The federal government established by the Philadelphia Convention seemed to violate the principles of 1776 that had guided the Revolutionary constitution-makers. The new Constitution provided for a strong government with an extraordinary amount of power given to the president and the Senate. It also created a single republican state that would span the continent and encompass all the diverse and scattered interests of the whole of American society—an impossibility for a republic according to the best political science of the day. During the debates over ratification in the fall and winter of 1787–88, the Anti-Federalists focused on these Federalist violations of the earlier Revolutionary assumptions about the nature of power and the need for a small homogeneous society in a republican state. They charged that the new federal government resembled a monarchy in its concentration of power at the expense of liberty. Because the society it was to govern was so extensive and heterogeneous, the Anti-Federalists asserted, the federal government would have to act tyrannically. Inevitably, America would become a single consolidated state, with the individuality of the separate states sacrificed to a powerful national federal government. And this would happen, the Anti-Federalists argued, because of the logic of sovereignty. That powerful principle of eighteenth-century political science, which the British had used so effectively against the colonists in the imperial debate, held that no society could long possess two legislatures: it must inevitably have one final, indivisible lawmaking authority. “We shall find it impossible to please two masters,” declared the Anti-Federalists. There could be no compromise: “It is either a federal or a consolidated government, there being no medium as to kind.” Because the Constitution was to be the “supreme law of the land,” the Anti-Federalists had no doubt that the proposed central government “must eventually annihilate the independent sovereignties of the several states.” The doctrine of sovereignty dictated that result.
Despite these formidable Anti-Federalist arguments, the Federalists did not believe that the Constitution repudiated the Revolution and the principles of 1776. They answered the Anti-Federalists not by denying the principle of sovereignty but by relocating it in the people at large. In doing so they forged an entirely new way of thinking about the relation of government to society. It marked one of the most creative moments in the history of political thought.
During the decade since Independence, American political culture had been transformed. Americans, it now appeared clear, had effectively transferred this sovereignty, this final lawmaking authority, from the institutions of government to the people at large. Ever since 1776 the American people, unlike the English, had refused to accept the fact that the election of their representatives eclipsed their existence; in the Americans’ view the people “out of doors” continued to act outside of all the official institutions of government. During the 1780s the people had organized various committees, conventions, and other extralegal bodies in order to voice grievances or to achieve political goals. By doing so, they had continued common practices that had been used during the Revolution itself. Vigilante and mob actions of various kinds had done quickly and efficiently what the new state governments were often unable to do—control prices, prevent profiteering, and punish Tories. Everywhere people had extended the logic of “actual” representation and had sought to instruct and control the institutions of government. Unlike the British in relation to their House of Commons, the American people never surrendered to any political institution or even to all political institutions together their full and final sovereign power.
By 1787–88 all this activity by the people outside of government tended to give reality, even legal reality, to this idea that sovereignty in America resided and remained in the people at large, and not in any specific institutions of government. Only by believing that sovereignty was held by the people outside of government could Americans make theoretical sense of their recent remarkable political inventions—their conception of a written constitution that was immune from legislative tampering, their special constitution-making conventions, their processes of constitutional ratification, and their unusual ideas of “actual” representation. This idea of sovereignty remaining in the people at large rather than being deposited in any institution of government opened up entirely new ways of thinking about government.
To meet the Anti-Federalist arguments against the Constitution, the Federalists were now determined to exploit this new understanding of the ultimate power of the people at large. True, they said, the Philadelphia Convention had gone beyond its instructions to amend the Articles of Confederation. It had drawn up an entirely new government, and it had provided for the new Constitution’s ratification by special state conventions. Had not Americans learned during the previous decade that legislatures were not competent to create or to change constitutions? If the federal Constitution was to be truly a fundamental law, then, the Federalists argued, it had to be ratified “by the supreme authority of the people themselves.” Hence it was “We the people of the United States,” and not the states, that ordained and established the Constitution.
