The Antifederalists: Critics of the Constitution, 1781-1788

The Antifederalists

CRITICS OF THE CONSTITUTION

1781–1788

The Antifederalists

CRITICS OF THE CONSTITUTION

1781–1788

JACKSON TURNER MAIN

Foreword by Edward Countryman

Published for the

Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture

Williamsburg, Virginia

by the

University of North Carolina Press

Chapel Hill and London

The Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture is sponsored jointly by the College of William and Mary and the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. On November 15, 1996, the Institute adopted its present name in honor of a bequest from Malvern H. Omohundro, Jr.

© 1961 The University of North Carolina Press,

renewed 1989 Jackson Turner Main

Main biography and foreword © 2004

The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the original edition of this book as follows:

Main, Jackson Turner

The antifederalists : critics of the Constitution, 1781–1788 /

by Jackson Turner Main

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index

1. Constitutional history—United States. 2. United States—

History—Confederation, 1783-1789

JK116.M2

342.73'029 61017904

ISBN 0-8078-5544-8

08 07 06 05 04   5 4 3 2 1

THIS BOOK WAS DIGITALLY PRINTED.

To my Mother and Father

CONTENTS

Jackson Turner Main: A Historical Life, 1917-2003

Foreword: The Antifederalists, Four Decades on, by Edward Countryman

Preface

Introduction

Chapter I. Social and Political Background

Chapter II. Society and Politics in the South

Chapter III. Society and Politics in the North

Chapter IV. Antifederalists vs. Nationalists: The Impost

Chapter V. Antifederalists vs. Nationalists: Commutation, Commerce, and the Convention

Chapter VI. Antifederal Objections to the Constitution, Part I

Chapter VII. Antifederal Objections to the Constitution, Part II

Chapter VIII. The Antifederal Solution

Chapter IX. Ratification: November to May

Chapter X. Ratification: The Final Defeat

Chapter XI. Conclusion

Appendix A. Separate Confederacies

Appendix B. The Antifederal Majority in Virginia

Appendix C. Authorship of Anonymous Articles

Appendix D. Chronology of Ratification

Appendix E. Occupational Tables

Appendix F. Socio-Economic Divisions in Maryland

Historiographical and Bibliographical Essay

Index

Jackson Turner Main

A HISTORICAL LIFE, 1917–2003

AFTER his death on October 19, 2003, Jackson Turner Main made L one last journey back to the historical roots of his family and his career in Madison, Wisconsin. This place nourished Mains progressive vision of the American past. His grandfather Frederick Jackson Turner had grown up nearby and attended the University of Wisconsin, where he subsequently researched, wrote, and taught, shaping the understanding of American history with his theory of frontier democracy. Born on August 6, 1917, Jackson Turner Main was the son of John Smith Main and Dorothy Turner Main. After a stint at Harvard, the young Main went home to Madison, where he earned his B.A., M.A., and following the interruption of World War II, his Ph.D. from the university. After serving with the U.S. Army Signal Corps, he completed his graduate work in 1949. The New Deal and postwar reformist perspectives permeated Wisconsin’s history department, whose faculty included the Socialist William Hesseltine and the progressives Merle Curti and Merrill Jensen. Under Jensen’s supervision, Main wrote his dissertation on the Antifederalists. In these opponents to the Constitution, Main located a radical democratic tradition in the nations origins.

Years later, reflecting on his career as a historian, Main recalled:

In Jensen’s seminar I had chosen to tackle Beard’s Economic Interpretation with the notion that Beard erred, but discovered that the secondary literature supported him, at least in general if not in detail. The view that the Constitution reflected its time and the ideas of an economic and social upper class fitted with the general thrust of scholarship and teaching at Wisconsin, and, to judge from the literature, elsewhere. The implication followed that the Antifederalists represented, in some degree, the ordinary folk, and that they might have been correct. My dissertation therefore sided with the Antifederalists and concentrated on the faults that they perceived in the new plan. It stressed economic and social influences on politics but with little attention to cultural or ideological forces except for the ideas of the Antifederalists themselves, and it failed to offer the Federalists equal time. The latter flaw occurs in most books on political groups, as does the concentration on party cores that limits such studies to a small minority of politicians, oversimplifying the actual diversity of opinion. Further research never removed these faults, which at the time did not seem deficiencies, and they survived in the subsequent book.¹

