The Great Debate
The publication of the Constitution in September 1787
inaugurated one of the most vigorous political campaigns
in American history. In the process of arguing over
the merits of the new plan of government, Americans
not only engaged in a lively inquiry into the meaning
of constitutional government, they also helped make
constitutionalism a central defining characteristic
of American political culture. Although the Constitution
had been drafted in private by a small select group
of statesmen, its meaning was inescapably public. As
soon as the results of the Philadelphia Convention became
known, Americans began discussing the new frame of government.
A week after the convention adjourned, one Philadelphian
reported that “the new plan of government proposed
by the Convention has made a bustle in the city and
its vicinity.” Less than a month later, further
west in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, another observer noted
that “the new Constitution for the United States
seems now to engross the attention of all ranks.”
In other parts of America similar observations were
made. One Virginia commentator remarked that “the
plan of a Government proposed to us by the Convention--
affords matter for conversation to every rank of beings
from the Governor to the door keeper.” 1
The decision of the Philadelphia Convention to submit
the Constitution to state ratification conventions meant
that Americans from all walks of life would be drawn
into a wide ranging public debate about its merits.
The Constitution was subjected to an unprecedented level
of public scrutiny; every clause of the document was
parsed and analyzed. Some writers approached this task
soberly, invoking the classical republican tradition
by adopting pen names such as Brutus
or Publius.
Rather than inflame popular passions, these writers
pleaded with their readers to examine the Constitution
in a calm and dispassionate manner. Other authors took
the low road, gleefully hurling invective and insult.
One writer signaled his attention to adopt this scurrilous
path, by choosing to sign his name as “a Defecater.”
In one of the only surviving political cartoons from
this epic debate, entitled “ The
Looking Glass for 1787,” the outrageous nature
of much of the popular debate over the Constitution
comes through clearly. In this cartoon, one protagonist
has dropped his pants with the intent of fouling his
opponents. The central theme of the cartoon, an allegory
about ratification in Connecticut, depicts the state
as a wagon stuck in the mud, loaded down by paper money.
Federalists valiantly try to pull the cart to a bright
future, while Antifederalists impede the cart’s
progress.
The debate over the Constitution was not restricted
to the pages of the nation’s papers. Arguments
over the merits of the Constitution were conducted in
taverns, town squares, and occasionally in the streets.
Federalists and Antifederalists each made use of the
rituals of popular politics, parading, and staging mock
funerals and executions to express their views of the
Constitution. In a few instances these spirited celebrations
and protests escalated into full scale riots. Violent
outbursts, however, were the exception, not the norm,
in the struggle over the Constitution.
Who Were the Antifederalists?
Antifederalists were never happy with their name. Indeed,
Elbridge Gerry, a leading Antifederalist, reminded his
fellow Congressmen that "those who were called
antifederalists at the time complained that they had
injustice done them by the title, because they were
in favor of a Federal Government, and the others were
in favor of a national one." Since the issue before
the American people was ratification of the Constitution,
Gerry reasoned it would have been more appropriate to
call to the two sides "rats" and "anti-rats!"2
No group in American political history was more heterogeneous
than Antifederalism. Even a cursory glance of the final
vote on ratification demonstrates the incredible regional
and geographical diversity of the Antifederalist coalition.
Antifederalism was strong in northern and western New
England, Rhode Island, the Hudson River Valley of New
York, western Pennsylvania, the south side of Virginia,
North Carolina and upcountry South Carolina. The opposition
to the Constitution brought together rich planters in
the South, “middle class” politicians in
New York and Pennsylvania, and backcountry farmers from
several different regions (click
here to see a map). Among leading Antifederalist
voices one could count members of the nation’s
political elite -- aristocratic planters such as Virginia’s
George Mason and the wealthy New England merchant Elbridge
Gerry. Mason and Gerry were adherents of a traditional
variant of republicanism, one which viewed the centralization
of power as a dangerous step toward tyranny. The opposition
to the Constitution in the mid-Atlantic, by contrast,
included figures such as weaver-turned-politician William
Findley and a former cobbler from Albany, Abraham Yates.
These new politicians, drawn from more humble, middling
ranks, were buoyed up by the rising tide of democratic
sentiments unleashed by the American Revolution. These
men feared that the Constitution threatened the democratic
achievements of the Revolution, which could only survive
if the individual states -- the governments closest
to the people -- retained the bulk of power in the American
system. Finally, Antifederalism also attracted adherents
of a more radical plebeian view of democracy. For these
plebeian populists, only the direct voice of the people
as represented by the local jury, local militia, or
the actions of the crowd taking to the streets, could
fulfill their radical localist ideal of democracy. The
democratic ethos championed by Findley and Yates proved
far too tame for plebeian populists, such as William
Petrikin, the fiery backcountry radical from Carlisle,
Pennsylvania.
The Antifederalist Critique of the Constitution
Although there was considerable diversity among the
opponents of the Constitution, the outline of a common
critique of the Constitution slowly emerged as the document
was debated in public. Three core issues defined this
critique:
1. The omission of a bill of rights
The absence of a bill of rights was an often repeated
criticism of the Constitution. Antifederalists not only
believed that the inclusion of a bill of rights was
essential to the preservation of liberty, but they also
believed that a fundamental statement of political and
legal principle would educate citizens about the ideals
of republicanism and make them more effective guardians
of their own liberty.
