But it was too late to save the Federalists. A new social order, stripped of classical republicanism, and even opposed to it, was emerging in America. The Federalists rejected it, and it in turn rejected them. In the following decades the party slowly would evaporate, absent from the ballot box, but still present for a while in the judiciary. In 1807, for example, Theophilus Parsons (Harvard, 1769), the Federalist chief justice of Massachusetts, ruled that not all citizens were equal before the law in the case at hand, a slander charge, because “rank and condition” affected the degree of
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