By the mid-1790s, two increasingly coherent parties had appeared in Congress, calling themselves Federalists and Republicans. (The latter had no connection with today’s Republican Party, which was founded in the 1850s.) Both parties laid claim to the language of liberty, and each accused its opponent of engaging in a conspiracy to destroy it.
The Federalists, supporters of the Washington administration, favored Hamilton’s economic program and close ties with Britain. Prosperous merchants, farmers, lawyers, and established political leaders (especially outside the South) tended to support the Federalists. Their outlook was generally elitist, reflecting the traditional eighteenth-century view of society as a fixed hierarchy and of public office as reserved for men of economic substance—the “rich, the able, and the well-born,” as Hamilton put it. Freedom, Federalists insisted, rested on deference to authority. It did not mean the right to stand up in opposition to government. Federalists feared that the “spirit of liberty” unleashed by the American Revolution was degenerating into anarchy and “licentiousness.” When the New York Federalist leader Rufus King wrote an essay on the “words... with wrong meaning” that had “done great harm” to American society, his first example was “Liberty.”