Origin of the Species

Here's something in their favor: At least they're not shooting each other anymore. Two hundred years ago this month, the vice president of the United States slipped away to an undisclosed location for a private meeting with the former secretary of the Treasury. On a bluff in New Jersey, overlooking Manhattan, Aaron Burr mortally wounded Alexander Hamilton with a single shot from a dueling pistol.

Obviously, their tiff had become acutely personal by that point. These brilliant leaders of our new nation would not have gone blasting away at each other without profound justification, namely Burr taking umbrage at something Hamilton may (or may not) have said that could have appeared in a newspaper but actually, in fact, didn't. Before their relationship sank to that dire nadir, however, the clash between our third vice president and the principal author of "The Federalist Papers" began as pure partisan politics. Hamilton was a Federalist, and Burr was a Republican (which is what the Democrats called themselves in those days. Really). In 1800, Hamilton schemed to keep Burr out of the White House, on account of Burr having earlier schemed to keep the Hamiltonians out of power. Scheming, thwarting, ridiculing, back-stabbing: One thing led to another until . . .

Bang.

Talk about the politics of personal destruction.

The point of this story is that, bad as partisan rancor seems today, it can be a lot worse. Party politics can spawn war, riot and feud. Abroad, party differences have produced purges, prisons and genocide. Seen in this light, Dick Cheney's use of the f-word on the floor of the Senate seems positively civil -- at least he's not drawing down on Robert Rubin.

The other lesson to be taken from the sad tale of Burr and Hamilton is that our rival parties didn't erupt like a couple of warts on the otherwise unblemished face of our nation. They were with us from birth. The stupendous figure of George Washington could rise above partisanship, but he was the only one. After him, the two most brilliant and visionary young men in the fledgling United States advanced dramatically different ideas about what America's future should be, and who should lead the nation there. Two geniuses, two rivals, two egos -- two parties.

Hamilton was one of them: handsome, ambitious, slippery and great. An emigrant from the West Indies, born out of wedlock, Hamilton hustled and strove his way to the right hand of Washington during the Revolution. He was also a gifted and energetic writer, a skill he applied as one of the most effective salesmen of the U.S. Constitution, then later used for lacerating attacks on his political enemies. Hamilton envisioned a centralized country governed by a strong president -- maybe even a king -- in cooperation with a mercantile aristocracy. He pictured a nation of merchants, manufacturers and financiers bound together by a central banking system and protected by high tariffs.

Then there was Thomas Jefferson: refined, ambitious, profligate with money but wonderfully efficient with ideas. He was Hamilton's only real equal. Jefferson envisioned a decentralized country, a loose confederation of states governed as lightly as possible; he pictured a nation of planters and yeoman farmers; he preferred democracy to aristocracy and therefore was suspicious of anyone who sought to concentrate power.

No sooner was Washington sworn into office than Hamilton and Jefferson began splitting the new country into competing factions. The Father of Our Country tried to rein in his scions by appointing Hamilton and Jefferson to the two most prominent seats in his Cabinet. But the rivalry of Treasury Secretary Hamilton and Secretary of State Jefferson soon made today's Colin Powell vs. Donald Rumsfeld friction look like a back rub at Elizabeth Arden.

They disagreed on matters great (like the French Revolution) and small (like the best way to address the president). Hamilton bankrolled a newspaper so he would have a place to publish his anti-Jefferson tracts -- written under a pen name, though everyone knew his dazzling stuff when they saw it. Jefferson, a bit more circumspect, encouraged a friend, poet Philip Freneau, to launch a competing newspaper, and drafted his pal James Madison to write anti-Hamilton tracts.

By the end of Washington's first term, the animosity between Hamilton and Jefferson "had reached the point where they could hardly bear to be in the same room," historian David McCullough wrote. "Each was certain the other was a dangerous man intent on dominating the government." The only thing they could agree on was that without Washington for four more years, the country might split into pieces.

The old general signed on for another term, then retired to Mount Vernon, leaving a divided government behind. In 1796, Federalist John Adams was elected president with Jefferson -- leader of the opposition -- as vice president. This exercise in bipartisan government turned out to be a dud. Jefferson wanted to start off with a warm and generous letter of praise to his old friend Adams, but his fellow party strategist, Madison, urged him not to send the letter, warning that it was dangerous to say nice things about an opponent.

Within two years, mobs of Federalists were rioting against Jeffersonian mobs in the streets of Philadelphia. "Politics and party hatreds destroy the happiness of every being here," Jefferson wrote to his daughter. As the United States lurched to the brink of war with France, the name-calling and mudslinging in the late 18th-century media outstripped Michael Moore and Rush Limbaugh at their angriest. One pro-Jefferson editor asked what "occult causes" had moved Americans to support Adams -- "a wretch whose soul came blasted from the hand of nature."

To silence criticism, Congress passed -- and Adams signed -- the egregious Alien and Sedition Acts. These appalling laws sharply curtailed the Constitutional freedoms of speech and the press. Benjamin Franklin's grandson, a pro-Jefferson newspaper publisher, was among the two dozen Jeffersonians arrested and charged under the sedition law with libeling President Adams. Several newspapers were shuttered.