“The Times, A Political Portrait” Cartoon

This political cartoon depicts one of the most important areas of disagreement in post-revolutionary America. There exists a tendency among many to believe that the Founding Fathers fundamentally agreed about the nature of the new government they had created; in reality, the first decade after the ratification of the Constitution, which was the product of numerous compromises, was one of the most divisive and bitter in the history of American politics. Two groups dominated the political landscape by the 1790s. One favored a strong federal government committed to global trade and developing into a world power, and the other remained suspicious of a powerful central government and was committed to a largely agrarian economy. The former group, the Federalists, was initially the larger and more powerful of the two, which enabled it to dominate the federal government during the first twelve years of the nation’s existence. But the latter group, the Democratic-Republicans, proved resilient and grew in numbers by ridiculing the Federalists as the party of the commercial elites while they represented independent farmers.