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Chapter 6 The Campaign for Political Unity Political parties drove the transformation and bridged the transition from early republican to early national politics in the first decades of the nineteenth century, and Jeffersonian Republicans went almost without challenge during the period. But even a passing familiarity with local and state politics in the Delaware Valley offers a strikingly different view of an era of supposed Republican dominance. Whereas New Castle, Delaware, was a mixed but Republican-leaning town in a Federalist state, Burlington, New Jersey, was an ardently Federalist place in a Republican state. Easton and Pennsylvania both were staunchly Republican, but the bitter controversies within that party in local and state contests easily matched, and probably exceeded, the two-party acrimony elsewhere. In short, these Delaware Valley towns demonstrate the complexity of representative politics in the first decades of the nineteenth century that can too easily be glossed over from national and presidential perspectives. Although organized political competition had been a feature of colonial politics in the Delaware Valley, especially in Pennsylvania, the growing legitimacy and significance of political parties began to coalesce into a bipartisan structure by the 1820s that would be the hallmark of modern American politics. The two-party system's later dominance in American electoral politics, however, can lead to a basic misunderstanding of early U.S. political culture, when parties still suffered widespread suspicion as corrupt institutions likely to destroy a true republican society.! Ethnic and religious dimensions of local experience that had been central to the Revolutionary mobilization in the Delaware Valley helped to shape the emergence of party organizations that hoped to exploit such identities for partisan purposes. A local perspective is required to see how people understood politics in their own day and shows that ethnoreligious considerations shaped voter perception and action in fundamental ways. Yet identity politics never dominated electoral politics in a monolithic or all-controlling manner, and individual examples can always be given that counter broader group tendencies. Partisan politics cannot be convincingly explained with a single formula that links parties to religious and ethnic groups for the simple reason that successful parties needed to build broad coalitions. Nevertheless, ethno-religious identities 210 Chapter 6 intertwined with partisan politics in the Delaware Valley, and these influences deserve close examination to uncover the subtle ways that group consciousness informed political activity and allegiance. Jacksonian Democracy once played a central part in historians' assessments of the early United States, and interpretations of that concept and era are as varied as the multiple groups in early national society. The rise of regular two-party competition that originated with the personalist contests between Andrew Jackson and John Quincy Adams in the 1820s has been most influentially explained in terms of oppositional economic classes, ethnic and religious group mobilization, and the professionalization of party leadership and machinery. Recently, broad socioeconomic differences arising from the Market Revolution have again emerged as the leading force explaining the politics of Jacksonian America.f While often contradictory, these standard explanations of the creation of a modern two-party political system generally share a top-down perspective on party formation that relies on presidential contests, the nation, and key state examples as the critical explanatory and evidentiary criteria. This approach usefully identifies broad patterns, yet reinforces one of the central consequences of the party system by obfuscating the richly varied local activities that often ran counter to larger trends. As most late eighteenth-century political actors keenly understood, a strengthened nation directly challenged the importance, influence, and diversity of local political expression . The formation of the second party system closed the era when Revolutionary values directly shaped American politics. By the 1820s the generation that had participated in the Revolution was waning and no longer played the leading role in American life. The emerging society that Jackson symbolized culminated the broad Revolutionary era that had wrought enormous change not just by separating from the British Empire, but also by spurring particular internal developments in the postwar United States. Whether one sees the numerous changes of this era as heralding movement toward a more egalitarian polity or decries them as curbs placed upon a potentially more transformative Revolution, the electoral system created in the decades after the war would be the period's most durable and direct social change. 3 Ethnicity, Religion, and Politics in the Republican Period Delaware's persistent bipartisan competition was unique in the so-called first party system of the early republic.? This competitiveness arose...

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