First Party System
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 Presidential-election results from 1796 through 1824. Green denotes states generally carried by Republicans; orange denotes states generally carried by Federalists or Federalist-supported candidates. |
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The First Party System was the first period of organized, nationwide party competition in the United States. Historians generally date it from the emergence of the Federalist Party and the opposition Republican Party in the early 1790s to the collapse of sustained Federalist–Republican competition after the War of 1812. Its endpoint is not exact: the Federalist Party declined sharply after 1816, the Republicans fragmented during the presidential election of 1824, and the rival coalitions associated with Andrew Jackson and John Quincy Adams developed into the Second Party System during the later 1820s.
The Federalists, led most prominently by Alexander Hamilton, supported the financial and administrative program of President George Washington's government, including federal assumption of state debts, the First Bank of the United States, public credit, a professional diplomatic and military establishment, and a comparatively broad interpretation of federal power. The Republicans, organized principally by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, opposed Hamilton's program and argued that it endangered representative government by concentrating authority in the federal executive and by binding the government to financial and commercial elites. Republicans favored a narrower construction of federal power and presented an agrarian political economy as a safeguard of republican independence.
Foreign affairs intensified the division. Federalists generally sought neutrality combined with stable commercial relations with Great Britain, whereas Republicans were more sympathetic to the French Revolution and more suspicious of British power. These alignments were neither absolute nor permanent, and both parties contained regional and ideological differences. The parties were national coalitions rather than simple sections or social classes: Federalists were strongest in New England, commercial centers, and among many merchants, while Republicans were especially strong in the South and in rural districts but also developed durable organizations in the Mid-Atlantic and northern states.
Neither organization resembled a modern mass-membership party. National leaders, members of Congress, state politicians, newspaper editors, local notables, and officeholders built overlapping networks that nominated candidates, distributed ballots and pamphlets, coordinated newspapers, and mobilized eligible voters. Participation increased during the period as many states loosened property qualifications for white men, but voting rules varied widely. Women were generally excluded from the franchise, enslaved people had no political rights, and the voting rights that some free Black men possessed were increasingly restricted in several states.