The Antifederalists: Critics of the Constitution, 1781–1788, was published in 1961 by the University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture and was the winner of the Jamestown Manuscript Prize. Main went on to publish five more books on Revolutionary America: He brought out a second with the Institute and North Carolina in 1973, Political Parties before the Constitution, which won the Fraunces Tavern Museum Book Award, and also authored The Social Structure of Revolutionary America (Princeton, 1965), The Upper House in Revolutionary America, 1763–1788 (Madison, 1967), The Sovereign States, 1775–1783 (New York, 1973), and Society and Economy in Colonial Connecticut (Princeton, 1985). In addition, he published a number of influential articles, including The One Hundred in the William and Mary Quarterly (1954).

In the midst of an indefatigable research schedule, logging many thousands of miles to depositories before the days of microfilm and the Internet, he pursued a teaching career in early American history. After a time as an instructor at Wisconsin, his first job was at Washington and Jefferson College, where he taught between 1948 and 1950. For a decade, from 1953 to 1965, he was at San Jose State College (now University), where he met Gloria Lund, whom he married in 1956, forming one of those partnerships, personal and professional, in which envisioning one without the other is difficult. Moving east in the mid-1960s, Main became director of the Institute for Colonial Studies at the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1966. He was professor there until he became emeritus in 1983. He and Gloria then moved to the University of Colorado at Boulder, where she became a professor of early American history, and he offered courses as well.

Jackson Turner Main had a long association with the Institute of Early American History and Culture. Besides publishing two of his books with the Institute and contributing regularly to the William and Mary Quarterly, he served twice on the Institute Council, in 1966-1969 and 1974-1977, and belonged to the Associates. At SUNY-Stony Brook in 1968 he cosponsored with the Institute a national conference on the new social history that featured the emerging school of New England town studies. In 1982–1983, he graced the Institute’s halls while serving as the Visiting James Pinckney Harrison Professor of History at the College of William and Mary. At historical conventions, he regularly dropped by the Institutes book booth to check the new publications and greet the staff with his wry humor and friendly manner. The last time he swung by was in 2003, obviously frail but still his affable self. With the reissuing of The Anti-federalists under the Institute and University of North Carolina Press’s joint imprint, the association lives on.

Fredrika J. Teute

Editor of Publications, Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture

Note

1. Main-Traveled Roads, William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., XLI (1984), 446.

Foreword

THE ANTIFEDERALISTS, FOUR DECADES ON

AS I BEGAN preparing this foreword, a chapter of the Sons of the L American Revolution asked me to address their monthly meeting. They wanted about twenty minutes on the Confederation period. My little talk for them one Saturday morning rested firmly on what Jackson Turner Main achieved in this book. So does a great deal of major scholarship.

When Jack Main published The Antifederalists—his first book—in 1961, his subjects did not enjoy a good reputation. At best they were Men of Little Faith, as political scientist Cecelia Kenyon called them in 1955.¹ Cold War American culture (or at least its dominant strain) was in a mood to stress our cohesion and our achievements as a people, and the Constitutions opponents did not fit that mood. They belonged instead to the states’ rights tradition. In the context of mid-twentieth-century black American protest, that phrase—states’ rights—could only evoke the defense of what was indefensible: slavery and Jim Crow. But during the ratification debates of 1787 and 1788, those problems had not been the issue. As a good historian must do, Main asked his readers to understand his subjects rather than judge them or claim them as forebears.

Jackson Turner Main was the grandson of Frederick Jackson Turner. Though he spent time at Harvard as an undergraduate, he chose to be a doctoral student at Wisconsin, working with Merrill Jensen. By his midwestern origins, his blood descent, and his intellectual forming, he belonged within the progressive tradition in American historiography. As of the date of this book’s publication, that tradition seemed in disarray. That was partly because of the larger cultural climate of consensus within a supposedly monolithic American mind or liberal tradition, but the seeming disarray also emerged from hard monographic research and close criticism of what the progressives had written.

