The Federalists are often overlooked as a part of the founding of America, with Thomas Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans (they were technically called “Republicans”, but they are retroactively labeled “Democratic-Republicans” to avoid confusion with modern Republicans) figuring much greater, and why shouldn’t they? They became the dominant party after the 1800 election up until the end of James Monroe’s presidency. However, the Federalists had a great deal of influence in politics nonetheless, and the dominant Democratic-Republicans ended up adopting numerous Federalist policies themselves, making them a massive-tent party. One of the major figures from the Federalist Party who is usually a mere footnote in history is Rufus King (1755-1827).

Although his father, Richard, had been a Loyalist, Rufus was a Patriot, and during the Revolutionary War he would divide his time between his studies and fighting. However, what happened to his father impacted the young King greatly: after the passage of the deeply unpopular Stamp Act of 1765, a mob, resentful of his Loyalist position as well as his wealth as a merchant, ransacked his home and destroyed most of the furniture, an act for which no one faced consequences, and the next year a mob burned down his barn (Ernst, 1-5, 209, 263, 377-78). He came to fear the possibility of mob rule greatly in his political thinking.

Elected to the Massachusetts General Court in 1783, King would in 1784 be sent to the Confederation Congress. However, it was soon apparent that the United States under the Articles of Confederation was too weak, and in 1787 he attended the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, where he was one of the most persuasive speakers for the adoption of the Constitution and was one of its drafters. The Constitution was ratified 187-168 by the convention. King had lived throughout his life in Massachusetts (although his neck of the woods, Scarborough, would become part of Maine), but was persuaded to move to New York, and this is where his career would continue, and he would, shortly after being elected to the New York State Assembly in 1789, be elected to the U.S. Senate.

He was a strong supporter of President George Washington, being in the Pro-Administration faction. King would join the Federalist Party upon its creation. King was strongly supportive of Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton’s economic policies and backed the establishment of the First Bank of the United States, based on the Bank of England, a private corporation that both held the government’s money and operated for businesses and individuals. King would be one of the directors of this bank. The DW-Nominate scoring system puts him at a 0.575 based on his Senate voting record.

King also supported the highly unpopular Jay Treaty, and Jeffersonian critics condemned portions of the treaty as humiliating, but the Washington Administration saw this as the best arrangement they could get and the young nation had to avoid war with Britain. The Jay Treaty would be ratified with 2/3’s vote on a party-line vote. Both he and Alexander Hamilton would write defenses of the Jay Treaty under the pseudonym “Camillus” in New York newspapers (Muchowski). In 1796, he would resign the Senate to accept the post of envoy to Great Britain, a role he would serve in until 1803.

King saw the potential for an influx of Irish immigrants in the wake of the 1798 Irish Rebellion as dangerous, seeing the rebellion as inspired by the Jacobins in France. He opposed their entry on the grounds of protecting the United States from radicalism; there was a great fear at the time among Federalists that Jacobin ideology could spread to the nation and cause the same sort of disorder and bloodshed as seen in France. As envoy to Britain, he regarded the Irish as “ignorant, ill governed, oppressed, and wretched” (Sullivan, 31).

In 1804 and again in 1808, the Federalist Party would run Charles C. Pinckney and King for president and vice president respectively. And both times Pinckney-King got clobbered: they only won Connecticut and Delaware in 1804 and added Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island in 1808, but even this degree of success was due to the unpopularity of the Embargo Act of 1807 in New England, a region hit particularly hard by the loss of trade with Britain and France.

On Slavery and Racial Discrimination

Although Rufus King had owned a slave as a young man, he came to strongly oppose the practice and was consistently opposed to expanding slavery. King was successful in adding to the Northwest Ordinance a prohibition on slavery in the Northwest Territories. He did accept the three-fifths compromise as necessary to secure adoption of the Constitution but came to back its repeal after the Louisiana Purchase, seeing in this acquisition high potential for spread of slavery. In 1820, King argued forcefully against the Compromise of 1820 because of Missouri’s admission as a slave state. The following year, he opposed eliminating the property requirement for voting but also opposed any difference in voting eligibility by race in New York, and on both points, he lost as although blacks could technically vote, they had to meet a high property ownership requirement that whites did not (Field, 35-36). I must comment that by today’s standards numerous people whose minds focus on equity and social justice would regard the property requirement itself as racially discriminatory as substantially more whites owned property than blacks. King’s belief was that slavery should be gradually ended by the states. In his state of New York, it would finally be completely ended in 1827.

Back to the Senate….and to Great Britain

In 1813, King was again elected to the Senate from New York, and unlike many Federalists, he supported the War of 1812, and he was not involved in the Hartford Convention that sent the Federalist Party into a death spiral. King was the last Federalist candidate for president in 1816 but didn’t actively campaign and only won 34 electoral votes from Connecticut, Delaware, and Massachusetts. Despite the Federalist Party being a dying entity federally and merely a party that had prominence in a few states, he won reelection as a Federalist in 1819.

King was the last framer of the Constitution to remain in politics, opting to leave the Senate in 1825. He was nominated Minister to Great Britain again by President John Quincy Adams, but his health permitted no more than several months of service. King’s poor health continued until his death in 1827.

P.S.: I will within a week be archiving 2019 and 2020 posts. Souped up versions have been and will be making it on to:

https://mikeholme.substack.com/

References

Ernst, R. (1968). Rufus King: American Federalist. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.

Field, P.F. (1982). The politics of race in New York: the struggle for black suffrage in the Civil War era. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Retrieved from

https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Politics_of_Race_in_New_York/raFhDwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq

Signers of the Constitution. National Park Service, 180-182.

Retrieved from

http://www.npshistory.com/publications/nhl/theme-studies/signers-constitution.pdf

Sullivan, W.A. (2005). The Rising of 1798 and the Political Foundation of Irish-American Identity. College of William & Mary.

Retrieved from

https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/235411488.pdf

The Founding of the Fed. Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

Retrieved from

https://www.newyorkfed.org/aboutthefed/history_article.html

Uproar Over Senate Approval of Jay Treaty. United States Senate.

Retrieved from

https://www.senate.gov/about/powers-procedures/treaties/jay-treaty-approval.htm