of rival candidates. The first party to go into action was the Democratic party which opened its convention in the hotbed of secession chatter, Charleston, South Carolina. It deadlocked after ten days and only reconvened forty-six days later in Baltimore at which time United States Senator Stephen A

Lancaster County Politics:1799 - 1810 Alan Kreider The preeminent fact of the political history of America in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is the decline of the Federalist Party and the ascendancy of Jeffersonian Republicanism. Pennsylvania in many ways epitomized this trend

- litical Antimasonry in the United States, 1827-1840," which was published in the Annual Report of the American Historical Association in 1902. Mc- Carthy's monograph gives a good overall presentation of the subject, but due to the broad scope of the subject the author is able only to consider the party on

American people.12 The "Era of good feeling" continued into the fall political cam- paign, which was issueless with neither party exerting much effort. Little mention was made of the war fever, or of the crisis which had pervaded the political atmosphere earlier—the "Little Belt affair" being an event of