The Federalist empire: insecurity and expansion in the Revolutionary Atlantic, 1793-1800

Abstract

During the 1790s, the Federalist Party pursued an increasingly aggressive series of domestic and foreign policies borne from a paranoid political worldview in which they believed the republic was at risk of falling to foreign subversion. This belief situated events (rightly or wrongly) into their worldview as reinforcing evidence. In the process, the Federalist Party enacted legislative policies and military actions that sought to curtal this perceived subversion. Foreign policy and domestic issues were not separate, but rather existed as an intermingled whole. This idea challenges much of the extant historiography on the 1790s, particularly the portion involving the Federalist Party. Traditionally, historians have viewed the Federalists as either pre-modern or anti-democratic, making them a perfect foil for the Republicans ascension and the Election of 1800. The Federalist Empire argues against these notions, making a case for political contingency rather than democratic inevitability. Most importantly, the work charts the growth of a mindset that viewed dissent and opposition as French, and at times English, attempts to co-opt the American experiment. Struggling to comprehend the still-developing party system, the Federalists turned to the military for solutions, from the suppression of the Whiskey Rebellion, through the execution of the Quasi-War, to the proposed formation of a provisional army for home defense. By 1800, however, the Federalists found themselves unable to build a coherent rhetorical message behind the Sedition Act and that, along with internal party divisions, set the conditions for the partys electoral defeat