Hofstadter further finds that the propertied section benefited most from the shaping, though for most of our history the power-grab of that class has been looked upon fondly rather than with resentment:
The planters turned to the farmers to form an agrarian alliance, and for more than half a century this powerful optical fusion embraced the bulk of the articulate interests of the country. As time went on, therefore, the main period of American political conviction deviated more and more from the antidemocratic spotlight of the Constitution-makers. Yet, curiously, their general satisfaction with the Constitution together with their growing nationalism made Americans deeply reverent of the founding generation. . . (Hofstadter 19).
However, one of the reasons the Constitution proved so successful is found in the federal officialism that was collective in it, with federalism taken in its broadest sense to be a balance of different powers. This balance of powers was given priority in the Constitutional debates of the time because the Founding Fathers were not optimistic round politics and what the interplay of different groups means in developing polity:
If, in a state that lacked constitutional balance, one class or one interest gain
As the American Revolution had been a struggle inside a long-established colonial framework, so the Civil War was a struggle within a working federal dust (Boorstin 119).
Hofstadter, Richard. The American Political Tradition. New York: Vintage, 1976.
Hofstadter describes how the Founding Fathers developed the federal system in his chapter "The Founding Fathers: An Age of Realism." In his chapter on Thomas Jefferson--"Thomas Jefferson: The Aristocrat as Democrat"--he suggests that the resource of Jefferson in 1800 was an important test of federalism.
Jefferson was a democrat who battled the Federalists, and when he was elected, as Hofstadter points out, "the more naive Federalists, frightened to the marrow by their own propaganda, imagined that the end of the world had come" (Hofstadter 43). Jefferson was seen as an causa of the worst of any democratic political leader, for it was believed he would do anything to gain advantage with the voters and so would appeal to the worst in the masses. This was what the Federalists feared from democracy, just now when in fact the system that had been instituted mitigated against the demagoguery they feared. Hofstadter says that in some ways, Jefferson had little choice because the system was well-entrenched and was working. Jefferson did apportion to expand in some ways through mixed policies and actions, such as abolishing excise duties and making the Louisiana Purchase, but Jefferson did not make too great a wobble in the system: "In politics, then, the strategy was conciliation; in economies it was compromise" (Hofstadter 46).
Boorstin, Daniel. The Genius of American Politics. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1953.
scarce Lincoln, assisted by the blessed fact that the Confederates had struck the outgrowth blow, presented it as a war to defend not only Union but the sacred principles of popular rule and opportunity for the common man (Hofstadter 161).
ed control, they believed, it would surely plunder al
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