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Map of Georgia
Written by Anthony Gene Carey
Auburn University

Georgia entered the Union on January 2, 1788, the fourth of the original thirteen colonies to ratify the United States Constitution. The Georgia constitution of 1789 created a bicameral legislature consisting of a Senate and a House of Representatives; representatives were elected annually, senators every third year. Although Georgia's early constitutions specified neither the sex nor the race of voters, in practice eligible voters consisted of free men (predominantly whites) at least 21 years old who had paid taxes during the previous year and had resided in the county for at least six months. Each county elected one senator, and counties elected from two to five representatives, depending roughly on relative population. The legislature elected the governor to a two-year term, initially through a cumbersome process but, after a 1795 amendment, through a simple joint ballot of the legislature. Another 1795 amendment made Senate elections annual. All elections were by ballot.

The 1798 constitution (frequently amended but not entirely replaced until 1861) left the basic electoral structure intact. The most important change specified the use of the "three-fifths" or "federal" ratio, which counted three-fifths of the enslaved population in addition to the free white population in apportioning seats in the state House of Representatives. The 1798 document also required regular reapportionment among counties as the population changed. The legislature continued to elect the governor until an amendment in 1824 required direct popular election of the state's chief executive. The first popular election for governor occurred in 1825. In elections for the U.S. Congress, the legislature elected senators by joint ballot, and the state alternated between a district system and a general ticket system for the direct popular election of members of the U.S. House of Representatives.

Early Georgia politics was highly personal and factional. The absence of statewide elections, except for Congress, tended to localize politics and deter the formation of broad, institutionalized parties. The Federalists had some strength through the turn of the century, especially in Savannah and Augusta, but Georgia was largely a Republican state. The major political contests featured clashes among those who claimed to be Jeffersonian Republicans. Outrage over the Yazoo land frauds helped James Jackson dominate state politics for many years until his death in 1806, and William Crawford and George M. Troup then assumed the leadership of the Jackson group. John Clark headed the major rival faction. In broad terms, Jackson-Crawford-Troup adherents tended to have Virginia ties and to be based in the wealthier sections of the eastern black belt and low country. The Clark faction contained more people of North Carolina extraction and found its strongest support in frontier areas. Clark defeated Troup for the governorship in both 1819 and 1821, before Troup bested his rival in 1825. William Crawford was a major presidential contender in 1824. Excitement over these races, indeed, helped push through the amendment calling for popular election of the governor and a law mandating popular election of presidential electors. The most persistent and pressing issue of this early period was the state's efforts to push back the Creek and Cherokee nations and open Native American lands to white settlement. The short-staple cotton boom and the Panic of 1819 fueled economic and land concerns. The election returns presented in this series end just before the Georgia factions began to organize themselves into bona fide political parties that would become the Democratic and Whig parties in the state.

<h3>Bibliography</h3> <ul> <li>Carey, Anthony Gene. <title>Parties, Slavery, and the Union in Antebellum Georgia. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997.
  • Coleman, Kenneth R., gen. ed. A History of Georgia, 2nd ed. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991.
  • Cook, James F. The Governors of Georgia, 1754—2004, 3rd ed. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2005.
  • Carl Vinson Institute of Government, University of Georgia Georgia Constitution Web Page
  • Lamplugh, George R. Politics on the Periphery: Factions and Parties in Georgia, 1783—1806. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1986.
  • Phillips, Ulrich B. Georgia and State Rights. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1902.

    • Federalist

    The Federalist Party

    The Federalist Party was dominated by a man who never actually ran for public office in the United States - Alexander Hamilton. "Alexander Hamilton was, writes Marcus Cunliffe, 'the executive head with the most urgent program to implement, with the sharpest ideas of what he meant to do and with the boldest desire to shape the national government accordingly.' In less than two years he presented three reports, defining a federal economic program which forced a major debate not only on the details of the program but on the purpose for which the union has been formed. Hamilton's own sense of purpose was clear; he would count the revolution for independence a success only if it were followed by the creation of a prosperous commerical nation, comparable, perhaps even competitive, in power and in energy, with its European counterparts." (fn: Marcus Cunliffe, The Nation Takes Shape, 1789-1837, (Chicago, 1959), 23.) (Linda K. Kerber, History of U.S. Political Parties Volume I: 1789-1860: From Factions to Parties. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., ed. New York, 1973, Chelsea House Publisher. p. 11)

