Party Government in the United States

Party Government in the United States. in 1899 (United States)

The following information about Party Government in the United States. is from the Cyclopaedia of Political Science, Political Economy, and the Political History of the United States by the Best American and European Writers.

PARTY GOVERNMENT IN THE UNITED STATES. The first recorded party contest in New York state, in 1789, ended in a total poll of 12,453; the total vote in 1880 was 1,102,945, and the number of voters over 1,200,000. This advance in the voting and the possible votes of nearly one hundred fold, or six times larger than the growth of population, aptly measures at once the needs, the conditions and the development of party government in the United States. Meetings at Martling’s in New York, and the Long Room in Boston, were sufficient for the conduct of party affairs, while the voters of one city numbered less than 3,000, and the poll list of the other fell short of this number by one-half; but the enormous increase of the voting voter, due, first, to the spread of political privileges by law, second, to the growth of political interests by party contests, and third, to the increase of population-has rendered the earlier methods obsolete, and developed an intricate system of party government, the product of the last sixty years, whose working is most vigorously attacked by those least aware of the tremendous difficulties presented by the quadrennial mobilization of 9,000,000 voters. The development of party government has, therefore, been along the inevitable lines of increasing organization and delegated powers, whose development in the state is the familiar story of representative government. Burke’s definition, Party is a body of men united in promoting by their joint endeavors the national interest upon some particular principle in which they are all agreed, was accurately applicable to the small and coherent body of electors which be represented. While remaining true in spirit, it has ceased to apply in detail to the two great political camps into which the United States has been substantially divided for thirty years. In these two parties a bare fraction of voters, not a tenth at most, carrying on the active work of party government, constitute the standing army of political life, which in periodical struggles exhausts its efforts in the endeavor to poll the last man; [113] in a word, to mobilize the great mass of inert voters with constantly increasing success. Beginning in 1820 with a polled vote in New York state (where the records are most complete), with one voter in five (12,453 in 1789, out of 57,606 voters in 1790), the proportion steadily rose to 31.12 per cent. in 1826, increased rapidly during the next six years, in which the foundations of party government were laid, to an average of 60 per cent., or very nearly the average now obtaining in Great Britain, rising in the ten years ending in 1865 to 77, reaching in the presidential year 1876 to 88 per cent., and in 1880 to 90 per cent. How largely keen political interest and high intelligence are needed to increase this per cent. is made best apparent by the fact that the highest percentage of voting voters in those states has been for years in the counties whose percentage of American-born population is largest. This growth in the percentage of voters exercising the right of voters, no less than the widening of suffrage, has increased the complexity of party management during the last century upon a scale rather one of kind than of degree.

-At the organization of the federal government the number of voters in each political division was still small enough to permit the management of parties by the simple and rudimentary methods long in use among English-speaking peoples. These were, self-nomination for the candidate, the caucus or meeting to express the desire of the voter, and in addition, as a dormant political power in the state, there existed the convention, which the traditions rather than the usage of the English constitution made the form in which the general body politic took original and initiatory action. Except in the southern states, which retain many archaic forms in their political life, self-nomination has disappeared in this country, the public meeting has become the caucus or primary, and is treated elsewhere (see CAUCUS); while the convention, developing along two distinct and independent lines, has become in its constitutional form the body to which is committed the composition of organic law, while in its political form it has come to be the body which in county, district, state and national affairs acts under a loosely defined body of usage and party regulation for the party as an organic whole, in theory drawing its power from the primaries, in practice acting independently, regulating their action and determining their constitution.

-These two widely divergent forms of the convention originated in the same stem; but while one attained full development and power in the constitution-making period of the revolution, the other only reached its development in the party-making period, which began in 1820, and ended in 1840, with the party organization now (1883) in existence in full operation, although the development of its details is still in progress. The convention, as a primal political force in the body politic, appeared early in American history.