By 1961 Robert E. Brown had advanced his thesis that the American Revolution was a matter of defending middle-class democracy and was beginning his frontal assault on the reputations of progressive historians Charles A. Beard and Carl Lotus Becker.² Forrest McDonald had taken on Beards argument that the Constitutions framers stood to make a financial killing by using the new government’s tax power to restore value to worthless securities. Examining all available records, he showed that the Constitutions opponents held the same kind of paper. Whatever separated the two sides, the prospect of simple financial gain for some did not explain it.³ Clinton Rossiter had taken important early steps along the path leading to what we now call the linguistic turn in American Revolution studies.⁴ Nor, for historians in the 1950s, were the Constitutions opponents the true bearers of the heritage of 1776. To Richard B. Morris, the Federalists, not the Antifederalists, were the real radicals of their day.⁵ Edmund S. Morgan wrote a powerful synthesis of Revolution scholarship whose descriptive nouns are all-embracing: colonists, revolutionaries, Americans. More precise terms did not seem necessary.⁶ The time seemed long past for regarding the Confederation years as the critical period of American history.⁷ The Antifederalists seemed like a negligible, transient group. To the consensus-minded historian of one intensely fought state ratification campaign, antifederalism simply disappeared after its cause was lost.⁸

Such historiography was formidable. For a first-book author to write in opposition to it required courage. Jackson Turner Main was not a noisy man. But he was not a historian to follow fashion, and he always displayed indomitable courage. The book that he produced and that is reissued here speaks for itself. He showed in these pages that the Antifederalists had serious points to make, and that they deserve even now to be heard. Without being reductionist or determinist about their motives, he demonstrated that they had good reasons in their own lives for making those points. During the debate on the Constitution, they found themselves both out-argued and out-maneuvered. They ended up among history’s losers. But they spoke for a majority of the people eligible to vote. In a fair plebiscite under the rules of their time, they would have won. As E. P. Thompson was doing for the English working class, Main was rescuing his subjects from the enormous condescension of posterity.⁹ They do not belong in history’s dustbin.

In the four decades since this book was published, scholarship has vindicated Main’s position. Main uncovered a very real and very important debate about the meaning of the American Revolution and about the direction of the American future. His opening sentence set his theme (as, of course, an opening sentence should do): The United States consisted in the 1780’s of a number of sections and subsections, each with a distinctive social structure, economy, and set of political objectives. There was no point in talking about Americans or revolutionaries in blanket, undifferentiated terms. The people who inhabit this book had shared a moment of great decision when, for their many separate reasons, they had chosen the path of independence. They had shared the struggle to achieve what Congress had declared. But they were not yet a single people. For most of them identity was local and specific. So were the sources of well-being in their lives.

Yet, will they, nil they, Mains people were living through a very large change. They faced problems that transcended their separate polities and their separate identities. Main constructed this book in terms of states and regions, but he showed that an emerging national economy vexed all his people, wherever they were. In this sense, as in many others, their Nationalist opponents did have the advantage. The trans-state issues over which the two emerging groups contended prior to 1787 were the congressional impost, the commutation of the salaries of Continental army officers, and the regulation of commerce between the states. Emergent Antifederalists were coalescing around each of these questions across sectional and state lines. But they did not realize it. Their opponents held positions in common, too, and much more than the people who would be Anti-federalists, they understood that point. They had the great advantages of knowing one another, of understanding that they shared a perspective and a set of interests and goals, and, ultimately, of deciding the questions that were going to be put for debate. They were setting the agenda, and in any debate on any subject that is the greatest advantage of all. In an oft-quoted sentence Thompson once wrote that class happens when some men, as a result of common experiences . . . feel and articulate the identity of their interests as between themselves, and as against other men whose interests are different from . . . theirs.¹⁰ In this sense the people whom the Antifederalists opposed were not just Nationalists, as Main insisted they should be called rather than Federalists, but a national class.¹¹

Not until well into the final stage of debate, when ratification of the Constitution was all but assured, did its opponents realize their own need to organize and cooperate across the lines that had kept them separate. For the most part these were men who spent their Revolution at the state level. Their best leaders were the likes of Governor George Clinton of New York, who must figure large in any account of the Constitution’s critics. In the second half of the 1780s Clinton and his state could look back on a revolution that seemed both supremely trying and supremely successful.

