Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [232]
Antifederalist opinion drew heavily on the radical Whig conviction that concentrated power was a menace to liberty. Under the Constitution, Antifederalists charged, the federal government’s broad prerogatives—to tax, to raise armies, to regulate commerce, to administer justice—would sooner or later overwhelm the states, pulverize individual rights, and sink the republic under a mass of corruption. Then, too, large republics had always succumbed to tyrants or dissolved in civil war. The great diversity of the American people, to say nothing of the distances separating them, offered no reason to hope that the United States could escape a similar fate.
Under the Constitution, Antifederalists also stressed, Congress would be too small and too remote from the people to represent them effectively. The widely circulated Letters from the Federal Farmer, a pamphlet that first appeared in November 1787 (probably written by Melancton Smith), stressed the inadequacy of representation under the Constitution. “Natural aristocrats” and demagogues, it argued, would have a better chance of winning election to Congress than men drawn from “the substantial and respectable part of the democracy.” No wonder, other Antifederalists said knowingly, that the Constitution was supported by the rich and well-born few.
Federalists, defending the Constitution, asserted that under the Articles of Confederation the country was falling apart. While Congress looked on helplessly, violent factionalism and insurrection had afflicted one state after another—most recently Massachusetts, where insurgent farmers led by Daniel Shays had closed courts in the western part of the state and in January 1787 mounted an abortive attack on the federal arsenal at Springfield. Trade and commerce meanwhile continued to languish, public credit had evaporated, and Congress, powerless to defend its own interests against foreign nations, had become an international laughingstock. The Constitution would end this misery by establishing a stronger, more energetic national government—which of course, Federalists said, explains why it had met with such opposition from popular demagogues and state politicians fearful of losing influence.
Toward the end of October 1787, the Independent Journal ran the first of eighty-five essays by “Publius.” Published together the following May as The Federalist, they were the fruit of a brilliant collaboration between Hamilton, Jay, and Congressman James Madison of Viriginia. Their exhaustive, clause-by-clause defense of the Constitution remains the most famous contribution to the debate on either side and a landmark of American discourse on government. Two crucial arguments of The Federalist, both related to the issue of representation, would have seemed especially compelling to readers in New York.
First, under the Articles of Confederation too many decisions of national importance depended on state governments that had been taken over by the wrong sort of men: men unprepared by wealth or education to conduct public business, “men of factious tempers, of local prejudices, or of sinister designs . . . [who] practice with success the vicious arts by which elections are too often carried”—exactly the kind of “democratical” leaders, in other words, who had followed George Clinton into office in New York after 1776. But the Constitution would set things right by causing an “ENLARGEMENT of the ORBIT” of government sufficient to exclude from power all but the “proper guardians of the public weal.” Congress, having powers commensurate with its responsibilities, would draw more “fit characters” into public life, and large electoral