and uncle had arguably helped create with their support of the exiled Frederick. It was Washington’s name and his widely respected governance that helped the Patriots claw back some of their reputation after their perceived defeat to the Constitutionalists over the creation of the Parliament itself. When he retired in 1795 to public acclaim and a generous pension, he was succeeded to the by Lord (Alexander) Hamilton who led an unabashedly Patriot presidency. Hamilton represented a threshold for the Patriots in many ways. Born a bastard in the British West Indies and having worked his way up from a poor background, his succession to the second highest office in the land[3] and an eventual peerage helped establish both for the Patriots and for the ENA in general that the traditional impediments for high office no longer applied. It has been argued (for example by Wolfenburg in New World of Difference) that Hamilton by his very existence embodied the moderate progressivism of the Americas in stark contrast to the violent revolution in France that he was swiftly forced to respond to.
It was during Hamilton’s first four-year presidency that the Constitutionalists invented the novel post of Official Opposition Leader, a position that had occasionally been suggested in the British Parliament but had rarely proved lasting.[4] The Opposition Leader was regarded as the Lord President-in-waiting if his party were to win more seats at the next election. The first Opposition Leader was James Monroe, whose lively exchanges with Lord Hamilton helped set the tone for how business in the Continental Parliament would be conducted.[5] When the Constitutionalists won the election of 1799 after the Ellery scandal, Monroe became Lord President and set another precedent by turning down a peerage due to his own Mentian principles.[6]
Monroe’s presidency helped define the ideological governing principles of the Constitutionalist Party ever after—for better and for worse. Being descended from the Oppositionist Party, a hodgepodge of varied interests all opposed to the Patriots for different reasons, on actually gaining Imperial power for the first time the Constitutionalists found it hard to adapt. It was only Monroe’s able governance—he compared keeping the party fixed on a programme of legislation to be akin to herding cats—that ensued they remained in power for as long as they did. Monroe’s refusal of a peerage helped instil the idea that the Constitutionalists were the party of the poor, common free man and his fight for his rights: this was often identified with the western frontiersman struggling to win his own land, as people found this image more romantic and sympathetic than the urban poor along the eastern seaboard. On the other hand, the Constitutionalists also became viewed as a southern party, with many of their most important MCPs—and financial backers—being from Virginia or Carolina.
The problematic issue for Monroe was that his party included both such southern planters (who of course were slaveowners) such as Henry Charles Pinckney and also radical abolitionists led by Ben Rush. This particular division, constantly talked about in the papers, arguably helped elevate slavery to a political issue when before most Americans had regarded it as a matter for personal conscience. Monroe managed to paper over the cracks by appointing Pinckney Foreign Secretary and Rush Continental Secretary, giving them what were considered to be the two most important and roughly equal cabinet posts. With the Patriots remaining strong and united under Hamilton, the Constitutionalists were intimidated into holding together until Pinckney won acclaim due to solving the Noochaland Crisis in 1802 and this emboldened the planters’ faction to push for the full annexation of formerly Spanish Cuba into the Confederation of Carolina. The situation is more complicated than the straightforward racialistic issue it is often portrayed as. While the southern Constitutionalists wanted to pass some anti-Catholic laws for commoners, they were willing to give the Spanish aristocrats in Cuba full ‘rights as Englishmen’ and, crucially, allow them to retain possession of their slaves. While there was some abolitionist sentiment in the Patriots, the particular strength of opposition to the Cuba Annexation Bill came not from concern for blacks but out of outrage from the powerful New England group within the Patriots which brought with it New England’s particular hatred of and distaste for Catholics.[7]
In the end the bill passed but the Lord Deputy refused to grant Royal Assent. Monroe instead asked him to call an election, which he used as a referendum on the bill, and surprisingly the Constitutionalists won again, despite Rush breaking away to form the American Radical Party. The Cuba Question was solved with annexation, but the two-party system in America was ended.