    "Federalists created their political program out of a political vision. They had shared in the revolutionaries' dream of a Republic of Virtue, and they emerged from a successful war against empire to search for guarantees that the republican experiment would not collapse." (Kerber, p. 3)

    "The Federalist political demand was for a competent government, one responsible for the destiny of the nation and with the power to direct what that destiny would be. What was missing in postwar America, they repeatedly complained in a large variety of contexts, was order, predictability, stability. A competent government would guarantee the prosperity and external security of the nation; a government of countervailing balances was less likely to be threatened by temporary lapses in civic virtue, while remaining strictly accountable to the public will." (Kerber, p. 4)

    "So long as Federalists controlled and staffed the agencies of the national government, the need to formulate alternate mechanisms for party decision making was veiled; with a Federalist in the White House, Federalists in the Cabinet, and Federalist majorities in Congress, the very institutional agencies of the government would themselves be the mechanism of party. Federal patronage could be used to bind party workers to the Federalist 'interest.' 'The reason of allowing Congress to appoint its own officers of the Customs, collectors of the taxes and military officers of every rank,' Hamilton said, 'is to create in the interior of each State, a mass of influence in favor of the Federal Government.' (fn: Alexander Hamilton, 1782, quoted in Lisle A. Rose, Prologue to Democracy: The Federalists in the South, 1789-1800, (Lexington, Kentucky, 1968), 3.) Federalists though of themselves as a government, not as a party; their history in the 1790's would be the history of alignments within the government, rather than of extrernal alignments which sought to influence the machinery of government." (Kerber, p. 10)

    "Major national issues invigorated the process of party formation; as state groups came, slowly and hesitantly, to resemble each other. The issues on which pro-administration and anti-administration positions might be assumed increased in number and in obvious significance; the polarity of the parties became clearer." (Kerber, p. 11)

    "As Adams' presidential decisions sequentially created a definition of the administration's goals as clear as Hamilton's funding program had once done, the range of political ideology which called itself Federalist simply became too broad to the party successfully to cast over it a unifying umbrella. Federalists were unified in their response to the XYZ Affair, and in their support of the Alien and Sedition Acts, which passed as party measures in the Fifth Congress, but in little else. The distance between Adams and Hamilton - in political philosophy, in willingness to contemplate war with France, in willingness to manipulate public opinion - was unbridgable; Hamilton's ill-tempered anti-Adams pamphlet of 1800 would be confirmation of a long-established distaste." (Kerber, p. 14)

    "One result of the war was to add to Federalist strength and party cohesion. There were several varieties of Federalist congressional opinion on the war: most believed that the Republicans had fomented hard feeling with England so that their party could pose as defende of American honor; many believed that in the aftermath of what they were sure to be an unsuccessful war the Republicans would fall from power and Federalists would be returned to office . . . Regardless of the region from which they came, Federalists voted against the war with virtual unanimity." (Kerber, p. 24)

    "As an anti-war party, Federalists retained their identity as an opposition well past wartime into a period that is usually known as the Era of Good Feelings and assumed to be the occasion of a one party system. In 1816, Federalists 'controlled the state governments of Maryland, Delaware, Connecticut and Massachusetts; they cast between forty percent and fifty percent of the popular votes in New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, New Hampshire and Vermont...Such wide support did not simply vanish...' (fn: Shaw Livermore, Jr. The Twilight of Federalism: The Disintegration of the Federalist Party 1815-1830, (Princeton, 1962), 265.) Rather, that support remained available, and people continued to attempt to make careers as Federalists (though, probably fewer initiated new careers as Federalists). Because men like Rufus King and Harrison Gray Otis retained their partisan identity intact, when real issues surfaced, like the Missouri debates of 1820, a 'formed opposition' still remained to respond to a moral cause and to oppose what they still thought of as a 'Virginia system.' Each of the candidates, including Jackson in the disputed election of 1824 had Federalist supporters, and their presence made a difference; Shaw Livermore argues that the central 'corrupt bargain' was not Adams' with Clay, but Adams' promise of patronage to Federalists which caused Webster to deliver the crucial Federalist votes that swung the election. If the war had increased Federalist strength, it also, paradoxically, had operated to decrease it, for prominent Federalists rallied to a beleaguered government in the name of unity and patriotism. These wartime republicans included no less intense Federalists than Oliver Wolcott of Connecticut and William Plumer of New Hampshire, both of whom went on to become Republican governors of their respective states, and in their careers thus provide emblems for the beginning of a one party period, and the slow breakdown of the first party system." (Kerber, p. 24)