By locating sovereignty in the people rather than in any particular governmental institution, the Federalists could now conceive of what previously had been a contradiction in politics—two legislatures operating simultaneously over the same community—the very issue over which the British Empire had broken. Thus they could answer the principal Anti-Federalist objection to the Constitution—that the logic of sovereignty would dictate that the national Congress would become the one final supreme indivisible lawmaking authority. Only by making the people themselves, and not their representatives in the state legislatures or in the Congress, the final supreme lawmaking authority could the Federalists explain the emerging idea of federalism, that unusual division of legislative responsibilities between the national and state governments in which neither is final and supreme. This idea became the model for similar divisions of legislative power elsewhere in the world.
By asserting that all sovereignty rested with the people, the Federalists were not saying, as theorists had for ages, that all governmental power was merely derived from the people. Instead, they were saying that sovereignty remained always with the people and that government was only a temporary and limited agency of the people—out to the various government officials, so to speak, on a short-term, always recallable loan. No longer could any parts of the state and federal governments, even the popular houses of representatives, ever fully represent the people; instead, all elected parts of the governments—senators and governors and presidents—were now regarded in one way or another as simply partial representatives of the people. This new thinking made nonsense of the age-old theory of mixed or balanced government in which monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy were set against one another. Even though the American governments, at both the state and federal level, contained monarchlike executives and aristocratic senates, they now began to be called unmixed democracies or representative democracies. Since the process of election had become the sole criterion of representation, all elected governmental officials, including senators and executives, were considered equal agents of the people. If judges themselves were likewise considered agents of the people, which is the way many Federalists now described them, then by rights they ought to be elected by the people—which, of course, is precisely what many of the states began to do. Today a majority of states have popularly elected judiciaries.
This new understanding of the relation of the society to government now enabled the Federalists to explain the expansion of a single republican state over a large continent of diverse groups and interests. The Federalists—especially Madison—seized on Scottish philosopher David Hume’s radical suggestion that a republican government might operate better in a large territory than in a small one, and ingeniously turned on its head the older assumption that a republic must be small and homogeneous in its interests. The Federalists argued that American experience since 1776 had demonstrated that no republic could be made small enough to avoid the clashing of rival parties and interests. (Tiny Rhode Island was the most faction-ridden of all.) The extended territory of the new national republic was actually its greatest source of strength, wrote Madison in The Federalist,No. 10, the most famous of the eighty-five essays that he, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay wrote in defense of the Constitution in New York. By extending the political arena over the whole nation, Madison concluded, the number of interests and factions in the society would increase to the point where they would check one another and make it less likely that a factious and tyrannical majority could combine in government to oppress the rights of minorities and individuals.
As an added benefit, Madison predicted that the elevated and expanded sphere of national politics would act as a filter, refining the kind of men who would become national leaders. Representatives to the national Congress would have to be elected from relatively large districts—a fact that Madison hoped would inhibit demagogic electioneering. If the people of a particular state—New York, for example—had to elect only ten men to the federal Congress in contrast to the sixty-six they elected to their state legislature, they would be far more likely to ignore the illiberal, narrow-minded men with “factious tempers” and “local prejudices” who had dominated the state legislatures in the 1780s—the Yateses and the Findleys—and instead elect to the new federal government only those educated gentlemen with “the most attractive merit and the most . . . established characters.” In this way the new federal government would avoid the problems that had plagued the states in the 1780s.
Although the Federalists in creating the Constitution may have intended to curb the populist forces the Revolution had released, the language and principles they used to defend the Constitution were decidedly popular. Indeed, most Federalists felt they had little choice in using democratic rhetoric. The proponents of the Constitution did not need John Dickinson to warn them in Philadelphia that “when this plan goes forth, it will be attacked by the popular leaders. Aristocracy will be the watchword; the Shibboleth among its adversaries.” Precisely because the Anti-Federalists, as Hamilton observed in the New York ratifying convention, did talk “so often of an aristocracy,” the Federalists were continually compelled in the ratifying debates to minimize, even disguise, the elitist elements of the Constitution. And in fact the Federalists of 1787–88 were not rejecting democratic electoral politics; nor were they trying to reverse the direction of the republican Revolution. They saw themselves rather as saving the Revolution from its excesses, in Madison’s words, creating “a republican remedy for the diseases most incident to republican government.” They shared a common American agreement that all American governments had to be “strictly republican” and derived “from the only source of just authority—the People.”
