The Cycles of American History by Arthur M. Schlesinger

Author:Arthur M. Schlesinger
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Mariner Books

The expanse of the new nation gave parties another function. The thirteen colonies that had joined precariously to overthrow British rule were divided by local loyalties, by discrepant principles, by diverging folkways, by imperfect communications. Yet they were pledged to establish an American Union—and to do so over nearly a million square miles of territory. The parties as national associations were a force, soon a potent force, against provincialism and separatism. At the same time, they strengthened the fabric of unity by legitimizing the idea of political opposition—a startling development for a world in which that idea had little legitimacy (it has little enough for most of the world today). In 1800–1801 the American parties showed they could solve the most tense of all problems in new nations—the transfer of power from a governing party to its opponents.

“The party system of Government,” Franklin D. Roosevelt once said, “is one of the greatest methods of unification and of teaching people to think in common terms.”7 When by the middle of the nineteenth century the growing tensions between North and South split most national institutions, even the churches, party organization, as that brilliant early analyst of American politics, Henry Jones Ford, observed, was “the last bond of union to give way.”8

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