By the grace of the used book deals of Amazon, I'm read an interesting small volume by the historian Linda Kerber entitled Federalists in Dissent. As shown by a more recent book on the "Copperheads" during the Civil War, it is useful to study not only the past, but groups therein that died out. This is especially so as their tenets and concerns live on.
[Some Federalists, especially not of the Southern persuasion, for instance, could use slavery as a cudgel against Jeffersonians. Others feared quick change, even fearing anti-Jeffersonian Noah Webster because of his "American" dictionary, or too liberal takes of religion which seemed to be akin to atheism to some. They also debated education policy in ways that seem familiar.]
An amusing aspect of FID is the tendency of some Federalists to use sarcasm and satire (a usual technique of the age, but more passionately used by those felt particularly put upon) against those dubious Jeffersonians. One noted that it might be deemed nice and polite to be less nasty, but that in effect wimps don't win. If you thought our political regime was nasty ...
Thus, we hear of those tyrannous farmers who do not honor the equality of weeds, or wrong-minded grammatarians who don't let pronouns do what they want, insisting on subject/verb agreement. Or, the man who tried to show that you didn't need food to survive, but died just before being able to prove the point.
The relevancy here in particular is that such debates often had a jurisprudential nature. The power and the roles of the courts was an important matter of debate as well as the correct interpretation of the Constitution as a whole. Jeffersonians leaned to giving more power to state courts and worrying about the corruption of our law via foreign (namely, English common) law and abuses of federal judicial power. And so on. It all seems rather familiar.
[Someone commented on a reference to the essay respecting an amendment to overturn the gay marriage case in MA. My interest piqued, I did some checking, and found the matter of some interest. Well, interest for someone who cannot help reading footnotes.]
The final chapter highlighted the social concerns that drove on the Federalists. Again, there was a reason for their opposition to the Jeffersonians, not just elitist at that. Jefferson favored the yeoman farmer. Though he received useful money from a nail factory, one of his little complexities, TJ had an idealized version of the yeoman farmer as an independent individual citizen. Concerned with consistency and stability, the wish of the person who relied on plentiful but steady returns, the farmer was his own man. No reliance on others, like those in those dirty cities.
Of course, this was based on a fiction -- yeoman farmers were quite reliant on others, namely creditors, and many lived a hand to mouth existence that led to much unrest. All the same, TJ ironically shared similar fears as many Federalists, that of the uncontrolled mob, which Jefferson seemed to want to inflict on society -- that pro-French Revolution nutjob. To the degree they knew of his writings on the subject, they would have just been reaffirmed in their feeling that the other side was just a bunch of hypocrites, dangerous ones at that. The risky path of the budding capitalist, which all that entails, was to be the fate of the country. Jefferson would probably have not liked how that turned out.
Social control from their betters wasn't going to be the route taken either ... both sides had something of an adversion for facing facts. But, the dangerous forces -- especially in the age of the French Revolution and upcoming unrest in other parts of Europe -- was there all the same. A peek, including a note that the fiction that there was some ideal time when nobilitic pretensions (which some still desired) was not in place here, ended things on an interesting note.
I'm taking a bit of a break from serious subjects ... reading a book on a mom turned into a vampire. Might be worth a comment or two. Has some bite.