Anti-Federalists did not support the ratification of the United States Constitution. Although they were ultimately defeated, their opposition convinced the Federalists to pass the Bill oe Rights after ratification of the Constitution. Moreover, their belief in the supremacy of the states remained an important part of American political theory and was not fully refuted until the Civil War. In 1787 most people in the United States probably opposed the Constitution. Prominent anti-Federalists included Patrick Henry, James Monroe, and Samuel Adams. Like the Federalists, anti-Federalists built their ideas on the republican ideology (see republicanism) of the American Revolution.
There were four main components to the anti-Federalist position. First, anti-Federalists objected to the way the Constitution was written. The Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia had been called to revise the Articles of Coneederation, with the idea of providing the Confederation with the power to raise taxes on its own. Instead, the convention had decided to scrap the articles for an entirely different form of government. The members of the convention had also agreed to meet behind closed doors with no reporting of their daily proceedings in the press. This approach smacked of conspiracy and seemed to be a means of hiding the convention’s true intentions. These suspicions were enhanced by the ratification procedure, which ignored the amendment process in the Articles of Confederation. Instead, the process relied upon state conventions and dictated that the Constitution would be put into place when only nine states had ratified.
Second, following the best political science of the day, and based in part on the writings of Montesquieu, the antiFederalists held that it was impossible for a republic to exist in a large geographic area. The anti-Federalists believed that there would be too many interests in a large nation and that with so many interests competing for control, ultimately one interest would seize power and act against the interests of the rest of the society. In such a polity, the public good would no longer be the end of government; rather, government would simply support the interest of those in power at the expense of the rest of society. History had demonstrated, as could be seen in ancient Greece and Rome, that large republics inevitably gave way to empires controlled by despots. In other words, as the 18th-century commonwealthmen explained, the more power given to the governors—as would inevitably happen in a large republic—the less liberty the people had. In the minds of many anti-Federalists, the Revolution had been fought to liberate the people from a too powerful government that had ruled over too large a territorial expanse.
The Constitution engendered a third complaint in its specific provisions that created a powerful government divorced from the common voter. The president was a kinglike executive who had broad appointive powers, commanded the army and navy, and was chosen through an Electoral College and not by direct vote of the people. Moreover, he could serve in office repeatedly without any limits. The Senate was viewed as an “aristocratic junto” with six-year terms that would make it a veritable House of Lords that could dominate government. Like the president, the Senate was not elected by the people but chosen by state assemblies. The popularly elected House of Representatives was little better. Many anti-Federalists, in an era in which annual elections predominated, believed that two-year terms were too long and that the 60,000-person constituency was far too large. The Supreme Court, in the eyes of anti-Federalists, was a refutation of the traditional trial by jury and was also too powerful. And anti-Federalists considered the “necessary and proper clause” as an open-ended invitation for the abuse of power. In short, the Constitution would be a distant and powerful government that threatened the American republics (the individual states) and would lead to the loss of rights.
To bolster this argument, anti-Federalists decried the failure to include a Bill of Rights—something that most state constitutions (see also constitutions, state) contained. This fourth part of the anti-Federalist argument was the most potent. Although the Federalists argued that a guarantee of rights was unnecessary, ultimately, they had to give in. They promised to pass the Bill of Rights if the Constitution was ratified. The anti-Federalists believed that it was crucial that the fundamental law of the nation stipulate the specific rights to be protected by the government, including the freedom of speech, assembly, and religion, as well as granting assurances of fair judicial procedure. They pushed also for limitations on the extent of the national government and a check on the “necessary and proper” clause—a provision offered by the Tenth Amendment that guaranteed that “the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
The Federalists and anti-Federalists had differing visions of society and government. The Federalists, as the anti-Federalists charged, held a hierarchical view and believed in a natural aristocracy comprised of “the purest and noblest characters” who would be above faction and personal interest. The anti-Federalists saw things differently. The rich and powerful would always be ambitious and would use government to protect their property rather than serving the public good. Instead of seeing the natural aristocracy as the repositories of virtue, the anti-Federalists, as Melancton Smith explained, held that “the substantial yeomanry of the country [common farmers] are more temperate, of better morals and less ambition than the great.” Smith called for a government that would include both the rich, whose ambition if properly checked could be useful to the republic, and the middling sort, who would be “friendly to liberty and the rights of mankind, which will tend to cherish and cultivate a love of liberty among our citizens.” The ultimate goal of the anti-Federalists was always the preservation of the republic, through the maintenance of state sovereignty and limitations on federal power. Like the Federalists, the anti-Federalists published pamphlets,
The most popular of which was Letters of a Federal Farmer. In these publications they articulated their vision of government, attacked the Constitution, and listed the rights that anti-Federalists felt should be protected. Many of the anti-Federalists would eventually become members of the Democratic-Republican Party.
See also states’ rights.
Further reading: Saul Cornell, The Other Founders: Anti-Federalism and the Dissenting Tradition in America, 1788-1828 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); Jackson Turner Main, The Antifederalists: Critics of the Constitution, 1781-1788 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1961); Robert Allen Rutland, The Ordeal of the Constitution: The Antifederalists and the Ratification Struggle of 1787-1788 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1966); Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969).
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