Few states had suffered as much as New York during the war years. Yet by 1786, on the eve of the writing of the federal Constitution and the struggle over its ratification, matters were very different. The state was economically prosperous and politically stable. There seemed little reason for major change. Most New Yorkers probably agreed. After their votes for the state’s ratifying convention, when the delegates gathered in Poughkeepsie, forty-six were pledged to oppose the Constitution and only nineteen to support it. Governor George Clinton presided. He also led the Antifederalist forces.

Clinton’s own path in the Revolution had led him from the moderate prominence of a seat in the old provincial assembly to unquestioned dominance in his own state. Unopposed in 1786, he won his fourth successive three-year term as governor. Future Federalist (or Nationalist) John Jay, who was the author of New York’s constitution, had looked forward in the 1777 gubernatorial election to calling one of Clintons opponents, Philip Schuyler, by the governors title of your excellency. Schuyler, another future Federalist and father-in-law of Alexander Hamilton, had fully expected to command them all. He thought after Clinton’s first victory that the new governor had neither the family nor the connections to qualify for so distinguished a predominance. Jay and Schuyler’s friend, the loyalist lawyer William Smith, Jr., who had taught Clinton, disparaged him now as George the Governor.¹²

Clinton did not begin his state-level career as an outright partisan. He sought in good faith to work with the likes of Schuyler and Jay and later with Hamilton. But Clinton proved to be a consummate politician. By 1786 he had a loyal following among both electors and legislators. He was master of his state, and he wielded patronage to shore up his position. He was not, however, a national figure, and he had very little national experience. New York was what counted to him, just as Virginia counted most to Patrick Henry and Richard Henry Lee and Massachusetts did to Samuel Adams. Together with the state legislators, county judges, and militia officers who rallied to them, these were men who had made their own Revolution and whom the Revolution had for the most part made. But they had done it at the state level. Such men, their followers in lower offices and at the state ratifying conventions, and the voters who chose them are the Anti-federalists whom Jackson Turner Main describes in this book. What he achieved here has influenced many historians since 1961.

The best evidence of Main’s influence is the book that still dominates study of the Confederation period, Gordon S. Woods Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787,¹³ published eight years after The Antifederalists. Wood worked from printed literary sources, and his method was very different from Main s. Yet he found strong evidence of the same deep divisions of social experience, historical interpretation, and future vision that Main found between the Antifederalists and their ultimately victorious opponents. One might read Wood as validating the Federalists’ side and Main his own subjects’ position, but their interpretations of the underlying issues match. Like Wood’s Creation of the American Republic, Roger H. Brown’s Redeeming the Republic was not written from an Antifederalist point of view. But it used sources and methods akin to Main’s own to present strong evidence that a debate about fundamental issues of taxation took place in the states during the 1780s, with very real interests at stake. In an argument that Main could have made, Brown showed how the separate state debates about taxation fed into the great national discussion of 1787-1788.¹⁴

Main went on to expand the argument of The Antifederalists in three separate books about what transpired in the states between the Declaration of Independence and the ratification of the Constitution.¹⁵ While Wood was finishing his book, I was a beginning graduate student, encountering and resisting Main’s ideas. I planned originally to write my study of revolutionary New York in opposition to his views, but my own immersion in the sources led me to do otherwise.¹⁶ (Actually, I shudder to look back at the marginalia I scrawled in my copy of The Antifederalists. And I have it on good authority that I was muttering its authors name in my sleep.) People who worked on other states are in debt to him in the same way.¹⁷ None of them found simple middle-class democracy. Instead they discovered and told stories of transforming conflict.

