When [John] Adams wrote that the [Louisiana] Purchase "gave a new face to politics," he meant that it signified the end of the Federalist Party, which was so shortsighted and partisan that many of its representatives criticized the act. Alexander Hamilton was wise to content himself with remakring that Jefferson had just been lucky. The Purchase, he said, resulted from "the kind interpositions of an overruling Providence." But a Boston Federalist newspaper did not like the dea at all: it called Louisiana "a great waste, a wilderness unpeopled with any beings except wolves and wandering Indians. We are to give money of which was have too little for land of which we already have too much." Jefferson was risking national bankruptcy to buy a desert.
Angry partisanship was the order of the day. Senator John Quincy Adams complained in his diary, "The country is so totally given up to the spirit of party, that not to follow blindfold the one or the other is an inexpiable offence." But the New England Federalists were putting themselves on the wrong side of history to poopse the Purchase. One denounced it as "a great curse," and another feared that the Purchase "threatens, at no very distant day, the subversion of our Union."
Of course we're seeing the same kind of crap today. The "other side" can do nothing right, wile "our side" can do no wrong.
And sometimes I participate in it. I need to stop.
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