The Anti-Federalists provided little match for the arguments and the array of talents that the Federalists gathered in support of the Constitution in the ratifying conventions that were held in the states throughout the fall, winter, and spring of 1787–88. Apart from a few distinguished leaders like George Mason and Richard Henry Lee of Virginia, most Anti-Federalists were ordinary state-centered men with only local interests and loyalties. They tended to lack the influence and education of the Federalists, and often they had neither social nor intellectual confidence. They had difficulty making themselves heard both because their speakers, as one Anti-Federalist in Connecticut complained, “were browbeaten by many of those Cicero’es as they think themselves and others of Superior rank,” and because much of the press was closed to them. Out of a hundred or more newspapers printed in the late 1780s, only a dozen supported the Anti-Federalists.
Many of the small states—Delaware, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Georgia—commercially dependent on their neighbors or militarily exposed, ratified immediately. The critical struggles took place in the large states of Massachusetts, Virginia, and New York, and acceptance of the Constitution in these states was achieved only by narrow margins and by the promise of future amendments. (Under the leadership of Madison, the first federal Congress attempted to fulfill this promise and proposed twelve amendments to the Constitution. In 1791 ten of them were ratified by the states, and these became the Bill of Rights.) North Carolina and Rhode Island rejected the Constitution, but after New York’s ratification in July 1788 the country was ready to go ahead and organize the new government without them.
Despite the difficulties and the close votes in some states, the country’s eventual acceptance of the Constitution was almost inevitable. Since the Confederation Congress had virtually ceased to exist, the alternative was governmental chaos. Yet in the face of the great number of wealthy and influential people who supported the Constitution, what in the end remains extraordinary is not the political weakness and disunity of Anti-Federalism but its strength. That large numbers of Americans could actually reject a plan of government that was backed by George Washington and nearly the whole of the “natural aristocracy” of the country said more about the changing character of American politics and society than did the Constitution’s acceptance. It was indeed a portent of the democratic world that was coming.
The Anti-Federalists may have lost the contest over the Constitution, but by 1800 they and their Jeffersonian-Republican successors eventually won the larger struggle over what kind of society and culture America was to have, at least for a good part of the nineteenth century. Not only as president in 1801 did Jefferson reduce the power of the national government, but those who had been Anti-Federalists—narrow-minded middling men with interests to promote—soon came to dominate American politics, especially in the North, to a degree that Federalist gentry had never imagined possible.
In the 1780s the arch–Anti-Federalist William Findley had pointed the way. In a debate in the Pennsylvania assembly over the role of interest in public affairs, Findley set forth a rationale for modern democratic interest-group politics that has scarcely been bettered. Unlike his patrician opponents, who continued to hold out a vision of disinterested leadership, Findley argued that since everyone had interests to promote, self-made middling men like himself, who had no lineage, possessed no great wealth, and had never been to college, had as much right to political office as wealthy gentry who had gone to Harvard or Princeton. This was what American equality meant, he said. Furthermore, since everyone did have interests to promote, it was now quite legitimate for candidates for public office to campaign for election on behalf of the interests of their constituents. This was a radical departure from customary practice, for none of the Founders ever thought it was proper for a political leader to campaign for office. In this debate Findley anticipated all of the popular political developments of the next generation—the increased electioneering and competitive politics; the open promotion of interests in legislation, including the proliferation of chartered banks and other private corporations; the emergence of political parties; the extension of the actual and direct representation in government of particular groups, including ethnic and religious groups; and the eventual weakening, if not the repudiation, of the classical republican ideal that legislators were supposed to be disinterested umpires standing above the play of interests. This was democracy as Americans came to know it.
As the Federalists of the 1790s eventually discovered to their dismay, this democracy was no longer a technical term of political science describing the people’s representation in the lower houses of representation. And it was no longer a simple form of government that could be skeptically challenged and contested as it had been since the ancient Greeks. Instead, it became the civic faith of the United States to which all Americans must unquestionably adhere. The emergence of this rambunctious middling democracy was the most significant consequence of the American Revolution.