Like Roger Brown and like Main himself, most state-level historians were more interested in bringing out patterns of political and social experience than in the close study of the texts and ideas of the ratification debate. But in 1981 those texts and ideas received their due with the posthumous publication of the University of Chicago political scientist Herbert Storings multivolume compilation, The Complete Anti-Federalist (finished by his associate Murray Dry).¹⁸ Their collection is not actually complete, but Storing and Dry compiled massive evidence that Main’s subjects deserved to be taken seriously as political thinkers. The seven volumes and Storings separately published introduction, What the Anti-Federalists Were For: The Political Thought of the Opponents of the Constitution, added Antifederalist voices, as well as their votes and organization, to the great national discussion that was underway. Acknowledging their debt to Main, Storing and Dry demonstrated that those who opposed the Constitution must be seen as playing an indispensable . . . part in the founding process. They contributed to the dialogue of the American founding The political life of the community continues to be a dialogue, in which the Antifederalist concerns and principles still play an important part.¹⁹ This is why their view must count in any discussion of the original intent of the founding generation.²⁰

Finally, consider this books next-generation successor, The Other Founders by historian Saul Cornell.²¹ Publishing through the Omohundro Institute imprint, like Main and Wood, Cornell does not set out to replace Mains work, let alone to disprove it. On the contrary, he takes Mains insights as fully established and turns to the question of the language the Antifederalists used. Like Main, he understands that blanket, all-encompassing terms will not do. This even applies to the term Antifederalist. Main distinguished them by state and region, and elsewhere he showed an enduring interest in the economic and social distinctions that separated Americans within specific places.²² Cornell shows that elite and popular Antifederalists had very different approaches to the problem that ratifying the Constitution presented. He takes the ratification debates onto new ground in two ways. One is by demonstrating that the debate involved not just the actual issues of 1787-1788, but also the appropriate place and rights of dissenters in the American public sphere. The other is by making clear that even though actual opposition to the Constitution died, the substantive issues the Antifederalists raised continued to be vital for decades.

Cornell does not simply argue that Antifederalists were plebeian, and therefore democratic. Many were not plebeian, just as many of the Constitution’s supporters were not members of the elite. The real Antifederalist contribution to evolving American democracy was that by dissenting from the Constitution they kept open the public sphere of debate that the Revolution had made possible. The Antifederalists and what they stood for did not disappear at all.

This book began that large discussion. It still bears reading, which is why the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the University of North Carolina Press are bringing it out in a new paperback edition. As I was writing this foreword, I learned of Jack Main’s death. He lived a long and good life and wrote many good books, beginning with this one. Its republication signifies that his quiet but determined voice should, and will, continue to be heard.

Edward Countryman

Notes

1. Cecelia M. Kenyon, Men of Little Faith: The Anti-Federalists on the Nature of Representative Government, William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., XII (1955), 3-43.

2. Robert E. Brown, Middle-Class Democracy and the Revolution in Massachusetts, 1691-1780 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1955); Brown, Charles Beard and the Constitution: A Critical Analysis of An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution (Princeton, N.J., 1956); Brown, Carl Becker on History and the American Revolution (East Lansing, Mich., 1970). See also Robert E. Brown and B. Katherine Brown, Virginia, 1705-1786: Democracy or Aristocracy? (East Lansing, Mich., 1964).

3. Forrest McDonald, We the People: The Economic Origins of the Constitution (Chicago, 1958).

4. Clinton Rossiter, Seedtime of the Republic: The Origins of the American Tradition of Political Liberty (New York, 1953).

5. Richard B. Morris, The Confederation Period and the American Historian, WMQ, 3d ser., XIII (1956), 139-156, quote at 156.

6. Edmund S. Morgan, The Birth of the Republic (Chicago, 1956).

7. John Fiske, The Critical Period of American History, 1783-1789 (Boston, 1888).

8. Linda Grant De Pauw, The Eleventh Pillar: New York State and the Federal Constitution (Ithaca, N.Y., 1966).

9. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York, 1963), 12.

10. Ibid., 9.

11. Gary J. Kornblith and John M. Murrin, The Making and Unmaking of an American Ruling Class, in Alfred F. Young, ed., Beyond the American Revolution: Explorations in the History of American Radicalism (DeKalb, 111., 1993), 27-79.