They had no doubt, says Hutchinson of the action of the Massachusetts colonists when the old council had taken possession of the government from which a mob had driven Gov. Andross, received advice of the convention called by the prince of Orange, and, in imitation of it, they recommended (May 2, 1689) to the several towns of the colony to meet and depute persons, who assembled, and assumed the right to decide what constituted the government of the colony, as the convention parliament of 1688, assembled without a writ, had decided upon the constituent powers of the English government. The whig lawyers who managed the revolution in the thirteen colonies, itself essentially a political struggle, were mindful of the organic character which precedent attached to a convention, and termed the meeting of commissioners from the colonies a congress. Meanwhile, the radical changes in progress through the colonies were conducted by conventions, the work being at length completed by a federal constitutional convention, while the political government of the day was carried on by meetings in the large cities, supplemented by the collective action taken by the members of colonial assemblies. The latter, as well as the former, bridged over the period between their sessions and their assembly through the appointment of committees of correspondence, a body which is the lineal predecessor of the state central committee of the present day, and which remained for over fifty years after the revolution the stated political authority in deciding upon the executive conduct of campaigns. These public meetings and committees of correspondence, in the post-revolutionary period, conducted normal political action; the convention was employed when extraordinary steps were proposed. Shay’s rebellion was preceded by one which met at Springfield, and embraced delegates from the counties about; the alarm created by the Hartford convention was in part due to the selection of this term in summoning it, and, without much regard to whether the body was made up of delegates, any mass meeting of more than usual importance was termed a convention; e.g., the New York meeting nominating George Clinton in 1811, the mass meeting led by Daniel Webster in New Hampshire in 1812, or even the early conventions in Maryland and Pennsylvania which nominated Jackson and Ha
rrison.

-The initiative in local and state party government, which rested at the opening of the revolutionary war with city meetings, societies and their committees of correspondence, was transferred in the period succeeding this struggle to state and federal legislatures, by whom it continued to be exercised until 1830 in all parts of the country, and in some southern states until 1860. The change in New York state, a closely divided political body, whose politics early reached, and has since maintained, a high degree of organization, which makes its development typical, was distinct and definite in this direction. George Clinton had been the chief executive of the state through the war of independence, by [114] unopposed election. The first serious step toward the organization of an opposition was by a meeting of Clinton’s opponents Feb. 11, 1789, which nominated Robert Yates, and appointed a committee of correspondence to promote his election, while a letter soliciting his candidacy was addressed to him from Albany. Three years later the nomination of John Jay was made by a called meeting of his special supporters, and confirmed by a larger body held later; Clinton, representing the more popular organization, received his nomination from a general meeting composed, as was alleged, of gentlemen from various parts of the state, followed by meetings in each county. Here was the early germ of the convention, as now known; but it withered from the practical difficulty and the vast expense of travel, which made it impossible to bring political delegates together, except as they were already assembled in state legislatures. It is highly significant that each step in the higher organization of our parties has been at a time when internal transportation was developed. The state convention reached its development in New York state in the decade which saw the Erie canal opened; the national convention first became complete in the period of railroad expansion from 1850 to 1860, and the management of a national campaign from a single party centre only became possible from 1870 to 1880, when the telegraph system of the United States was first extended over our territory. These are the real conditions which have made possible the development, and determined the character, of party government. Tocqueville early pointed out the extraordinary freedom of political association enjoyed in this country, but this would have continued dependent on cliques and caucuses at state capitals and at the seat of federal power, if it had not been supplemented by a freedom and facility in travel and communication inconceivable when he wrote. By 1795 an unprecedented advance in population had extended the base of political action in New York state beyond the scope of any meeting, large or select, on Manhattan island, and John Jay was nominated by a quasi legislative caucus held at Albany, which was, for a quarter of a century after, the centre of political action. To the close of the century, the action of the Albany caucus was still shared by citizens of the state capital; but the tendency was to recognize only legislators as its members, and in 1804 Aaron Burr and Morgan Lewis were nominated by fully organized legislative caucuses. Even then the Burrite ticket was completed by a public meeting at Albany, which nominated Oliver Phelps as lieutenant governor; but for Burrites and Quids the Albany caucus of legislators was the controlling body, its address the party platform, and its committee of correspondence the governing body of the campaign. A regular party organization now first appeared in New York politics, which has never since been without a political organization claiming regularity by virtue of its unbroken political succession from the body which in 1805 nominated D. D. Tompkins. For twenty years afterward the business of carrying on party government was conducted at Albany, and the struggle against the Albany regency was in fact the struggle of the counties and their political action against power which out of the necessity of the post road had gravitated to Albany. The same development of party government was in progress at all the state capitals, at least as far south as Virginia and as far north as Massachusetts. In New Hampshire the Rockingham convention, Aug. 5, 1812, a mass meeting of 1,500 voters, adopted a platform, nominated a full ticket, state, electoral and congressional, and joined in a vigorous address to President Madison. In Vermont conventions of free men and the legislative caucus acted indiscriminately, sometimes reaching the same nominations. The public meeting preserved its place as the origin of political action much later at the south, and the extent of the states west and south of Virginia left a political initiative to the county, which has long survived, although the legislatures were in all these states centres of political action. Inevitably, however, the condition of society on the frontier rendered impossible methodical political action. Nominations in Kentucky, in 1799, for a constitutional convention and state legislature, were agreed upon in many counties by committees of two from each religious society and from each militia company; a combination of religious and secular affairs in political organization which had its analogue in Philadelphia at a recent period in the cant political question, Are you a presbyterian or democrat? whose answer opened more than one election fight.

