4-4.7

It Is Essential For Students To Know:

• Social and economic differences among Americans and the different ideas of Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton helped form two political parties in the 1790’s.
• The Federalist Party was led by Alexander Hamilton. Federalists included businessmen, large landowners, and professional people who believed that the country should grow and expand through industrialization. These Federalists felt that the federal government should be stronger than the state governments and should be led by educated persons. They wanted their government to be modeled after the British government.
• Thomas Jefferson led the Democratic-Republican or the Jeffersonian Republican Party. The Democratic-Republicans included mostly farmers and common people. Jefferson believed in an agrarian society. His followers believed that most of the power of government should lie in the state governments and that the federal government should remain weak. They admired the French because they believed that the French Revolution was modeled after the American Revolution.

It Is Not Essential For Students To Know:

• It is not essential for students to know the issues that helped to create the different parties such as the difference of opinion over the assumption of state debts, the establishment of a national bank, how to interpret the constitution or whether or not to protect infant industry with a protective tariff.
• Students do not need to know how these political parties continued to grow and change in future years.