    "The dreams of the Revolution had been liberty and order, freedom and power; in seeking to make these dreams permanent, to institutionalize some things means to lose others. The Federalists, the first to be challenged by power, would experience these contradictions most sharply; a party that could include John Adams and Alexander Hamilton, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney and Noah Webster, would be its own oxymoron. In the end the party perished out of internal contradiction and external rival, but the individuals who staffed it continued on to staff its succesors." (Kerber, p, 25)

    Additional Sources:

    • History of U.S. Political Parties Volume I: 1789-1860: From Factions to Parties. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., ed. New York, 1973, Chelsea House Publisher.
    • The Revolution of American Conservatism: The Federalist Party in the Era of Jeffersonian Democracy. David Hackett Fischer. New York, 1965, Harper and Row.
    • The Age of Federalism: The Early American Republic, 1788-1800. Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick. New York, 1993, Oxford University Press.

    The Federalists were referred to by many monikers over the years by newspapers.

    American Party:

    • In 1809, The Concord Gazette refers to the Federalist Ticket as the American Ticket.
    • Beginning in 1810, the Newburyport Herald (MA), began referring to Federalists as the American Party (as opposed to the "French" Party, who were Republicans). This continued in the 1811 elections.

    Anti-Republican:

    The Aurora, based in Philadelphia, the most well-known Republican newspaper of the era (see American Aurora: A Democratic-Republican Returns by Richard N. Rosenfeld.) in the February 11, 1800 issue referred to Mr. Holmes, the losing candidate for the Special Election for the Philadelphia County seat in the House of Representatives as an "anti-republican".

    Federal Republican:

    The October 7, 1799 issue of the Maryland Herald (Easton) referred to the Federalist ticket of Talbot County as Federal Republicans. It would continue to be used intermittently throughout the next 20 years. Newspapers that used this term included the Gazette of the United States (Philadelphia) and Philadelphia Gazette in 1800, the Newport Mercury in 1808, the New Bedford Mercury in 1810, the True American (Philadelphia) in 1812, the Northumberland Republican (Sunbury) in 1815, the United States Gazette (Philadelphia) in 1816 and the Union (Philadelphia) in 1821 and 1822.

    Friends of Peace / Peace / Peace Ticket:

    Beginning in 1812 ("In laying before our readers the above Canvass of this county, a few remarks become necessary, to refute the Assertion of the war party, that the Friends of Peace are decreasing in this country." Northern Whig (Hudson). May 11, 1812.) and continuing through to 1815 a number of newspapers referred to the Federalists as the Peace Party (or Peacemaker Party, as the Merrimack Intelligencer (Haverhill) of March 19, 1814 used), as the Peace Ticket or as the Friends of Peace due to their opposition of the War of 1812 (many of these same newspapers referred to the Republicans as the War Party). This use occurred all through at least August of 1815, with the Raleigh Minerva of August 18, 1815 referring to the Federalist candidates as Peace candidates.

    These newspapers include the Columbian Centinel (Boston), Merrimack Intelligencer (Haverhill), Providence Gazette, the New York Evening Post, the New York Spectator, the Commercial Advertiser (New York), Northern Whig (Hudson), the Broome County Patriot (Chenango Point), the Independent American (Ballston Spa), the Baltimore Patriot, the Alexandria Gazette, Poulson's, Middlesex Gazette (Middletown), the Political and Commercial Register (Philadelphia), Freeman's Journal (Philadelphia), the Carlisle Herald, Northampton Farmer, Intelligencer and Weekly Advertiser (Lancaster), National Intelligencer (Washington), The Federal Republican (New Bern), the Raleigh Minerva, The Star (Raleigh) and Charleston Courier.

    The New Hampshire Gazette (Portsmouth) took the opposite side, listing the Federalists in the March 16, 1813 edition as "Advocates of Dishonorable Peace and Submission."

    Additional Sources:

    "The Tyranny of Printers": Newspaper Politics in the Early American Republic. Jeffrey L. Pasley. Charlottesville, 2001, University Press of Virginia.