Jefferson's Republican Party later split into today's Democrats and the Whigs
The party Thomas Jefferson and James Madison built in the early 1790s called itself Republican, yet its most direct descendant is the modern Democratic Party. It rose to fight Alexander Hamilton's economic plans, crushed the Federalists, and then, lacking any real rival, fractured after the 1824 election into two new camps.
The movement began in Congress as resistance to Hamilton, Washington's Treasury Secretary, whose national bank and federal assumption of state debts critics said favoured wealthy Northern merchants and speculators. Madison led the opposition in Congress while Jefferson, still in the Cabinet, worked quietly against Hamilton. Their newspaper, the National Gazette, recast the quarrel as aristocrats against republicans. By late 1793 stable voting blocs had formed, and foreign policy sharpened the divide, with Federalists leaning towards Britain and Republicans towards revolutionary France.
Jefferson lost the 1796 contest, the first competitive presidential race, to John Adams. The Federalists then overreached: amid the XYZ Affair and the undeclared naval Quasi-War with France, they passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, under which journalists sympathetic to the Republicans were prosecuted. Jefferson and Madison answered with the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, arguing that states could judge whether federal laws were constitutional. In 1800 the Republicans won, carrying most of the South and New York, helped in eastern cities by Irish immigrants.
In office Jefferson cut the national debt and spending and bought Louisiana from France. Madison, president from 1809, steered the country through the inconclusive War of 1812, after which he accepted a Second Bank of the United States and protective tariffs, a sharp turn from the party's earlier states'-rights stance. Old Republicans such as John Randolph of Roanoke accused the leadership of betraying the Principles of '98.
With the Federalists gone after 1815, the Era of Good Feelings left the Republicans unchallenged but divided. The party was strongest in the South and on the western frontier and weakest in New England. After 1824, backers of John Quincy Adams became the National Republicans and later merged into the Whigs, while supporters of Andrew Jackson formed the Democratic Party.
Source: Democratic-Republican Party
