The first reaction against an enlarged and all-powerful America had been reached in the history of parties. The drag on the chariot was now to be felt.
The Republicans were in correspondingly high spirits over the prospective downfall of the party which had so far perverted the administration of the National Government from the path which it should have taken. Republican rhymesters exhausted their wit in describing how
"Brave Hamilton, our warrior bold, Strove Adams in the chair to hold, By mustering sense, and spleen, and wit, To prove him totally unfit."
Madison thought a steady adherence to the principles of prudence all that was needed. "It would be doubly unwise," he wrote to the impatient Monroe, now Governor of Virginia, "to depart from this course at a moment when the party which has done the mischief is so industriously co-operating in its own destruction." If anything was wanting to assure the defeat of the Federalists, it was supplied in the publication of "A Letter from Alexander Hamilton Concerning the Public Conduct and Character of John Adams, Esq., President of the United States." The letter laid bare most mercilessly the weakness in the nature and the defects in the administration of John Adams. Material for the recital had been furnished Hamilton by his tools in the Cabinet. Hamilton had his revenge on Adams, but he paid dearly for it in the estimation of every non-partisan American. Simply because the national structure was not being built to his own plans he would endanger the fabric by giving it over to those whose theories tended to weakening instead of strengthening it.
The presidential election of 1800 was epoch-making in several meanings of the term. It was a reaction against the bold and defiant attitude of the party in power. It was a revolution of the people. Yet it was neither a dissolution of all government, as it appeared to the defeated, nor a permanent conversion of the people to democracy, as the victorious element was inclined to consider it. Sixty years later, the people would rise against the victorious party, grown to be a slave-truckling organisation, overscrupulous of the individual when the world was turning to aggregation, and would take the sceptre from them for a quarter of a century at least. The masses punish arrogance in a party as in an individual. Unlimited success is always fatal. No sooner has the party passed the safety-line in one direction than the tide of popular favour turns in the opposite way and leaves it stranded. Owing to such reaction, the National Government has never approximated anarchy on the individualistic side of Jeffersonianism, nor has it been in danger of monarchy under Hamiltonian centralising principles at the other extremity. To-day it is as far from the ideals of the one as the other. Controlled constantly by centrifugal and centripetal forces, the fixed orbit of the Union has been maintained.