This ambitious work uncovers the constitutional foundations of that
most essential institution of modern democracy, the political
party. Taking on Richard Hofstadter's classic
The Idea of a
Party System, it rejects the standard view that Martin Van
Buren and other Jacksonian politicians had the idea of a modern
party system in mind when they built the original Democratic
party.
Grounded in an original retelling of Illinois politics of the 1820s
and 1830s, the book also includes chapters that connect the
state-level narrative to national history, from the birth of the
Constitution to the Dred Scott case. In this reinterpretation,
Jacksonian party-builders no longer anticipate twentieth-century
political assumptions but draw on eighteenth-century constitutional
theory to justify a party division between "the democracy" and "the
aristocracy." Illinois is no longer a frontier latecomer to
democratic party organization but a laboratory in which politicians
use Van Buren's version of the Constitution, states' rights, and
popular sovereignty to reeducate a people who had traditionally
opposed party organization. The modern two-party system is no
longer firmly in place by 1840. Instead, the system remains captive
to the constitutional commitments on which the Democrats and Whigs
founded themselves, even as the specter of sectional crisis haunts
the parties' constitutional visions.