Americans ratified the 1787 Constitution because it provided a clearly superior alternative to the existing Articles of Confederation, given the political and economic purposes of the most populous section of the country: the eastern seaboard. Opponents themselves admitted that state governments could be unresponsive to the peoples’ attempts at self-government (Wood, Creation, Chapter 10). They could offer no new, better choice. Further, their own position suffered from internal tensions or contradictions. Many of their concerns had either been addressed at the Philadelphia convention or would be assuaged by the promise of a bill of rights.
The Revolutionary War ended in the expropriation of Tories’ property; many left for Canada—perhaps most of those who had been most influential before the war (Wood, Radicalism, 176). Remaining were two types of commercial republicans: commercial-manufacturing ‘nationalists,’ who envisioned an integrated, mercantile economy, and ‘localists,’ who preferred commercial-agrarian economies operating intrastate. Both sides advocated what amounted to commercial republicanism, as distinguished from the military republicanism of the most celebrated earlier republic, that of ancient Rome. But the commercial republicanism of the Federalists was more thoroughly commercial; the commercial republicanism of the Anti-Federalists included admixtures of ‘ancient’ and Christian principles that could not be sustained as political bonds across large, socially heterogeneous territories. The war itself had given mercantile interests a boost, bringing money transactions in place of barter—accelerating capital accumulation (Radicalism, 248). With the decline of religiosity after the Great Awakening of the 1740s—a decline itself precipitated and sustained by increased social diversity—political societies needed bonds of interest to replace weakened religious ties. “American society could no longer be thought of as either a hierarchy of ranks”—as it had been to some extent under the Tories—”or a homogeneous republican whole” (Radicalism, 258).
There could have been a serious split between northern and southern states—that is, between states leaning away from slavery and states where the peculiar institution was securely ensconced. But this split was averted in Philadelphia, with the several compromises devised by the prudent (and exhausted) delegates: the three-fifths clause, the fugitive slave clause, and the slave importation clause. Instead of a division between states, northern and southern, the ratification debate resolved into intrastate debates between eastern and western interests. The best way to see this is to look at the way voters in the three regions—North, South, Middle Atlantic—behaved during the ratification period.
The Middle Atlantic states ratified quickly. Their central location would be an advantage under a more centralized government. Moreover, in terms of both population and territory, three of them—Delaware, New Jersey, and Connecticut (often misclassified as a New England state)—were small states whose worries about being engulfed by their large neighbors had ended with the “Great Compromise” between small states and large states at the Convention. with equal representation in the Senate, they were assured that New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia could not squeeze them with high imposts. A ‘states’ rights’ position cannot be upheld by sovereign states too small to defend themselves; equal representation in the Senate was the best deal for them.
Large or small, the Middle Atlantic states were already full-fledged commercial republics by the 1780s. A stronger national economic and political union was an obvious advantage for them. A well-organized national military force would protect their coastlines and therefore their international trade. With no Puritan heritage and with religiously diverse populations, no Christian Spartas enlivened their dreams. As for the one large state of the group, Pennsylvanians saw that Philadelphia would remain a major commercial center. Western Pennsylvania, very democratic, localist, and agrarian, opposed the new Constitution and eventually staged the Whiskey Rebellion, but lacked the votes to defeat the Federalists in the eastern section of the state.
The South viewed the Constitution with more suspicion, worrying that western expansion might be sacrificed to trans-Atlantic trade. In 1780 and throughout the first half of the century to come, southerners hoped to consolidate the dominance of commercial agrarianim over the North’s commercial manufacturing and finance by pushing into the west and driving the Amerindians out. They regarded the Jay-Gardoqui treaty with Spain as a sellout of southern interests, putting the right to navigate the Mississippi River at hazard. Would the new, stronger federal government spend money to defend north-Atlantic shipping instead of frontier defense (and offense?) Nonetheless, in the end the east-coast southerners prevailed over the less numerous westerners. In South Carolina, Charleston was a major international shipping point, and its interests carried the day. Virginia had a tradition of self-government, but it was also militarily vulnerable, with its long seacoast and rivers leading deep into the interior. Virginians knew they needed northern help for defense not only from the British and the French navies but from potential rivals in other states, if the Union dissolved. Further, Madison could argue that the Jay-Gardoqui treaty was actually the result of the weakness of the Articles of Confederation government. For defense, a an energetic, strong central government would be indispensable. In the South, Federalists could turn the Anti-Federalist argument on its head. If you really want self-government, independence from foreign nd domestic military threats, your best bet is a strong federal union, especially if you have the guarantees of the Bill of Rights. Union by definition discourages depredations by neighbors; union also makes Americans much more formidable to European powers. For self-government, for the practical enjoyment of states’ rights, a stronger federal union makes more sense than a weak confederation.
