the Federalists, realizing that to survive they would have to act like a party, formed more than two hundred chapters of a new Washington Benevolent Society.55 These were, writes Gordon Wood, “ostensibly charitable organizations but in reality arms of the party.” Yet even this effort was halfhearted, he adds, because “they saw themselves as the wise, natural rulers of society, and thus found it virtually impossible to conceive of themselves as an opposition party.”56
