One part of the Federalist heritage that the Republicans could not undo was the Supreme Court and its various Federalist appointees by Adams, most notably the U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall.  Marshall was a strong Federalist, unlike most of the rest of his fellow Virginians, who tended to be Jeffersonian Republicans.  He had declined Washington's offers of being a part of his Administration (turning down the offer first to be the nation's attorney general and then ambassador to France) and even Adams' first attempt to nominate him to the Supreme Court.  But considered one of the most brilliant lawyers of his days, he was again nominated to the Supreme Court as its chief justice in Adam's frantic effort to put Federalists in office before the Republicans took control of both houses of Congress and the White House in early 1801.  This time Marshall accepted the offer.

Jefferson and the Republicans were furious about the Federalist judiciary, especially by the way the Federalist-dominated courts had treated Republicans under the ill-fated Alien and Sedition Acts, and were determined to clean the courts of the midnight judges. Jefferson's secretary of state, Madison, refused to sign the commission of the Federalist William Marbury, a commission appointing Marbury as justice of the peace in Washington D.C.  Marbury sued Madison, bringing before Marshall's Supreme Court the famous case of Marbury v. Madison (1803).

But ultimately Marbury lost the case, due to Marshall's questioning about who exactly had the right to bring this case before the Supreme Court. In theory Marbury had a right to his appointment.  But it was done under a law, the Judiciary Act of 1789, that supposedly gave Marbury that right to bring the case directly to the Supreme Court.  But Marshall argued that the Constitution itself permits original jurisdiction for the Supreme Court only to foreign policy issues or state issues.  Marbury's case involved neither factor, despite what the 1789 law seemed to authorize.  In fact, the 1789 law of Congress was invalid, because it was "unconstitutional."  Thus Marbury had no right under the Constitution to proceed as he had.

In one short stroke, Marshall had just accorded to the Supreme Court the power to decide what laws of Congress were and were not constitutional.  Though the Constitution itself mentioned no such power belonging to the Supreme Court, Marshall's decision was not contested.  At the time, it seemed like a win to the Republicans.  But the Republicans did not see that the principle underlying Marshall's decision laid the groundwork for the Supreme Court to continue to move down this road of making itself the ultimate decider in the land as to what was law and what was not, or worse, how the law might be better interpreted by progressive judges.

For the next three decades Marshall and the Supreme Court rendered various decisions which further strengthened not only the voice of the Supreme Court, but also the supremacy of the Washington, D.C., government over the various state governments.  For instance, in the Fletcher v. Peck (1810) decision, Marshall's Supreme Court affirmed that federal authority took precedence over the laws of the individual states.  In McCulloch v. Maryland (1819), his court denied the rights of the states to tax federal agencies (in this case the Bank of the U.S.).  In Cohens v. Virginia (1821) Marshall declared that the Supreme Court had review powers over the decisions of the state courts.

In his 34 years of Supreme Court service (1801-1835), he turned this panel of judges into something more akin to true legislators, revising the law of the land at will.  Not only did his court pass judgment on legal contests that inevitably arise from applying the law in particular cases (the traditional role of English judges) ... he actually went well beyond that in deciding how such laws should be interpreted or even be reinterpreted ... or even be set aside as "unconstitutional" – according to his own personal Federalist political instincts.  But these could be almost anything he deemed as "reasonable."  Thus slowly he was reshaping Constitutional Law so as to make it conform to the logic or reason of a small group of jurists who happened to be sitting on the bench – actually only a simple majority among them being required for a wide-sweeping decision.

And there was no built-in "check" on such enormous power.  Justices, once appointed, served for life – not subject to any subsequent elections or renewals of their appointments by the world other than their deaths (or voluntary retirement) itself.  Tragically, the Framers of the Constitution did not see this power-expansion coming.  No such power as the Supreme Court assumed for itself was actually ever assigned by the Constitution.  And the English political tradition that the Framers thought they were working with had no such grants of political power assigned to their judges.  This political expansion was all a result of Marshall's personal creativity.