New England posed a somewhat different, but still soluble, problem for Federalists. Massachusetts and New Hampshire were as ardent devotees of localism as were the southern states. In addition, they had religious reasons for local self-government. The small republic, they saw, was indispensable in order to maintain the homogeneity needed for the public promotion of personal and civic virtue. The Christian Sparta cannot tolerate ‘Athenian’ laxness. In New Hampshire, for example, religious toleration meant personal freedom of conscience, but decidedly not disestablishmentarianism. The new federal constitution required no religious test for officeholders and in addition countenanced slavery; then as later, muscular Protestantism and anti-slavery moralism were tightly linked. But yet again, eastern, commercial interests prevailed. In Massachusetts, the port city of Boston was heavily Federalist. The central part of the state was just as heavily anti-Federalist, consisting of agrarian democrats in search of debt relief. The far west also wanted debt relief, but had suffered the effects of Shays Rebellion and by now wanted law and order as well. Result: ratification (narrowly) but with support for a Bill of Rights entailing state sovereignty over internal affairs.
New York as usual was in something of a class by itself, with one foot in the Middle Atlantic region, the other in New England. New York experienced some of the tensions of Massachusetts, albeit without the Puritan ethico-religious elevation. Upstate Clintonites—Jeffersonians of the future—opposed downstate Hamiltonians. Hamilton won the debate, narrowly, by arguing for the need for self-defense, still keenly felt after the British occupation of New York City during the war. Absent the mountains of Switzerland, how is the small, virtuous republic to defend itself? Hamilton had the answer: the extended republic of The Federalist, numbers 1-10. And even if the Adirondacks may have seemed a fair equivalent of the Alps, why would downstaters not secede from New York and join the Union, leaving upstaters virtuous and isolated, with British Canada along their border?
Rhode Island too was sui generis. It was a state full of debtors and democrats eyeing a proposed federal Constitution designed to moderate democracy and to prevent debtors from welshing on loans. And so it refused to ratify for several years. Eventually, its good citizens realized (to steal a mot later applied to the sovereign state of South Carolina) that it was too small to be a country and too large to be an insane asylum.
Virtuous but isolated: What is wrong with that? A real Spartan (over even Christian-Spartan, or if you prefer desert-Spartan) might very well ask that question. But most Americans found isolation undesirable because even the sternest Anti-Federalists were finally commercial republicans or what would come to be called ‘liberals.’ They lived in societies that were bigger and more diverse, religiously and economically, than the original Sparta ever was. A glance at Fustel de Coulanges’s La Cité Antique suffices to show the harsh measures needed to sustain a truly ‘virtuous republic.’ Anti-Federalists never had any real intention of taking such measures. There cannot really be a Christian Sparta—at least, not in a community much bigger than a monastery, as the American Puritans learned. Protestants put a premium on the individual conscience. And if you conceive of Christianity in a manner ‘tamed’ if not compromised by Lockeanism, as so many new England and other Protestant clergy had been by the latter half of the eighteenth century, you have decisively left Spartanism behind. Anti-Federalists and Federalists alike regarded government as an invention of prudence designed to secure the natural rights of individuals, and only secondarily as a device of civic education. Commercial-republican mothers, even Christian ones, do not adjure their husbands and sons to come back with their shields or on them; they are more likely to require them to bring home some bacon. Anti-Federalist appeals to personal and civic virtue had considerable power, but it was finally the power of nostalgia, an affection for a half-invented past mixed with dreams of an impossible future, even less plausible than the ersatz chivalry of nineteenth-century southerners, eventually to be gone with the wind.
Anti-Federalists were drawn by too many conflicting ambitions. They wanted the self-government of the states with the security of a more perfect union. They wanted agrarianism but not on self-sufficient farms; they wanted a commercial agriculture which required national and even international markets. Sparta did not adopt a policy of free trade. They wanted self-defense but wanted no standing armies; they wanted the citizen-soldiery of the militia, who were the same people who had returned to their fields when crops needed to be gathered during the Revolutionary War. They wanted a perfect equilibrium of state and federal power, but saw that America under the Articles of Confederation could not effectively govern itself. They wanted to secure natural rights, including the right of property, but could not find a way to prevent the state governments from being seized by rights-abusing minorities. American under the Articles could not continue to prosper economically as the Anti-Federalists (too) wanted it to do.
So they fought the Federalist politically but settled for a reasonable bargain—the 1787 Constitution with a bill of rights appended. As a consolation to idealists, the city on a hill remained standing, an example for the other peoples of the world. But it shone less, was less the New Jerusalem emitting a light unto the nations, more a rational model of popular self-government.
In that fight, it should be added, Anti-Federalists were overmatched intellectually as well as economically, socially, and politically. Anti-Federalists never wrote anything in defense of the Articles remotely comparable to The Federalist. In a civil-social milieu where substance counted more than style, that mattered. The more cosmopolitan, commercial sections produced the more impressive statesmen. The Virginia Anti-Federalist (for example) tried to match Patrick Henry against Madison (educated in the commercial-republican state of New Jersey), Randolph, and Washington. That, too, was an unequal contest. Federalist had the edge on Anti-Federalists, both in quantity of votes and quality of leadership. The representatives of most of the people were persuaded not to want radical democracy.
Works Cited
Gordon S. Wood: The Creation of the American Republic. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1972.
Gordon S. Wood: The Radicalism of the American Revolution: How a Revolution Transformed a Monarchical Society into a Democratic One Unlike Any that Had Ever Existed. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992.
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