The Founding Fathers Feared Political Factions Would Tear the Nation Apart

The Constitution’s framers viewed political parties as a necessary evil.

Today, it’s hard to imagine the U.S. government without its two dominant political parties, Democrats and Republicans. Yet in 1787, when delegates convened in Philadelphia to draft the Constitution, they intentionally left political parties out of the nation’s founding document.

This omission was deliberate. The framers wanted to prevent the deep divisions that had torn England apart during the 17th-century civil wars. Many viewed political parties—then called “factions”—as corrupt remnants of the British monarchy that the new American government should avoid.

“It wasn’t that they didn’t think about parties,” says Willard Sterne Randall, professor emeritus of history at Champlain College and biographer of six Founding Fathers. “The very idea of a party reminded some of them of bitter conflicts they wanted to leave behind.”

George Washington’s family had fled England to escape civil war, while Alexander Hamilton described parties as “the most fatal disease” of popular government. James Madison, co-author with Hamilton of the Federalist Papers, argued in Federalist 10 that a strong union should control the “violence of faction.”

Yet Thomas Jefferson, serving in France during the Constitutional Convention, believed the framers erred in excluding political parties. “Men by their constitutions are naturally divided into two parties,” he wrote in 1824.

When Washington ran unopposed in the nation’s first presidential election in 1789, he selected Jefferson for his Cabinet to ensure a diversity of political views. “He had been warned that if Jefferson wasn’t included, he might actively oppose the government,” Randall explains.

With Jefferson as secretary of state and Hamilton as Treasury secretary, two competing visions of America emerged, forming the country’s first political parties. Hamilton’s Federalists, advocating a strong central government, drew support from Northern businessmen, bankers, and merchants with pro-British leanings. Jefferson’s followers preferred limited federal power, favoring states’ rights, and were often small farmers, artisans, and Southern planters aligned with France.

Even Madison, who had defended the Constitution alongside Hamilton, opposed many of Hamilton’s financial policies, fearing they concentrated too much power in Washington. In 1791, Madison and Jefferson formed what became the Democratic-Republican Party—precursor to today’s Democratic Party—in opposition to Hamilton’s programs, including the federal assumption of state debt and creation of a national bank.

By the mid-1790s, both Jefferson and Hamilton had left Washington’s Cabinet, and the two parties engaged in bitter public battles through newspapers over the president’s policies. In his 1796 farewell address, Washington warned against the dangers of factionalism: “The common and continual mischiefs of the spirit of party are sufficient to make it the interest and duty of a wise people to discourage and restrain it.” Randall notes, “He had stayed for a second term to prevent these parties from tearing the Union apart.”

The rivalry intensified under John Adams, who narrowly defeated Jefferson and sought to suppress opposition by making it a federal crime to criticize the president. When Jefferson returned to power four years later, his Democratic-Republicans purged much of the Federalist bureaucracy, effectively dismantling the party.

Though the Federalists never regained the presidency and vanished after the War of 1812, the two-party system reemerged with Andrew Jackson’s Democratic Party in the 1830s and solidified with the founding of the Republican Party in the 1850s. By 1860, the framework of the modern two-party system was in place—even as the nation approached the very civil war the Founders had hoped to avoid.