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Republicans. Some of the founding fathers, including James Madison, were skeptical about the role parties would play, and some of those fears proved to be well-founded.

Before long the two factions took on revealing names. The Hamiltonian party called itself Federalists, implying that it alone supported the Constitution and national unity. It took a robust view of federal power and a strong executive branch, and it favored banks and manufacturing as well as agriculture. Elitist in its politics, it tended to doubt

AS WASHINGTON CONTEMPLATED the postwar world and wondered how to make America happy, free, and powerful, he was uniquely well positioned to affect the outcome. Adams, Jay, and Franklin were off on diplomatic assignment in Europe, while Hamilton and Madison were too junior to assume leadership roles. Washington had eliminated or outlived his militar

Although he held his tongue during the debates, Washington was never a neutral party, and the interminable squabbling only reinforced his view that the country needed a potent central government to override the selfish ambitions of local politicians.

But when asked whether Washington was “governed by British influence,” Jefferson supposedly replied, facetiously, that no danger existed so long as Washington “was influenced by the wise advisers or advice, which [he] at present had.”12 When Governor Henry Lee told him about this patent gibe that he was biased toward Britain and hoodwinked by Hamil