Two-and-a-half-Party Politics (1803-1819). The formation of the American Radical Party in 1803 was the first glimmer of what would become the ENA’s celebrated multi-party system. Benjamin Rush and his supporters’ new party consisted of a coalition of many former Constitutionalists from the northern Confederations, like Rush himself, together with some former Patriots who regarded their own party as being too aristocratic and out-of-touch. The party was generally referred to by its full name or by the acronym ‘ARP’ rather than as ‘the Radicals’. The reason for this was that in the ENA ‘the Radicals’ tended to have connotations of referring to the British Radicals who had come over in 1788 and attempted—usually without success—to get elected to the new Continental Parliament to push for new reforms as an example to home, and were viewed as comic figures by American theatre. It also had connotations of Charles James Fox’s Radical-led government in Britain, which was not very popular with Americans, perceived as interfering too much in issues like the Cuba Question. For that reason Rush and his supporters were careful to always use the qualifier ‘American’. While the ARP was best known for its abolitionism, it also advocated causes like extending voting rights to all free men, the abolition of the American peerage, and removing all religious qualifications for voting or holding office. The ARP tried to appeal to the western frontiersmen, using propaganda that pointed out that the Constitutionalists were growing dominated by the same southern planters who many of the settlers had fled west to escape, but their early efforts were largely unsuccessful. In the minds of too many settlers, the ARP simply represented an ivory tower filled with urbanite intellectuals who embraced half-baked causes. Anti-ARP propaganda by the two big parties often associated them with political positions then considered to be ludicrous, such as votes for women (which the ARP did not advocate). After Rush’s death in 1813, New Yorker Henry Tappan took over the party leadership.
Throughout this period the Constitutionalist struggled to keep their appeal across the whole Empire rather than being pigeonholed as the party of southerners and the rich. Monroe’s presidency ultimately did not fall due to the ARP or the issues it raised, but because of the Cherry Massacre and the Constitutionalists’ inability to agree to a decision: most were outraged over the attack, but a few were too sympathetic to the UPSA to condemn it outright (not least because they saw the Meridians’ attacks on the Empire of New Spain as being likely to collapse it and allow their own freebooters to grab territories for themselves). Monroe only passed a war bill with the support of the Patriot Opposition, leading to his resignation, a new election and Hamilton’s return to power.
Although the Constitutionalists were not especially tarred with the brush of failure over the Cherry Massacre, they found it difficult to compete in the northern Confederations after Monroe’s departure in 1807. The party became led by Wade Hampton, a rich southern planter who was a reasonable capable political operator but synonymous with every stereotype of the only people that the Constitutionalists cared about anymore. In 1811 Hamilton had a heart attack scare and stepped down, being succeeded by his Treasury Minister, Augustus Seymour. Against Hamilton and Seymour, the Hampton-led Constitutionalists progressively lost three elections, while the ARP built up its support. The ARP benefited considerably from the fact that under the British-derived political system of the ENA, some constituencies were allocated two MPs with both the winner and runner-up of the popular vote gaining a seat. This meant that the ARP picked up a number of seats while under a strict first-past-the-post system it would have struggled to gain more than one or two.
After the 1811 election, which the Patriots won by just one seat, the Constitutionalist leadership decided they had to broaden their appeal by appointing a northern MCP to replace Hampton as their leader. They found that man in Matthew Quincy, MCP for South Massachusetts-Second[8], noncommittal on slavery and a fiery anti-Catholic. The Quincy-led Constitutionalists beat Seymour’s Patriots in 1814, beginning their second and final period in government as a united party. Quincy stoked controversy by cutting aid to Great Britain and then seeking to unite his party by seizing upon the cause of the western frontiersmen, renaming the Ministry for Domestic Regiments to the full-blown Ministry for War and embarking on the Lakota War against the natives. He also presided over the Crisis of 1817, with the death of the Lord Deputy and many Americans’ refusal to accept any replacement appointment made by Frederick II under Churchill’s duress. In the event a compromise saw an Irish Catholic Lord Deputy appointed, much to Quincy’s horror. The disastrous results of the Lakota War coupled to Quincy’s anti-Catholic sentiments stirring up trouble in Canada and the Caribbean led Jacobin Wars hero John Alexander to challenge Quincy’s leadership. In the 1819 election the Constitutionalists were crushed, with the Patriots obtaining a huge majority of 20. Alexander’s ‘Southron Movement’ faction ran ‘Constitutionalist Whig’ candidates against Quincy’s official Constitutionalists, often splitting the vote and letting the Patriots through. The new Patriot Lord President Artemas Ward found his job made considerably easier by a divided opposition. The era of two-and-a-half party politics was over.