12. Edward Countryman, A People in Revolution: The American Revolution and Political Society in New York, 1760-1790 (Baltimore, 1981), 196, 198, 286.

13. Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1969).

14. Roger H. Brown, Redeeming the Republic: Federalists, Taxation, and the Origins of the Constitution (Baltimore, 1993).

15. Jackson Turner Main, The Upper House in Revolutionary America, 1776–1788 (Madison, Wisc., 1967); The Sovereign States, 1775-1783 (New York, 1973); and Political Parties before the Constitution (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1973).

16. Countryman, A People in Revolution.

17. As examples, see Stephen E. Patterson, Political Parties in Revolutionary Massachusetts (Madison, Wisc., 1973); Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert, eds., Sovereign States in an Age of Uncertainty (Charlottesville, Va., 1981); Norman K. Risjord, Chesapeake Politics, 1781-1800 (New York, 1978); Ronald Hoffman, A Spirit of Dissension: Economics, Politics, and the Revolution in Maryland (Baltimore, 1973); and Jerome J. Nadelhaft, The Disorders of War: The Revolution in South Carolina (Orono, Maine, 1981).

18. Herbert J. Storing, ed., The Complete Anti-Federalist, 7 vols. (Chicago, 1981).

19. Herbert J. Storing, What the Anti-Federalists Were For: The Political Thought of the Opponents of the Constitution (Chicago, 1981), 3.

20. Jack N. Rakove, Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution (New York, 1996).

21. Saul Cornell, The Other Founders: Anti-Federalism and the Dissenting Tradition in America, 1788-1828 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1999).

22. Jackson Turner Main, The Social Structure of Revolutionary America (Princeton, N.J., 1965).

PREFACE

IT is curious that after all that has been written on the subject there is still no adequate history of the Constitution, of its making and ratification. Merrill Jensen’s The New Nation furnishes much of the background, but stops short of the Constitutional Convention, and other general histories of the period either are out-of-date or never were much good. Moreover the lack of monographs is so serious that a satisfactory book can hardly be written at present. There are few good histories of state politics, fewer of economic developments, and fewer still of social and cultural matters. We have some reliable studies of the ideas of prominent individuals, but no general investigation of Federalist political thought has been made, nor has there hitherto been one of the opposition.

The present volume is therefore intended only to fill a gap, not to furnish a complete account of post-Revolutionary politics. In order to identify the Antifederalists and to discover what they thought, it was necessary to examine in the various states the political controversies that culminated in the conflict over ratification. In doing so, certain conclusions were reached and are stated; however they must be regarded as tentative only, and the broader implications of this book must await further research.

The author’s principal obligation is acknowledged in the dedication. Secondly, I am indebted to my teachers, especially those at the University of Wisconsin, and most of all to Merrill Jensen, who first criticized this study as a term paper, then as a dissertation, and finally through several drafts. Every historian is glad to state that his book could not have been written without the facilities provided by great libraries and historical societies. I was especially aided at the following: American Antiquarian Society, Boston Public Library, Charleston Library Company, Connecticut Historical Society, Connecticut State Library, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Library of Congress, Massachusetts Historical Society, Massachusetts State Archives, New Hampshire Historical Society, New York Historical Society, New York Public Library, New York State Library, Philadelphia Library Company, Rhode Island Historical Society, South Carolina Historical Society, United States Archives, Alderman Library of the University of Virginia, Virginia Historical Society, Virginia State Library, and the Wisconsin Historical Society.

INTRODUCTION

THEY are called the Antifederalists, but it should be made clear at once that they were not antifederal at all. In reality they were determined to preserve the Confederation, and the name, far from being their own choice, was imposed upon them by their opponents, the so-called Federalists. The attachment to them of a word which denotes the reverse of their true beliefs, and which moreover implies that they were mere obstructionists, without any positive plan to offer, was part of the penalty of defeat. The victors took what name they chose, and fastened on the losers one which condemned them. Since the victory was a lasting one, the name and the stigma have endured.

