"Our ancestors took sides in the English Civil War, they overthrew the Dominion of New England – which included New York – when James II tried to impose it, and, of course, sadly, they warred upon the Tortolians. And sometimes each other. But most people say party politics really started after Prince Frederick, as he was then, was exiled here in 1728. You can agree or disagree with that, it’s debatable. When Frederick arrived, the main political divide was the same old traditional one from the mother country: the Court Party versus the Country Party, the innies versus the outies, if you like. (Laughter) That kind of political divide existed in all the old colonies, but the details were different in each one, we were still growing towards a unified identity. And, of course, at that time most people would have regarded that identity as including Carolina too, not just America. (Murmurs)

Prince Frederick built himself a support base here by working with, well, the outies, the Country Party. Back in England his supporters were called the Patriot Boys, a dissident faction of the ruling Whigs. That term started to catch on here, as well, eventually. Frederick’s moment came after the controversial Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748, which ended the Second War of Supremacy. Americans were collectively disgusted that our boys had sacrificed their lives to take Lewisborough in New Scotland and other places, only for the government in London under Cumberland to order them handed them back again.[3] So we became a nation, an Empire, and fought to restore Frederick to the throne. And we did!

As a consequence of the War of the British Succession, many former ‘Court Party’ establishments in the colonies were either overthrown or subsumed by the former ‘Country Parties’. Fused together, these formed the Continental Patriots or American Tories, the first true American political party. What scattered opposition remained were generally referred to as Whigs, sometimes Western Whigs, as frontier settlers began to feel alienated from the coastal cities.

The power of the Patriots was demonstrated during the Troubled Sixties, when they advocated for greater representative self-rule and protested against subordination to London choosing which lands could and could not be settled by Americans. After the Crisis of 1765, the North Commission was instated to draw up the framework of government that we have all heard in school: Five Confederations and One Empire.[4] The large number of the old, variably-sized, colonies were consolidated into five roughly equal ones, each with its own Confederal Assembly.[5] They would split power with the Continental Parliament here in Fredericksburg. Henceforth, Americans would fund their own internal improvements out of their own tax revenues levied by their own governments, rather than it all going through London. Only military taxation and deployment remained partially tied to the mother country.

Now, you may hear TPV people get teary-eyed about that being perfect (Laughter) but it wasn’t all rose gardens. Outside of Pennsylvania, relatively few men could vote – and practically no women. Governors were still appointed by the Crown, either by the Emperor or the Lord Deputy, and they sometimes held more power than the elected assemblies. The Confederations were intended to expand westward, but that left more and more voters distant isolated from the cis-Appalachian capital cities, what we now call the Arc of Power. That’s a problem we still face today (Sounds of agreement) in a different way, of course. But I’m talking about days before quisters, before Lectel, even before Optel here. If you lived in a distant frontier outpost, like, say, Milwark (Laughter) you couldn’t even write a letter to your MCP without worrying the messenger would be taken by bandits or Tortolians! The late eighteenth century was a different time.

And yet, it still had politics. This is the first time where were really got multiple competing parties. The old Patriots shifted from being a broad-tent party encompassing almost all public opinion, to a more partisan one defined by its loyalty to Lord Washington and his successor Lord Hamilton. The first Patriots were traditionalist, aristocratic, loyal to the mother country, somewhat economically doradist and favoured a centralisation of power. Opposing them rose the Constitutionalists, more radical in terms of pushing for more American autonomy, a little more cobrist, quite a bit more confederalist and suspicious of too much centralised government. It was this tendency which would eventually split the Empire, of course. Both parties were heterogenous masses with many competing local coalitions and priorities, especially the Constitutionalists.

Maybe there’s a version of history out there where America stayed dominated by just two political parties, but I doubt it. (Chuckles) After the Constitutionalists were first elected under James Monroe in , they began to split under their own contradictions, especially in disagreements over slavery – yes, even back then – and specifically the annexation of Cuba. Remember back then Carolina was considered part of the Empire! So an abolitionist faction of the Constitutionalists, led by Ben Rush of Pennsylvania, split off as the American Radical Party.[6] They chose that name because many English Radicals had travelled to the Empire back in 1788 in the hopes of being elected under the more liberal voting franchise here, clearly intending to use their status as MCPs purely as a pulpit to attack London politics with. Well, the voters here weren’t very impressed with being taken for granted like that. So Rush and his supporters were keen to emphasise how American they were.

This era, sometimes called ‘two-and-a-half party politics’ as the ARP were smaller than the other two, lasted until 1819.[7] The Constitutionalists were divided between northerners who were often anti-Catholic but lukewarm on slavery, such as President Matthew Quincy, and southerners who had chosen John Alexander’s push for Catholic tolerance specifically as a tool to expand slavery into former Spanish lands. The Constitutionalists fractured further and shattered altogether when General Alexander’s ‘Southron Movement’ ran ‘Constitutionalist Whig’ candidates against official Constitutionalist ones in Carolina – and also parts of Virginia and beyond, lest we forget.

The following era was the First Multi-party System, to use the jargon, when the parties were breaking and reforming and nobody was quite sure what was going on. The remnants of the Quincyite Constitutionalists reformed under Ralph Purdon under what he called the Frontier Party, but inevitably became known as the Neutrals due to their neutral position on slavery. Of course, nowadays we would call mere neutrality on slavery to be a loathsome position of moral cowardice. Yet Purdon remains a political hero of mine in spite of that. At a time when so many American politicians, even sometimes the ARP, were complacent about the restrictive suffrage and the needs of western settlers – Purdon raised a flag that said the west could not be ignored, dismissed by the Arc of Power just as those coastal cities had been dismissed by Cumberland’s London a few generations before. (Murmurs)

Of course, these were the days of first-past-the-post elections and parties running against each other, or sometimes agreeing to stand down for each other and nominate fusion candidates. Soon after their founding in 1819, the Neutrals made an alliance with the ARP to fight the Pennsylvania confederal election, and they gradually entered into cooperation nationally as well. This was helped by the fact that the parties’ support bases shared some similar goals, but rarely occupied the same geographic locations – remember, this was first-past-the-post. The ARP usually had most success in cities, especially the newer western ones, while the Neutrals drew most support from the rural west and its frontier settlers. Effectively, the Empire now had three major parties – the Patriots, Radical-Neutral alliance, and yes, the pro-slavery Whigs. At that point, running on Catholic tolerance rather than pro-slavery expansion in parts of the north, they were actually winning seats in the Empire proper, even north of Virginia, which seems unimaginable now.

But this fragile equilibrium was short-lived. Patriot President Josiah Crane dubiously tried to govern with the support of the Whigs, passing Catholic relief among less positive measures. The remaining anti-Catholics in the Neutrals broke away as the Trust Party under Arundel Ogilvy. In 1825, a scandal due to the sale of peerages – nothing changes, does it? (Laughter) – helped bring down and shatter the Patriots.[8] The Whigs ended up as the largest party nationwide then – doesn’t bear thinking about, does it? A Patriot faction under Solomon Carter then dirted their hands by helping the Whigs get into power, while a smaller Hamiltonian faction kept fighting the good fight."

Were Lord Washington and Hamilton Patriots or Constitutionalists?