A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror (27 page)

It goes without saying that Beard is correct to identify the Anti-Federalists as farmers and middle-class workingmen, but this definition bridges a wide range of the population in 1787, including subsistence farmers in western Pennsylvania and upstate New York alongside elite southern planters who led the movement. Patrick Henry, Richard Henry Lee, William Grayson, and James Monroe, firm Anti-Federalist leaders, were as wealthy as any in the Federalist camp, and were joined by Sam Adams (a chronic bankrupt), Melancton Smith, Luther Martin, and New York’s George Clinton. Thomas Jefferson, arguably the best known Anti-Federalist of all, did not join the movement until the early 1790s and, at any rate, was out of the country from 1787–88.

And yet, Beard’s definitions and the complaints by Howard Zinn and his disciples wrongly assume that people were (and are) incapable of acting outside of self-interest. Had not the great Washington argued as much? Yet Washington had to look no further than his own life to realize the error of his position: he was on track to gain a general officer’s commission in the British army, replete with additional land grants for dutiful service to His Majesty. Instead, Washington threw it away to lead a ragtag army of malcontents into the snow of Valley Forge and the icy waters of the Delaware. Self-interest indeed! What self-interest caused Francis Lewis, a signer of the Declaration, to lose his properties and see his wife taken prisoner by the British? How does self-interest account for the fate of Judge Richard Stockton, a delegate from New Jersey to the Continental Congress, who spent time in British jails and whose family had to live off charity—all because he dared sign the Declaration? On the other hand, Patrick Henry, Richard Henry Lee, and others all stood to gain handsomely from the growing value of slave labor in the new Constitution—the one they opposed! In sum, no matter how Beard and his successors torture the statistics, they cannot make the Constitutional Convention scream “class struggle.”
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The debate was genuine; it was about important ideas, and men took positions not for what they gained financially but for what they saw as the truth.

After a slow start, the Anti-Federalists rallied and launched an attack on the proposed Constitution. Employing arguments that sounded strikingly Whiggish, Anti-Federalists spoke of the Federalists in the same language with which they had condemned the British monarchy in the previous decade. They described the Constitution as a document secretly produced by lawyers and a hated “aristocratic monied interest” that aimed to rob Americans of their hard-won liberties. Echoing Montesquieu and other Enlightenment thinkers, they insisted government should remain close to home, and that the nation would be too large to govern from a “federal town.” Richard Henry Lee captured the emotion of the Constitution’s opponents, calling the document “dangerously oligarchic” and the work of a “silent, powerful and ever active conspiracy of those who govern.”
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Patrick Henry warned Americans to “Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect everyone who approaches that jewel.”
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James Monroe, the future president, worried that the document would lead to a monarchical government.

Anti-Federalists expressed shock at the extent of the taxation and warfare powers. One delegate asked, “After we have given them all our money, established them in a federal town, given them the power of coining money and raising a standing
army
to establish their arbitrary government; what resources [will] the people have left?”
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Anti-Federalists furiously attacked the Federalists’ three-tiered system, arguing that the proposed constitutional districts did not allow for direct representation, that congressmen should be elected annually, and that the proposed Senate was undemocratic. They saw the same aristocratic tendency in the proposed federal judiciary, with its life terms. And, of course, because Whigs feared executive authority, Anti-Federalists were appalled at the specter of an indirectly elected president serving unlimited terms and commanding a standing army. Cato, one of the most widely read Anti-Federalists, predicted such a system would degenerate into arbitrary conscription of troops for the army.

