The Parties They Didn't Want

Federalist No. 10 warned against faction. The Farewell Address warned against the spirit of party. The founders who wrote those documents founded the parties anyway. The National Gazette was established on October 31, 1791, at the urging of Jefferson and Madison, to counter the influence of the Federalist press. Madison wrote eighteen anonymous essays for it. Hamilton wrote to Washington about it. By 1796 the parties were fixed.

Philip Freneau was a poet and journalist. In 1791, Jefferson offered him a position as a State Department clerk at 250 dollars a year. The position required little work. Madison had been a college classmate of Freneau's at Princeton. Together, Jefferson and Madison recruited Freneau to establish the National Gazette in Philadelphia as a Democratic-Republican counterweight to John Fenno's Federalist Gazette of the United States. The National Gazette published its first issue on October 31, 1791.

Hamilton learned of the arrangement and wrote to Washington about it in 1792, accusing Jefferson of subsidizing a partisan press through a government appointment. Jefferson denied that Freneau's clerkship was connected to the newspaper. Washington, watching his cabinet destroy itself, wrote to both men asking them to stop. Neither did.

Madison published eighteen essays in the National Gazette between November 19, 1791 and December 20, 1792. He signed some with his initials. He left others anonymous. The essays argued, among other things, that the Federalists had misread the Constitution, that Hamilton's financial program benefited speculators at the expense of productive citizens, and that the Democratic-Republicans represented the true constitutional majority.

The essays mark the moment Madison broke definitively with Hamilton. They had co-authored the Federalist Papers three years earlier. By 1791 they were arguing in print, anonymously, for opposite constitutional theories. The National Gazette gave Madison a platform outside the floor of Congress. The Gazette of the United States gave Hamilton one. The two newspapers made the cabinet split visible to the public.

The National Gazette suspended publication in October 1793 when yellow fever closed Philadelphia. Freneau left. But the party structure it had helped build did not dissolve. By 1796, the Federalists and Democratic-Republicans were organized enough to run competing slates of presidential electors. John Adams won the presidency. Thomas Jefferson, as the runner-up under the original electoral rules, became Vice President. They were leaders of opposing parties now sharing the executive branch. The 1800 election would resolve that arrangement by changing it.

The National Gazette is available at the Library of Congress. The LOC holds digitized issues from 1791 through 1793. Madison's initials appear on seventeen of his eighteen essays in the bound volume at the LOC. The authorship attribution is documented in the Founders Online editorial note.