Question

HELP• How did the Early Republic era in US History help to mold the American Nation? Be sure to mention the presidencies of Washington and Adams along with the pivotal election of 1800.

Answer 1

We tend to think in this age that the writing of the Constitution and its ratification, the setting up of the new government under the Constitution, the early years of Washington’s administration, and indeed the whole series of events in the post-Revolutionary War period had a certain inevitability, that these things were the logical and only possible outcome of the struggle with Great Britain. Along with that idea goes the notion that American history was pretty much ordained to come out as it did, that subsequent events would have taken us along the same general path to the future, that America would become the great 20th-century powerhouse that has dominated world affairs for the past sixty years. In fact, particularly if one accepts the general premise of chaos theory as applied to historical events, which we discussed in the opening sessions, nothing at all was inevitable about what happened from 1775 to 1800.

Answer 2

We also tend to think of our own times as politically troublesome—people get angry over politics and think the worst of our political leaders with a cynicism that present day pundits find disturbing. How wonderful, we think, it must have been to have lived under government conducted by those great founding fathers, who had to have gotten along famously in order to have achieved what they did. Yet Page Smith, a superb historian of that period, has written that the 1790s were so bitter that “many Americans of various political persuasions felt little hope that the republic could survive.” He discusses the election of 1800 in terms of “a quantum of Republican and Federalist rage difficult to account for” and adds that the loss of the election of 1800 for the Republicans “would almost certainly have driven them mad,” and that the loss of that election did just that to many Federalists. (The killing of Alexander Hamilton by Vice President Aaron Burr in a duel in 1804 is but one highly visible symptom of the political antagonism of that era.)