Federalist Party, early U.S. national political party, which advocated a strong central government and held power from 1789 to 1801, during the rise of the country’s political party system. The term federalist was first used in 1787 to describe the supporters of the newly written Constitution, who emphasized the federal character of the proposed Union. Parties were generally deplored as inimical to republican government, and President George Washington was able to exercise nonpartisan leadership during the first few years of the new government (begun in 1789). Strong division, however, developed over the fiscal program of the secretary of the treasury, Alexander Hamilton, whom Washington supported. Hamilton and other proponents of a strong central government formed the Federalist Party in 1791. Differences with the opposition were intensified by ideological attitudes toward the French Revolution, and by 1795 administration supporters had hardened into a regular party, which succeeded in electing John Adams to the presidency in 1796.
Over the decade of the 1790s, the Federalists stood for the following economic policies: funding of the old Revolutionary War debt and the assumption of state debts, passage of excise laws, creation of a central bank, maintenance of a tariff system, and favourable treatment of American shipping. In foreign affairs they observed neutrality in the war that broke out between France and Great Britain in 1793; approved the Jay Treaty of 1794, which terminated the difficulties with Britain; and sponsored strong defense and internal-security legislation in the crisis of 1798–99 (see Alien and Sedition Acts), when French demands almost forced open war. These policies were strongly resisted, especially in the South; the opposition, organized by James Madison and Thomas Jefferson beginning in 1791, became the Republican Party, also known as the Jeffersonian Republicans and Democratic-Republican Party. Eventually this organization became the modern Democratic Party. The name Republican was taken over in the 1850s by a new party that espoused Federalist economic ideas and that survives to the present day under that name.
The Federalists never held power again after 1801. Their failure is attributable to the Republicans’ political skill and to the Federalists’ own incapacity or unwillingness to organize politically, their internal divisions (especially between supporters of Adams and Hamilton), and their aversion to compromising principles for the sake of winning elections. Furthermore, New England Federalists adopted a divisive policy of sectionalism, moving dangerously near secession in 1808 and strenuously opposing the War of 1812 (see Hartford Convention). By 1817 the party was practically dead, though the opposing Republicans had adopted the Federalists’ principles of nationality and had accepted many of their economic ideas.
The accomplishments of the Federalists were great: the party organized the enduring administrative machinery of national government; fixed the practice of a liberal interpretation of the Constitution; established traditions of federal fiscal integrity and credit worthiness; and initiated the important doctrine of neutrality in foreign affairs, allowing the infant nation to develop in peace for more than a century.