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-In Virginia a periodical Richmond caucus early in the century decided on state nominations, and appointed a committee of correspondence, which acted with like committees in the counties. The action of this legislative caucus was so strictly a matter of state party government that in a presidential year, as in 1812, it did not go beyond the nomination of electors, and passed no resolutions expressing a preference as to a candidate for president, or enunciating a national platform, the only test laid down in the selection of electors being Will he vote for Mr. Madison? In Pennsylvania nominations were made at this time in the same way, and party management vested in members of the legislature. In Massachusetts, even as late as 1826, the Jackson corresponding committee, appointed by a meeting in Boston, deferred meeting until the legislature met, and a state convention could be assembled, steps in this direction still hinging on the legislature. To party management the members of the legislature naturally added the declaration of party policy and party principles. The sphere which has been occupied during the half century closing in 1880-90 by the party platforms and the letters of candidates, was earlier filled by addresses from state legislatures on federal and state topics, taking a range and [115] appearing with a frequency since unknown. For nearly fifty years after the revolutionary war these addresses summed up the opposing political doctrines of the day, and the members who signed them managed the party organizations. Nor, in comparisons between the personal character of state legislatures at an earlier and later date, is it fair to forget that membership in these bodies fifty years ago gave the political control of party nominations and party policy which has since become vested in the party convention and its central committee.

(Ability will always gravitate where real power is exerted) This is exercised to-day upon the floor of conventions, whose members are quite as often hindered in their influence as aided in their authority by a seat at Washington or in a state capital. The control exercised by the legislative caucus found its natural analogue in a like control over federal affairs in the congressional caucus at Washington, whose power was first challenged, not by the national convention which succeeded it, but by the state legislative caucus, which envied both the power of the body at Washington and the preponderating influence enjoyed in the councils of t
he meeting at Washington by the Richmond caucus. Aaron Burr’s nomination as vice-president was the first formal action taken by a caucus at Washington-Jefferson’s selection being a foregone conclusion-and Burr was nominated at the suggestion of an Albany conference. By 1808 seventeen members of the republican caucus at Washington bolted its action on another suggestion from Albany. State legislatures had begun, each on its own account, to make presidential nominations, but holding their action subordinate to final determination at Washington, precisely as in the convention period state conventions present their favorite sons to national conventions. The objection to the congressional caucus as the manager of national politics had become so serious in 1812 that the call that year laid stress upon the regular character of the assembly, while the resolutions passed disclaimed any power in its members to act except in a personal capacity. Albany was, as usual, the first to break ground in a new direction, and the republican legislative caucus at Albany nominated De Witt Clinton ten days (May 29, 1812) after Madison’s nomination at Washington.

One nomination, said Niles’ Register, in commenting upon their action, is just as legitimate as the other.

The convention which met at New York in September of the same year, with a representation from eleven states included in its membership, and which is sometimes cited as the first nominating convention, was in fact a mass meeting held to approve, or, in modern phrase, indorse, the nomination made at Albany. Four years earlier a like assemblage held at Martling’s styled itself a general meeting, and, while approving by name state nominations, in the address which it instructed its committee of correspondence to forward to republicans of the United States, exhorted them to support such candidates for offices in the general government as are regularly selected and recommended by a republican majority of the Union; meaning, of course, the congressional caucus.