It was a nice piece of misdirection by the Federalists. Originally the word federal meant anyone who supported the Confederation. Several years before the Constitution was promulgated, the men who wanted a strong national government, who might more properly be called nationalists, began to appropriate the term federal for themselves. To them, the man of federal principles approved of federal measures, which meant those that increased the weight and authority or extended the influence of the Confederation Congress. The word antifederal by contrast implied hostility to Congress. According to this definition, the antifederal man was opposed to any effort to strengthen the government and was therefore unpatriotic. Eventually the term became a general word of opprobrium applied by the Nationalists to anyone who opposed their designs. So we find David Humphreys referring to Antifederalists & Advocates for Mobs & Conventions.¹

Naturally the unpleasant connotation of the name thus attached to the Antifederalists was injurious to their cause—as the Federalists surely foresaw.² It suggested that they were against a federal government, which was diametrically opposite to the truth, and the negative form implied that an anti was nothing but an obstructor. The Antifederalists indignantly rejected the name, insisting that the proponents of the Constitution really deserved the appellation, and they tried to recover for themselves the more accurate designation of Federalists. For example, in The American Herald (Boston) of December 10, 1787, appeared the following: A FEDERALIST is a Friend to a Federal Government-An ANTI-FEDERALIST is an Enemy to a Confederation.–Therefore, the FRIENDS to the New Plan of CONSOLIDATION, are Anti-Federal, and its Opposers are firm Federal Patriots.

When the Antifederalists selected pseudonyms for their published tracts they made the same point. Richard Henry Lee chose A Federal Farmer as his pen name, and no fewer than eight other writers used the word as part of a nom de plume.³ Numerous writers and speakers insisted that the Federalists did not believe in Federalism but that the Antifederalists did, while A Countryman remarked that the use of the term was the way some great men had to deceive the common people, and prevent their knowing what they were about.⁴ When John Lamb and others organized a committee in New York to oppose the Constitution, they called it the Federal Republican Committee.⁵ Indeed a principal objection to the Constitution was that it set up a national, not a federal, government. But they lost, and Antifederalists they remain.

Antifederalism was not a single, simple, unified philosophy of government. It was rather a combination, a mixture of two somewhat different points of view adhered to by two different groups of men. It was, first, the doctrine of those who preferred a weak central government. This concept attracted many well-to-do thinkers, most frequently from the agricultural interest, and these men provided the Antifederalists with their ablest and best-educated leaders. The origins of this body of thought lay far back in colonial and English political history, and it became especially relevant during the last years before independence and the period of constitution-making, when fundamental principles of government had to be defined and applied. From the broadest point of view, the issue was whether authority or liberty should be emphasized. Once the authority of the British government had been overthrown, many were satisfied with the degree of liberty thus achieved and were willing to retain or reconstruct a strong central government at home; but others continued the struggle for local self-rule and individual freedom from restraint. In an equally general way, the former view was defended by those who desired a political system which would protect property and maintain order in society, while the latter was held by those who feared oppression: the former wished to exert power, the latter feared the effects of it.

The second ingredient of Antifederalism was provided by the smaller property holders, in particular by the small farmers. All of the socio-economic groups had their peculiar, often conflicting interests, which they attempted to further by political action. Because the small property holders were a majority in Revolutionary times, they wanted a government dominated by the many rather than the few, and they therefore favored democratic ideas. Thus the Antifederalists included two major elements: those who emphasized the desirability of a weak central government, and those who encouraged democratic control. The democrats at this time accepted the doctrine of weak government, but the advocates of weak government did not always believe in democracy.

Strictly speaking, Antifederalism came into existence only when the Constitution was made public and lasted until opposition to its adoption ceased. But it is clear that the origins of Antifederal ideas must be sought long before 1787, deep in the colonial past. In order to explain why the Constitution aroused such intense hostility and where that hostility came from, it will be necessary first to describe the social structure of the new nation; second, to point out some of the most important political ideas which the Antifederalists adopted. Two chapters will be devoted to an analysis of the political conditions in the states. The final step before treating the Constitution itself will be to describe the earlier attempts to revise the Articles of Confederation, in which both sides rehearsed their arguments in preparation for the decisive conflict.