Wow!  Lawyers in black robes!  But what else did anyone think was likely to occur if nothing was said or noticed at the time.

In any case, this single judicial appointment would establish a political path that would slowly make the Supreme Court, not Congress, the supreme legislative body of the land

Samuel Slater was an Englishman who had apprenticed as a youth to Richard Arkwright, the inventor of the water-driven machinery which spun raw cotton into the thread needed for England's growing textile industry.  Slater slipped off to America in 1789 with the knowledge of this process in his head (such technology was considered such a strategic secret that what Slater was doing was highly illegal in England), to set up a spinning mill of his own in Rhode Island in 1790.  So successful was his mill that Slater soon expanded his operations to Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Hampshire.

Slater's contribution to the American economy coincided with the contribution that Eli Whitney made, when as a youth he moved from Massachusetts to Georgia to study law.  Observing the painfully slow process by which slaves extracted seeds from cotton balls in order to ready the cotton as raw material for yarn production, in 1793 Whitney came up with a machine that could perform that same process mechanically, greatly speeding up the process – and the profitability of Southern cotton production destined for the English textile mills (and soon the rapidly growing number of Yankee textile mills in New England).

Indeed, this simple invention revolutionized the South, confirming the South as an agrarian society focused on the growing and exporting of raw cotton, but also confirming slavery as a Southern institution, as thousands of slaves would be needed to plant and pick the cotton now so vital to the Southern economy (and to the small Southern aristocracy whose wealth soon became founded almost entirely on this single industry).

What was taking place was the widening of the gap that separated the Northern or Yankee culture from the Southern slave-based aristocratic culture.  Yankee culture extolled hard work and inventiveness, and produced not only an ever-widening variety of industrial products but also a rapid growth in inventions that would quickly bring America into the industrial revolution that had been shaking Europe. In fact, very soon, Yankee America would surpass Europe itself in the vastness of its industrial creativity and energy.

It was heady stuff, stimulating a culture that became increasingly fascinated with its own human ability or powers to shape the world according to its own design.  It did not at first see itself as leaving behind the deeply devout Christian culture that had originally formed New England.  It was simply moving ahead or progressing (supposedly to the pleasure of the Creator-God) in bringing the wonders of a perfect heaven to an ever-perfecting earth.

The South, on the other hand, seemed to be moving in the direction of Jefferson's idealized agrarian utopia, where a leisured gentry would preside over a highly structured, even rigidly stratified, agricultural society.  Supposedly this presented a picture of agrarian bliss, with the slaves singing in the fields as they produced the harvests that brought the valuable revenues to the entire community, and the aristocracy conducting their rounds of intellectual discourse and genteel socializing as the confirming symbol of the success of it all.  Of course few people lived lives that measured up to this bliss.  But it was a beautiful social picture, so compelling that it led even poor White farmers to believe that someday they would share this same bliss with their cousins enjoying the refinements of plantation life.

In many ways this was the cause of the bitterness that separated Jefferson and his Republicans from Hamilton and the Federalists.  Hamilton came of questionable social circumstances and had worked his way forward in society through simply a lot of hard work and sheer determination.  To Jefferson, born to social privilege, Hamilton's type of social climbing seemed vulgar (as it did also to all English gentry) and inappropriate as a social model for the emerging American culture.

Indeed, these two life-styles, these two cultures, not only had little in common except the name American, they were in so many ways mutually antagonistic that there was no way that some kind of cultural, social or even political battle was not inevitable.  And Hamilton's death at the hands of the aristocratic Burr (who, though a New York northerner, shared Jefferson's view on how America should take shape) was perhaps symbolic of the bitter struggle to come.  Southern honor, after all, simply could not be allowed to suffer the indignities of upstart Yankee presumptuousness.

⁷In comparison to the Caribbean Islands, which supplied to England the commodities of sugar and rum – highly sought after at that time – the English colonies of continental America were considered to be interesting, but of much lesser value as economic assets.