Both sides in America’s early partisan battles—John Adams’s Federalists and Thomas Jefferson’s Republicans—regarded each other as a threat to the republic. The Federalists saw themselves as the embodiment of the Constitution; in their view, one could not oppose the Federalists without opposing the entire American project. So when Jefferson and Madison organized what would become the Republican Party, the Federalists regarded them as traitors, even suspecting them of harboring loyalties to Revolutionary France—with which the United States was nearly at war. The
