Jul 17

Jul 17 Preparing for the Anti-Federalist

After reviewing every Federalist Paper, this article lays out the plan for covering the Anti-Federalists.

A New Challenge

If you’ve been reading Founder of the Day for any length of time, you are probably aware that I wrote one summary a week for each Federalist Paper between October 2018 and June 2020.

I have now decided (with the recommendation of several readers) to attack the Anti-Federalist Papers.

Unfortunately, for reasons we will get into here, that is not quite so simple as the Federalist Papers.

A Scattered Collection

Reviewing the Federalist Papers was simple enough.

There are 85 Papers written by three people under one pseudonym.

Everything was all set up for me.

The Anti-Federalist, however, is more chaotic.

A large group of authors wrote separately on a wide variety of topics. They were not unified under a common cause.

Some of these men wrote just one essay. Others wrote dozens.

The Irony

The Federalist Papers were not created just to champion the merits of the Constitution.

They were each composed as a direct response to different Anti-Federalist arguments.

In doing so, the Federalist Papers themselves became the best collection of Anti-Federalist complaints.

Assessing the Situation

So herein is my situation.

Should I write about each individual Anti-Federalist Paper?

This would take significantly longer than the year and a half I put into the Federalist Papers.

Do I include private correspondence between two Founders?

This too would take a lifetime. In fact, The Complete Anti-Federalist Papers is a 7 volume series which was not completed until after the original compiler’s death. (It’s also out of print and somehow not available online which made the task difficult for me too).

The Plan

With all these considerations, I have decided to take a two pronged approach to reviewing the Anti-Federalist Papers.

First I will spend a few weeks analyzing the most prominent Anti-Federalists (see list below) before moving on to a deeper discussion regarding the arguments themselves.

Keeping in mind that most publications were done under a pen name at the time, here are (in no particular order) the contributors I plan to review in the coming weeks:

John DeWitt

Montezuma

Centinel

Brutus

Speech of Patrick Henry

Cato

Speeches of Melancton Smith

The Impartial Examiner

Letter of Agrippa

Dissent of the Pennsylvania Minority

A Farmer (Maryland)

While you wait for the first Anti-Federalist, feel free to read back on some of the Federalist Papers I wrote about over the last year and a half.