Notes

1. To George Washington, Nov. 16, 1786, Washington Papers, CCXXXVI, No. 133, Lib. Cong. For the use of the word during this early period see also James Madison to James Monroe, Aug. 7, 1785, Gaillard Hunt, ed., The Writings of James Madison, 9 vols. (New York, 1900-1910), II, 158; Robert A. East, The Massachusetts Conservatives in the Critical Period, in Richard B. Morris, ed., The Era of the American Revolution (New York, 1939), 373; Massachusetts Centinel (Boston), Dec. 20, 1786; Daily Advertiser (N. Y.), May 11, 1786, Jan. 31, 1787; New Haven Gazette, Feb. 8, 1787; New-Hampshire Spy (Portsmouth), Apr. 20, 1787; David Humphreys to Thomas Jefferson, June 5, 1786, in Julian P. Boyd, ed., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 13 vols, (in progress, Princeton, 1950 to date), IX, 609.

2. The French minister Joseph Fauchet wrote some years later, "The primitive divisions of opinion as to the political form of the State, and as to the limits of the sovereignty of the whole over each State individually sovereign had created the federalists and the anti-federalists. From a whimsical contrast between the name and the real opinion of the parties, a contrast hitherto little understood in Europe, the former aimed and still aim, with all their power to annihilate federalism, whilst the latter have always wished to preserve it. This contrast was created by the consolidators or the Constitutionalists who being first in giving the denominations (a matter so important in a revolution!) took for themselves that which was the most popular, altho’ in reality it contradicted their Ideas, and gave to their rivals one which would draw on them the attention of the people, notwithstanding they really wished to preserve a System whose prejudices should cherish at least the memory and the name." To the French Commissioner to Foreign Relations, Oct. 31, 1794, Edmund Randolph Papers, Lib. Cong.

3. Norfolk and Portsmouth Journal, Mar. 5, 1788; Pennsylvania Packet, and Daily Advertiser (Phila.), Oct. 23, 1787; Boston Gazette, and the Country Journal, Nov. 26, 1787; Pennsylvania Herald, and General Advertiser (Phila.), Oct. 27, 1787; Mass. Centinel (Boston), Dec. 29, 1787 to Feb. 2, 1788; United States Chronicle: Political, Commercial, and Historical (Providence), Mar. 27, 1788; Freeman’s Journal: or, North-American Intelligencer (Phila.), Mar. 26, 1788.

4. New York Journal, Dec. 13, 1787. See also John Smilie, in John Bach McMaster and Frederick D. Stone, Pennsylvania and the Federal Constitution, 1787-1788 (Lancaster, 1888), 768; Algernon Sidney, in Independent Gazetteer; or, Chronicle of Freedom (Phila.), Feb. 13, 1788; ibid., Jan. 16, 1788; John Wilkes, in ibid., Jan. 26, 1788; William Irvine in Irvine Papers, IX, Hist. Soc. Pa.; Thomas Tredwell in Jonathan Elliot, ed., The Debates in the Several State Conventions, on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution, as Recommended by the General Convention at Philadelphia, in 1787 . . ., 5 vols. (Washington, 1854), II, 405; Melancton Smith in ibid., 224; Luther Martin in Max Farrand, ed., The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, 3 vols. (New Haven, 1911), III, 195; Joshua Atherton to John Lamb, Feb. 23, 1789, John Lamb Papers, Box 5, N. Y. Hist. Soc; Nathan Dane to Samuel Adams, May 10, 1788, Samuel Adams Papers, N. Y. Pub. Lib.; Mercy Warren to Mrs. Macauley, May 1788, in Charles Warren, Elbridge Gerry, James Warren, Mercy Warren and the Ratification of the Federal Constitution in Massachusetts, Mass. Hist. Soc., Proceedings, 64 (1930-1931), 158; Freeman’s Journal (Phila.), Jan. 16, 1788; Providence Gazette; and Country Journal, Mar. 15, 1788; New York Journal, Feb. 11, 1788; Elbridge Gerry in [Annals of Congress] Debates and Proceedings in the Congress of the United States, 1789-1824, 42 vols. (Washington, 1834-55), I, 731; Samuel Chase to John Lamb, June 13, 1788,