2. The centralizing tendencies of the new government
The new powerful central government created by the
Constitution would slowly absorb all power within its
orbit and effectively reduce the states to insignificant
players in a powerful new centralized nation state.
Antifederalists feared that the new Constitution would
create a powerful central state similar to Great Britain’s
powerful fiscal/military model. The extensive powers
to tax, the provision for a standing army, and the weakening
of the state militias would allow this new powerful
government to become tyrannical.
3. The aristocratic character of the new government
The charge of aristocracy frequently voiced by Antifederalists
could be framed in either democratic terms or in a more
traditional republican idiom. Thus, for middling democrats
or plebeian populists, the charge of aristocracy was
in essence a democratic critique of the Constitution.
According to this view, the Constitution favored the
interests of the wealthy over those of common people.
For elite Antifederalists, by contrast, the charge of
aristocracy echoed the traditional republican concern
that any government with too much power would inevitably
become corrupt and would place the interests of those
in power over the common good.
Antifederalism and the Historians
The changing historical view of Antifederalism has itself
become a remarkable historical litmus test for the political
mood of the nation. Throughout American history, Antifederalist
ideas have been resurrected by groups eager to challenge
the power of the central government. Historians have
not been exempt from the tendency to see Antifederalism
through a political lens. Over the course of the twentieth
century historians continuously reinterpreted the meaning
of Antifederalism. These different interpretations tell
us as much about the hopes and fears of the different
generations of scholars who wrote about the opposition
to the Constitution as it does about the Antifederalists
themselves.
At the end of the nineteenth century, populists cast
the Antifederalists as rural democrats who paved the
way for Jeffersonian and Jacksonian democracy.3
This interpretation was challenged by counter progressive
historians writing during the Cold War era. For these
scholars, the Antifederalists were examples of the paranoid
style of American politics and were backward-looking
thinkers who failed to grasp the theoretical brilliance
of the new Constitution.4 This claim was
later challenged by Neo-Progressive historians who saw
Antifederalism as a movement driven by agrarian localists
who were opposed by a group of commercial cosmopolitan
supporters of the Constitution.5 The rise
of the new social history during the turbulent era of
the 1960s had relatively little impact on scholarship
on Antifederalism. The many community studies produced
by social historians were generally concerned with more
long term changes in American society and hence tended
to shy away from the topic of ratification. Social history’s
emphasis on recovering the history of the inarticulate
also pulled historians away from the study of elite
constitutional ideas in favor of other topics. [Thus,
none of the many excellent New England town studies,
for example, dealt directly with ratification. Some
neo-conservative scholars actually faulted the new social
history for abandoning constitutional politics entirely;
see Gertrude Himmelfarb, The New History And The
Old (1987)].
The Constitution was, however, of considerable interest
to students of early American political ideology. For
scholars working within this ideological paradigm, the
struggle between Federalists and Antifederalists was
a key battle in the evolution of American political
culture. Some saw the opponents of the Constitution
as champions of a traditional civic republican ideology,
clinging to notions of virtue and railing at corruption.
Others cast the Antifederalists as the forerunners of
modern liberal individualism with its emphasis on rights
and an interest-oriented theory of politics. 6
Over the course of the twentieth century Antiederalism
had played a central role in a number of different narratives
about America history. For some, opposition to the Constitution
was part of the rise of democracy, for others, it heralded
the decline of republicanism, while others saw it as
source of modern liberal individualism. Given the heterogeneity
of Anti-Federalism, it is possible to find evidence
to support all of these claims, and more. Rather than
seek a single monolithic true Antifederalist voice,
it would be more accurate to simply recognize that Antifederalism
was a complex political movement with various ideological
strains, each of which made important contributions
to the contours of early American political and constitutional
life.
Antifederalism and the American Constitutional
Tradition:
The Enduring Legacy of the Other Founders
Historians and political scientists are hardly the
only groups to show an interest in the ideas of the
Antifederalists. Judges, lawyers, and legal scholars
have increasingly canvassed the ideas of the Antifederalists
in their effort to discover the original understanding
of the Constitution and the various provisions of the
Bill of Rights. Indeed, in a host of areas, from federalism
to the Second Amendment, legal scholars and courts have
increasingly turned to Antifederalist texts to support
their conclusions.7 If the past is any guide
to the future, the ideas of the Antifederalists are
likely to continue to play a prominent role in future
constitutional controversies.
1Saul Cornell. The Other Founders: Anti-Federalism
and the Dissenting Tradition in America, 1788-1828
(1999).
2Cornell, Other Founders.
3Orrin Grant Libby. The Geographical
Distribution Of The Vote Of The Thirteen States On The
Federal Constitution, 1787-8 (1894).
4Cecelia Kenyon. Men of Little Faith:
The Anti-Federalists on the Nature of Representative
Government (1955).
5Jackson Turner Main. The Antifederalists;
Critics Of The Constitution, 1781-1788 (1961).
6Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the
American Republic, 1776-1787 (1969); Lance Banning,
The Jeffersonian Persuasion: The Evolution of a
Party Ideology (1978); Richard Beeman, et. al,
eds. Beyond Confederation: Origins of the Constitution
and National Identity (1987). For an early effort
to frame the struggle over the Constitution in light
of the perspective of new social history, see Edward
Countryman, The American Revolution (1985 rev
ed. 2003).
7Michael C. Dorf, “No Federalists Here:
Anti-Federalism and Nationalism on the Rehnquist Court”
31 Rutgers Law Journal 741 (2000).
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