First Multi-party System (1819-1832). From the ashes of the Constitutionalists rose two new parties. Initially there was talk of trying to hold the party together, but too much finger-pointing curtailed that ambition. Quincy had lost his seat at the election (both South Massachusetts seats going to Patriots) and the Quincyite Constitutionalists were leaderless. Alexander’s Southron Movement was ostensibly founded on toleration of Catholics and government non-interference. This would later be clarified to ‘Confederalism’, meaning the idea that the Confederations’ governments should have greater authority than the Imperial government in Fredericksburg—a cause which had been mooted before in the past by the Constitutionalists. However, it was obvious that the real cause behind what would become known as the Whig Party was the preservation and expansion of the slavery-based economic system of Carolina and Virginia.
In order to understand what happened next to the remaining Quincyite Constitutionalists we must first understand events in the Confederate assemblies of the Five Confederations. The American Constitution had been vague on how the Confederate assemblies would be organised, leaving that decision up to the Confederations themselves. The result was an eclectic mix derived from the pre-existing colonial assemblies. Some assemblies allowed for a third tier of government in provinces—this tended to be the case in areas that had been separate colonies before the institution of Five Confederations, such as in North and South Carolina within Carolina, Maryland within Virginia, Delaware within Pennsylvania and Connecticut, Rhode Island and New Hampshire within New England.[9] Importantly, the parties on the Confederation level did not always correspond to those on the Imperial level. For example, New England, which had never elected many Constitutionalists even at Imperial level, had a three-party system in its General Court: the Patriots, the Radicals and the Salem Movement, a fiery anti-Catholic and expansionist group that had essentially acted as the New England wing of the Constitutionalists for the period of Matthew Quincy’s leadership of that party. The Patriots usually won the largest number of seats but not a majority, meaning they governed as part of a coalition either with the Radicals or the Salem Movement. Because the goals of those two parties vis-a-vis Catholic rights were inverted, this meant that New England had a lot of erratic policies passed over the years. In 1819 New England was regarded as being the second most progressive of the Confederations in suffrage, after Pennsylvania: it had universal householder suffrage for all white Protestants.
New York, Virginia and Carolina all had property qualifications on voting, although they were far more lenient than in Britain and often amounted to owning a house in any case. Pennsylvania however had continued its practice of universal white male suffrage, and thus it was no surprise that Pennsylvania was a Radical stronghold. In the Pennsylvanian Council and General Assembly, the Radicals held a strong position but still could not realistically gain control of the government. The Pennsylvanian Patriots held power almost exclusively while the Pennsylvanian Constitutionalists—who had little in common with the party on a national level even before 1819—held the balance. It was the Pennsylvanian Constitutionalist leader on the Confederate level, Ralph Purdon, who helped bring about the transformation of the remnants of the Imperial-level party into a new force. In late 1819, prior to the Pennsylvanian election of that year, Purdon announced the formation of a new party, to be known as the Frontier Party. Purdon was obviously trying to ensure that what was left of the Constitutionalists set themselves as appealing to a demographic he regarded as expanding in the future rather than being tied to slaveholders as with the Whig faction.