However, the Anti-Federalists’ most telling criticism, and the one for which American civilization will forever remain in their debt, was their plea for a bill of rights. Federalists, who believed the state constitutions adequately protected civil liberties, were stunned by this libertarian critique of their work. Jefferson, who had studiously avoided the debate, wrote from France that “a bill of rights is what a people are entitled to against every government on earth, general or particular, and what no just government should refuse or rest on inference.”
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To grant such sweeping powers without simultaneously protecting life, liberty, and property seemed like madness. Political rhetoric aside, Anti-Federalists were amazed at what they saw as a direct assault on the principles of the Revolution. One Anti-Federalist, writing as Centinel, spoke for all his brethren when he expressed “astonishment” that “after so recent a triumph over British despots…a set of men amongst ourselves should have the effrontery to attempt the destruction of our liberties.”
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Obviously, the Anti-Federalists opposed many things, but what were they for? By 1787–88 most of them supported a Confederation government revised along the lines of the New Jersey Plan. They maintained that no crisis actually existed—that the nation was fine and that a few adjustments to the Articles would cure whatever maladies existed. But the Anti-Federalists waited too long to agree to any amendment of the Articles, and they lost their opportunity. Even some of their leading spokesmen, such as Patrick Henry, unwittingly undercut the sovereign-state position when he wrote, “The question turns…on that poor little thing—the expression,
We, the People
instead of the United States of America.”
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With that statement, Henry reinforced Jefferson’s own assertion in the Declaration that the people of the colonies—and not the colonies themselves—separated from England. By invoking “the people” as opposed to the “states,” Henry also stated a position not far from that of Lincoln in 1861, when he argued that disunion was no more possible than cutting a building in half and thinking it would still keep out the rain. The Federalists saw their opening and brilliantly sidestepped the question of state-versus-federal sovereignty by arguing that the Constitution made the
people
sovereign, not the state or the federal government.

Far from being the traitors or aristocrats alleged by their opponents, the Federalists showed that they too had inherited the ideology of the Revolution, but only that they took from it different political lessons. Through a series of eighty-five
Federalist Papers
(written as newspaper articles by Hamilton, Madison, and Jay under the pseudonym Publius), they demonstrated the depth and sophistication of their political philosophy.
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Hamilton, ever the republican centralist, saw the Constitution as a way to foster a vigorous centralized republic (not a democracy) that would simultaneously promote order and economic liberty in the Lockean tradition.

Madison emerged as the most significant of the three
Federalist Papers
authors in one respect: he correctly analyzed the necessity of political parties (“factions,” as he called them) and understood their role. An extensive republic, especially one as large as the United States would become, inevitably would divide society into a “greater variety of interests, of pursuits, of passions, which check each other.” Factions, then, should be encouraged. They provided the competition that tested and refined ideas. More important, they demanded that people inform themselves and take a side, rather than sliding listlessly into murky situations they did not choose to understand out of laziness.

Modern Americans are assaulted by misguided calls for “bipartisanship,” a code word for one side ceding its ideas to the party favored by the media. In fact, however, Madison detested compromise that involved abandoning principles, and in any event, thought that the Republic was best served when factions presented extreme differences to the voters, rather than shading their positions toward the middle. The modern moderate voters—so highly praised in the media—would have been anathema to Madison, who wanted people to take sides as a means of creating checks and balances.

His emphasis on factions had another highly practical purpose that, again, reflected on his fundamental distrust of human nature; namely, factions splintered power among groups so that no group dominated others. Like Hamilton then, and later Tocqueville and Thoreau, Madison dreaded the “tyranny of the majority,” and feared that mobs could just as easily destroy personal rights as could any monarch. Madison demanded an intellectual contest of ideas, and recognized that the Constitution’s separation of powers only represented one layer of protections against despotism. The vigorous competition of political parties constituted a much more important safeguard.
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Hamilton shared Madison’s dark view of human nature, but where Madison stressed personal liberties, Hamilton thought more in terms of the national interest and the dangers posed by the Articles. Portrayed as more radical than Madison—one author referred to Hamilton as the Rousseau of the Right—the New Yorker has often been viewed as a voice for elitism. In fact, Hamilton sought the alliance of government with elites because they needed to be enlisted in the service of the government on behalf of the people, a course they would not take if left to their own devices. To accomplish that, he intended to use the Treasury of the new republic, and its financial/debt structure, to encourage the wealthy to align themselves with the interests of the nation.
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Only the wealthy could play that role: middle-class merchants, farmers, or artisans were too transient and, at any rate, did not have enough surplus to invest in the nation. Permanent stability required near-perpetual investment, which in turn required structuring property laws so that the wealthy would not hesitate to place their resources at the disposal of the government. Hamilton also argued that the new government would thrive once the “power of the sword” (a standing army) was established, opening the door for his detractors to label him both a militarist and a monarchist, whereas in reality he was a pragmatist.

