Liberty & Order: The First American Party Struggle

Liberty and Order is an ambitious anthology of primary source writings: letters, circulars, debate transcriptions, House proceedings, and newspaper articles that document the years during which America's founding generation divided over the sort of country the United States was to become. The founders' arguments over the proper construction of the new Constitution, the political economy, the appropriate level of popular participation in a republican polity, foreign policy, and much else, not only contributed crucially to the shaping of the nineteenth-century United States, but also have remained of enduring interest to all historians of republican liberty. This anthology makes it possible to understand the grounds and development of the great collision, which pitted John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, and others who called themselves Federalists or, sometimes, the friends of order, against the opposition party led by Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and their followers, in what emerged as the Jeffersonian Republican Party. Editor Lance Banning provides the reader with original-source explanations of early anti-Federalist feeling and Federalist concerns, beginning with the seventh letter from the 'Federal Farmer', in which the deepest fears of many opponents of the Constitution were expressed. He then selects from the House proceedings concerning the Bill of Rights and makes his way toward the public debates concerning the massive revolutionary debt acquired by the United States. The reader is able to examine the American reaction to the French Revolution and to the War of 1812, and to explore the founders' disagreements over both domestic and foreign policy. The collection ends on a somewhat melancholy note with the correspondence of Jefferson and Adams, who were, to some extent, reconciled to each other at the end of their political careers. Brief, elucidatory headnotes place both the novice and the expert in the midst of the times. With this significant new collection, the reader receives a deeper understanding of the complex issues, struggles, and personalities that made up the first great party battle and that continue to shape our representative government today.

About the Author :
Lance Banning is Professor of History at the University of Kentucky, where he has taught since 1973, and was the 2000/2001 Distinguished Professor in the College of Arts and Sciences. He is also co-editor of the University Press of Kansas series 'American Political Thought' and the author of many articles, essays, and books on the American founding and first party struggle, including three award-winning books: Jefferson and Madison: Three Conversations from the Founding, The Jeffersonian Persuasion: Evolution of a Party Ideology, and The Sacred Fire of Liberty: James Madison and the Founding of the Federal Republic, the latter two of which were nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.

Review :
Compiled and edited by Lance Banning (Professor of History, University of Kentucky), Liberty and Order: The First American Party Struggle presents representatives of the Federalist and Anti-Federalist factions expounding in their own words their divergent philosophies, visions, and concerns-differences that would give birth to a system of American political parties which was originally unexpected and unforeseen by the Founding Fathers and the United States Constitution. Liberty and Order provides significant insights and backgrounding into such historical issues as the development of the Bill of Rights; the impact of the French Revolution and the War of 1812 upon American civil liberties and foreign policy; and the primal foundations of what we recognize today as the American political economy. Liberty and Order is a seminal contribution to school and community library American Political History collections.

James A. Cox
The Midwest Book Review
2004

Liberty and Order does a fine job of charting the course of American political history from the constitutional debates of 1787-8 to the end of the first party system in 1816. It contains a rich assortment of public and private documents. The private documents, mostly letters, are particularly fascinating, revealing the full depth of partisan feeling. They prove conclusively that conspiracy theories were genuinely held beliefs, not mere rhetorical tools to use on gullible voters. The prevalence of such theories even among the supremely rational founders can be instructive to our own age, which is hardly immune from them. Liberty and Order is an invaluable tool in understanding the origins of the American political system.

Carl J. Richard
Department of History and Geography
University of Louisiana at Lafayette
International Journal of the Classical Tradition
Winter 2005