However, Purdon’s name did not catch on: like many other names for political parties, the one which eventually stuck came from an act of satirical mockery. As part of his election campaign, Purdon took part in a debate with Pennsylvanian Radical leader Joseph Baldwin and Patriot leader (and current Speaker[10]) Philip Price. The debate was organised by the Philadelphia Daily Gazette, one of the principal newspapers in the Confederation. Price lost no time in attacking Purdon by associating him with both Quincy and slaveholders. Purdon tried to deflect attention by repeatedly saying “We are neutral on that issue” when Price demanded Purdon commit to a position on slavery, knowing that Purdon was personally opposed but did not want potential western settler voters to view him as a fire-breathing abolitionist and closet urbanite Radical. Purdon’s comment was picked up in a series of editorial cartoons in the Gazette, which had Purdon saying he was neutral on many more issues, from the sublime to the ridiculous (an invasion of the ENA, Lord President Artemas Ward declaring he was a tree, Purdon himself being tortured by the ‘Straight Answer Society of Pittsburgh’). If the cartoons had been meant to mock Purdon, however, they largely failed, only ensuring that Purdon’s “catchphrase” was circulated throughout the Confederation and with it greater knowledge of the man himself. It did however ensure that Purdon’s optimistic label of ‘Frontier Party’ got nowhere: from now until the end of time, they would be the Neutral Party.
The election produced a hung General Assembly for the first time, though the Patriots continued to narrowly hold the Council. It was expected that the Patriots would try to form a coalition with either the Radicals or the ‘Neutrals’. However, Purdon’s deputy in the ‘Neutrals’, Phineas Jenks, had a deep-seated connection with the Radicals due to having professionally known the old imperial-level Radical leader (and fellow Pennsylvanian) Benjamin Rush. Purdon was able to use Jenks as a negotiator to forge a coalition between the Neutrals and Radicals, forcing the Patriots out of power for the first time in Pennsylvania. And across the country, the remnant of the Quincyite Constitutionalists embraced the new name and leadership. For the next decade or so, the ENA would have a four-party system: the Patriots, Whigs, Radicals and Neutrals, though the latter two generally cooperated on a national level as they did in Pennsylvania. It was a system that would last until the Popular Wars came to America...
[1] This is a bit debatable. The Declaration of Right signed by colonial lieutenant-governors and other American bigwigs in 1748 simply stated that Frederick was the rightful king of Great Britain and Ireland. While it was implicit that part of this bargain would be Frederick winning the colonies more self-rule and prestige, he did not explicitly proclaim an Empire of North America until his coronation in 1750.
[2] Strictly speaking this should be Lord Washington, as he was made 1st Baron Washington by George III. However, as with some other historical figures in TTL such as the Duke of Marlborough and the Duke of Mornington, he is usually referred to by his surname (as with Churchill and Wesley). An OTL comparable example is Pitt the Elder, who is usually referred to as such except in political circles which sometimes give him his correct name of (Lord) Chatham.
[3] The Lord Deputy is considered the highest office, although this is a bit misleading because by convention the Lord Deputy is always a British noble appointed by the King, so an American couldn’t aspire to it anyway.
[4] The post of Leader of His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition would not become a constant and recognised position until the mid-19th century in OTL.
[5] Hamilton was a lord and Monroe a commoner, but the American Continental Parliament was organised a bit differently to Britain’s: people holding noble titles could still run for and win seats in the Commons. Technically Hamilton, as both MCP for Albany Province and Baron Hamilton, could have voted in both the Commons and Lords—but this was frowned upon.
[6] Obviously the term is being used anachronistically here as the Mentian Movement wouldn’t begin until after Monroe’s death. What the author means is that Monroe was opposed to peerages because he viewed them as contradicting the idea that all free men should be equal.
[7] Some of this is historical, but it’s substantially more the case than OTL because New England has annexed Canada and is used to troublesome revolts from the local French Catholics—those that haven’t removed themselves to Louisiana or been racially purged.
[8] I.e. he was runner-up in the popular vote for the constituency of South Massachusetts and therefore got its second seat.
[9] But not Massachusetts because the Boston-based General Court of New England, the Confederation of New England’s Confederate assembly, is basically the old General Court of Massachusetts expanded to subsume the other provinces within the Confederation.
[10] As in most modern American state assemblies, the ENA Confederate assemblies have carried over the idea that the Speaker is essentially the prime minister, rather than being the neutral oversight position it is in Westminster systems. However Pennsylvania’s odd backwards bicameral system means this is a bit more complicated than usual.
