Party: Independent
Fact One: This president remained neutral during a war in France because he felt that the country was not up to a war with a major European power.
Fact Two: Unsuccessfully tried to heal political divisions that were forming between two rivals. Sadly those rivalries grew into political parties.
Fact Three: Put down the first resistance to federal law by commanding a large militia to put down a rebellion. This set the precedent that the government had the ability and willingness to suppress resistance to federal laws.
Fact Four: Appointed the most Supreme Court Justices. In fact, he packed the entire court and established the entire federal court system.
Fact Five: Exercised his veto power twice. He did not want to step on the newly formed legislature’s toes, but had to use the power for the first time to stop an Apportionment Act that would redistribute House seats.
Quotes:
“However [political parties] may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.”
“I hope I shall possess firmness and virtue enough to maintain what I consider the most enviable of all titles, the character of an honest man.”
“The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries, which result, gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of Public Liberty.”
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