-Party government had now reached a stage in which the congressional caucus, whose power, though questioned, was supreme, carried on the loose national organization of the day through its standing committee of correspondence; state legislatures did the same for state contests; while an inchoate representative political body did the like in the cities. The general meeting had already become too cumbrous to carry on party affairs in cities like New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore; Boston was still a town whose inhabitants enjoyed right of pasturage on the common for thirty years later. Secret societies had been an earlier substitute for the mass meeting, of which Tammany, a society of the Columbian order, is the last lingering representative. The democratic society, organized in Philadelphia during Washington’s second term, had its affiliated branches over Pennsylvania and the neighboring states, extending to the outer bounds of the Kentucky wilderness. Federal politics in western Massachusetts and the region about were for nearly a generation at this period powerfully influenced, if not controlled, by a secret society which had affiliated branches in New England and the middle states, and more transient organizations existed elsewhere; all circumstances which played an important part in giving edge to the anti-masonic movement. None of these societies offered a basis for popular action during a time when the number of voters was yearly augmenting, quintupling in New York state in thirty years; 57,606 in 1790, 259,387 in 1821. The committee of correspondence, which each general meeting left to continue political action until another met, was gradually supplanted by ward organizations, first temporary, then permanent. The great general meeting which met, 12,000 strong, to approve Madison’s nomination and the prosecution of the war, in Philadelphia, May, 1812, called ward caucuses to appoint five delegates to a general committee, which sat apparently for no other purpose than a more formal and weighty declaration than was possible in a tumultuous mass meeting. A similar appeal to the primary was taken in Baltimore; but the usual course with these large city meetings-of which a number were held in these stormy war times-was to approve existing nominations made by state legislatures, and to appoint the customary committee of correspondence. From cities, counties and single districts representative party government spread rapidly to the state, while the term convention began to be employed for any general meeting which included members of more than one place. The last nomination of the congressional caucus in 1824 made plain the disappearance of its political power, which had received a fatal blow eight years before. Eight years later the Albany caucus, which [116] had dealt this blow, alarmed at the growth of a new political engine in the convention, called for a revival of the congressional caucus as an escape from the dangers of separate state nominations for the presidency. The committee of correspondence of the congressional caucus has survived in unbroken succession as the congressional campaign committee of to-day, appointed biennially in the joint caucuses of the senators and representatives of each political party. The influence of this body varies greatly with the strength of the national committee and the ability of its secretary and members. In a presidential year the congressional campaign committee can do little but distribute documents, the party in power in either wing of the capitol using its facilities, folding rooms, employés and what not, for this purpose. In the intercalary congressional election the powers of this committee are considerable. It makes, or has made, the assessment on officers, organizes the congressional campaign where the party is weak, sometimes assumes to decide between conflicting claimants for a regular nomination, and furnishes doubtful districts with their speakers and supplies; but in the practical work of politics all this proves of less advantage to party success than in furthering conflicting intrigues within the party for the places in its gift, in particular those which depend upon the action of the party caucus in the house when deciding upon its candidates for speaker and other officers in the organization of the lower chamber of the federal legislature.

-The state legislative caucus remained in full away upon the disappearance of its Washington rival; but it was near its end. Presidential nominations by state legislatures as a formal official act were becoming more frequent, and paved the way for a broader representation than a party legislative caucus, in which the voters of the party living in districts where it was in a minority had no representation. The convention of the day was steadily widening its base and increasing its influence, and what was of nearly equal importance, ceased to be regarded as a dangerous or revolutionary political tool. It is a familiar fact that the legislature of Pennsylvania early lost the high relative importance attached to state legislatures and service in them in the post-revolutionary period, and it was in this state that the nominating convention first appeared in full action. A fruitless proposal for a national convention to make an anti-slavery nomination against Monroe was made in Philadelphia in 1820; in the previous four years the nomination of state officers through a convention consisting of delegates chosen by public meetings had become familiar. In the decade opening in 1820 this became the practice in Pennsylvania, beginning five years before the like innovation in New York state, ten years before it was rooted in Massachusetts, and fifteen years before the legislative caucus had disappeared in Virginia, while in some western and south western states it survived the first highly organized national campaign of our history in 1840. A convention held in Carlisle, Pa., in February, 1821, made up of county delegates, which nominated Heister in opposition to Gov. Findlay, was one of the first state conven
tions on the modern plan, if not the earliest. Six years earlier, Feb. 27, 1815, when a meeting of citizens from every part of the state was holden at Boston, it confined itself to an address to the independent electors of Massachusetts, and only confirmed the nomination of Caleb Strong and William Phillips, already reached by a legislative caucus.

