Republican Government

Although today the terms are almost interchangeable, republican government was not the same as democracy to the founders of the United States. Made up almost entirely of members of the new nation's elite, they equated democracy with mob rule. What they were creating, they believed and intended, was a representative democracy or republican form of government.

In a democracy, they feared, a faction or party could become a tyrannical majority. But a “well-constructed Union” formed along republican lines, James Madison wrote in The Federalist, would tend to “break and control the violence of faction.”

Besides ensuring a government of wise and patriotic citizens, the founders hoped, their Constitution would separate executive, legislative, and judicial powers sufficiently to prevent any one branch from assuming excessive control. Another of those checks and balances was the federal system, with powers shared between the national government and the states.

The powers of the national government were to be those spelled out or implied in the Constitution. By contrast, the states were to exercise reserved powers—that is, those not specifically prohibited to the states and those not granted to the national government. As an example of prohibited activities, the Constitution bars the states from coining money or entering into treaties or alliances with foreign countries.

Reflecting the split that preceded adoption of the Constitution in 1789, the first American political parties divided largely over the issue of national versus state government authority. The Federalists—a loose coalition of merchants, shippers, financiers, and other business interests—favored the strong central government established by the Constitution. The opposition (at first called anti-federalists or Jeffersonians and later known as democratic-republicans) were farmers and frontiersmen intent on preserving the sovereignty of the states.

Federal Supremacy