Taken together, the ideas of Madison and Hamilton further divided power, and when laid atop the already decentralized and balanced branches, added still more safeguards to the system of multiple levels of voting restrictions, staggered elections, and an informed populace—all of which provided a near-impenetrable shield of republican democracy. Laminating this shield, and hardening it still further, was the added security of religious conviction and righteousness that would not only keep elected and appointed officials in line on a personal level, but would infuse the voting public with a morality regarding all issues. At least, this was the plan, as devised by the Federalist Founders.

State after state cast votes, and the Federalists advanced to a dramatic victory. Five states—Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Georgia, and Connecticut—ratified the Constitution within three months of first viewing the document. Anti-Federalists claimed the voters had not been given enough time to debate and assess the proposal, but the Federalists brushed away their objections and the Constitution sailed through. The process slowed in Massachusetts, New York, North Carolina, New Hampshire, and Virginia. In those states, Anti-Federalist majorities attacked the documents, but the Federalists answered them point by point.

As the spring and summer of 1788 wore on, the Anti-Federalist cause gradually lost support. In some states, tacit and written agreements between the factions traded Anti-Federalist support for a written bill of rights. New Hampshire’s June twenty-first ratification technically made the Constitution official, although no one was comfortable treating it as such until New York and Virginia had weighed in. Washington helped swing Virginia, stating flatly that “there is no alternative between the adoption of [the Constitution] and anarchy,” and “it or disunion is before us to choose from.”
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Virginia, thanks to Washington’s efforts, ratified on June twenty-fifth, and New York followed a month later. Despite North Carolina’s and Rhode Island’s opposition, the Constitution became the “law of the land.”
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The Constitution was “a Trojan horse of radical social and economic transformation,” placing once and for all the principles espoused by Jefferson in the Declaration into a formal code whose intent was usually, though not always, obvious.
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The Anti-Federalist Legacy

Given the benefit of hindsight, it is remarkable that the Anti-Federalists fared as well as they did. They lost the battle, but not the war. In 1787–88, the Anti-Federalists lacked the economic resources, organizational skill, and political vision to win a national struggle. Nor did they have the media of the day: of one hundred Revolutionary newspapers, eighty-eight were solidly in the Federalist camp. This proved advantageous when Virginians read false Federalist newspaper reports that New York had ratified on the eve of their own state’s narrow vote! Moreover, Franklin, Jay, Hamilton, John Marshall, and General Washington himself—the cream of Revolutionary society—all backed the Constitution and worked for its ratification. On the other hand, the Anti-Federalists were lesser-known men who were either aged or less politically active at the time (for example, Sam Adams, George Mason, and Patrick Henry) or young and just getting started in their political careers (James Monroe and John Randolph).

And, ironically, the Anti-Federalists’ love of localism and states’ rights sealed their fate. This first national political election demanded a
national
campaign organization and strategy—the kind that typifies our own two-party system in the present day. Anti-Federalists, though, tended to cling to local allegiances; they were fearful of outsiders and ill equipped to compete on a national stage. To their credit, when they lost, they grudgingly joined the victors in governing the new nation.
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Yet the Anti-Federalists’ radicalism did not disappear after 1788. Instead, they shifted their field of battle to a strategy of retaining local sovereignty through a philosophy constitutional historians call strict construction. This was an application of the narrowest possible interpretation of the Constitution, and the Anti-Federalists were aided in arriving at strict construction through their greatest legacy, the Bill of Rights.