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-In general terms, it may be said that, up to the slack-water politics of Monroe’s second election, the general meeting in the centres of population, while it bad been widened by the presence of voters from other parts of the state, assumed no strict representative capacity, and left the initiative in politics to the legislative caucus; but in the decade beginning with 1820 two changes took place: state conventions, embracing representatives from most of the counties of the state, began to make state and national nominations, and conventions for a special purpose, embracing quasi delegates from many states, began to formulate opinion on questions of national politics, and out of these separate threads was spun the national convention. So slowly did this take place that, reckoning from the earliest state convention of a representative character, it was fifteen years before all the counties of a large state were represented in a convention, and forty-eight years before all the states were represented by national conventions. These early bodies were, as was natural, most loosely organized. The Hartford convention, in spite of its official character, received from New Hampshire delegates elected by county meetings, and carelessness of form or credential was still more characteristic of the bodies which met at a later period to represent some particular form of national opinion. Early as these bodies assumed a representative character, their systematic organization came more slowly, and important political gatherings which exerted a serious influence upon current party policy were in fact nothing but voluntary assemblages of men chosen by no formal constituency. This was the case even with the protection convention which met at Harrisburg, upon the call of the Pennsylvania legislature, July 30, 1827, delegates to which were elected by counties in Pennsylvania. The address of the free trade convention which met in Philadelphia Sept. 30, 1831, was accepted by Mr. Justice Story, in his Commentaries, as an authoritative exposition of the political views of the party denying congress the right to levy protective duties; but the convention itself met pursuant to a call issued at the suggestion of the New York Evening Post; the delegates, who voted singly and with equal powers, represented states, cities, counties, mass meetings and themselves; Mississippi being represented by a single delegate, Mr. Pinckney, a member of congress, and the proceedings throughout point to a loose structure only possible [117] while the functions and methods of a political convention were still unformed. The like was true of the protectionist convention which met in the same year in New York, of the convention of the friends of American industry held in Harrisburg in 1824, and of most interstate conventions of the day. In the first of the long series of conventions dealing with the needs of the Mississippi valley, which met at Memphis, Nov. 12, 1845, upon a call issued by the Tennessee state legislature, with John C. Calhoun as its presiding officer, delegates from eleven states, one territory, Texas, an independent power, St. Louis, and a number of counties, all met and voted on a common basis. In fact, the many interstate conventions which met for a quarter of a century after the Hartford convention, bore the same relation to the strictly organized national conventions of the post-rebellion period, that early parliaments sustain to the completely organized body now at St. Stephens.

-In most states the convention had reached a complete organization long before its representative capacity was recognized. In 1820 the republican legislative caucus at Albany, whose address put Tompkins and Mooers in nomination in accordance with the settled and approved ways of the party, was met by a bolting caucus, whose address dealt freely in the current charges of fraud against Gov. Tompkins. In the ensuing four years the constitution of 1821 added largely to the voters of the state, and the popular convention sprang into being under the control of the young leaders in the central counties by the lakes, who were beginning, first as anti-masons, and later as whigs, their struggle against the control of politics from Albany. In ten years, the new and facile instrument of political action had driven the legislative caucus out of existence. The first conspicuous, but by no means the earliest, convention of the new order was an anti-masonic body, which met in 1826, with Thurlow Weed as its influential manager. It still took longer to go from New York to Buffalo than in 1883 to go from New York to San Francisco; and, in the loose practice of the day, any man with interest enough to take a week’s journey to a political convention was accepted as a representative, with little scrutiny of his credentials, if any were required. Progress, however, toward a different procedure, was rapid. Originating in a local call in local newspapers to the young men’s republican clubs through the state, the republican young men’s convention, which met at Utica Aug. 12, 1828, and chose W. H. Seward as its presiding officer, was a full-fledged political convention, whose neat and rapid working shows how early the hand of Thurlow Weed learned its cunning. Its record presents delegates elected and ranged by counties, a temporary and permanent organization, committees on credentials, organization and resolutions, appointed on the instant by the chairman by congressional districts, and its close presents a complete working machine. Central corresponding committees of three were named from each county, and these were instructed to complete the county organization by a committee of five in each town, while the general conduct of affairs was intrusted to a state central corresponding committee of twelve to be taken from the town of Utica and vicinity, a necessary concession to the practical difficulty of bringing together a committee including members scattered over a wider area. This convention adopted a modern platform, tacking on a tariff plank as an afterthought; but it made no nominations; approving those already made of Smith Thompson and Francis Granger on the state, and Adams and Rush on the federal ticket. Resolutions were passed, but they did not as yet constitute a comprehensive platform, and action upon nominations was reached through the adoption of a resolution-a practice which still survives in many states in the apparently useless form of adding to the platform an additional resolution giving the names of the candidates who have been put in nomination by the vivâ voce choice of the convention between several candidates. The new form of party rule was already in full operation in Pennsylvania, where by 1823 the nomination of J. Andrew Shulye was reached in a convention (March 4, 1823) only after five ballots; but so loose was party organization that the state committee appointed by the convention was at this period in the habit of meeting only to call another convention, interconvention political control vesting, as it had for so many years in committees of correspondence appointed by general meetings in the larger cities. In Massachusetts, at the same period (Jan. 23, 1823), the first step was taken toward a convention by adding to the mass meeting of republican members of both branches, delegates from republican towns not represented in the legislature.

Five years later the Jackson republicans in the state had fully organized on the convention plan, and both parties in 1832. In Virginia, where, as in New York, the opposition seized on the convention in 1828, the ruling legislative caucus extended its numbers in the same method by adding representatives of
countie