As a result, the founders regarded oppositional activity as suspicious, the result of pernicious plotting. In the 1790s, as political pressures built, this stream of conspiracy thinking grew into a flood. Those in power viewed those who opposed them as enemies of the state. “The Federalists never saw themselves as a party but as the beleaguered legitimate government beset by people allied with revolutionary France out to destroy the Union,” states Gordon Wood.10
