Virtue, Dissent, and The Other Founders

I have a problem with the Anti-Federalists that goes beyond my general hatred of the American Rebellion. They supported the Satanic Revolution of 1789!

From Front Porch Republic

By Tim Colvin

It’s important not to lose sight of the strangeness of the Anti-Federalists. They lived in a very different moral world.

Most Americans are familiar with Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and the Federalist Papers, but it would be a stretch to find many who have heard of Anti-Federalists like Federal Farmer or Centinel. As a result, most Americans fail to realize that Madison and Hamilton were writing from only one side of the debate. By failing to consider their opponents’ points of view, we lose the context that would help us more deeply understand the controversy that surrounded the Constitution. Without that context, we misread the nature of the opposition to the Constitution, and we misunderstand the ideals of the Anti-Federalists. In one sense, these ideals have seeped deeply into American political culture. Yet they originate from an alien moral and political world, and many of those who consider themselves heirs of the Anti-Federalists might not be very recognizable to their ideological forebears.

As historian Saul Cornell argues, Anti-Federalism was not one monolithic ideology. Books on the ratification debates often portray the conflict as a debate between two clear-cut sides: Federalists and Anti-Federalists. The reality of the situation was more nuanced. Federalists had a clear proposition they were arguing for: the Constitution should be ratified by the states. All those opposed to this proposition were easily grouped together, despite the fact that Anti-Federalists did not all agree with one another and had different motives for opposing the Constitution. This dynamic worked in favor of the Federalists and made the Anti-Federalist case all the more difficult to make.

Cornell divides the Anti-Federalists into elite, middling, and plebeian strands. Elite Anti-Federalists like Mercy Otis Warren, Richard Henry Lee, and Elbridge Gerry argued that only in small, decentralized republics – the states – could “natural aristocracy” arise and guarantee the virtue required for republican government. They feared that the new Constitution would break down the established systems of patronage that kept society hierarchical and reciprocal. The centralizing tendencies of the new federal Constitution would break down this system and pose a threat both to liberty and to this hierarchical order.

By contrast, middling Anti-Federalists like Federal Farmer argued for a broader conception of representative government. They represented the rising middle class, and argued that society should be broadly representative rather than hierarchical. And while elite Anti-Federalists feared the new constitution because they thought it would diminish the aristocracy, middling Anti-Federalists feared it for precisely the opposite reason. For them it was the new nationalist Constitution that would empower the aristocracy to rule. The debate over who should govern – a natural aristocracy of virtue or a democratized virtue of the middle class – would become one of the deepest differences among the Anti-Federalists.

Plebeian Anti-Federalists, who represented the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder, were the most radical of the Anti-Federalist writers. They favored an immediacy of representation, something akin to direct democracy. Even the state governments were too distant for them. Local juries and locally organized militias would be the bedrock of liberty. Divisions between middling and plebeian Anti-Federalists prevented any sort of non-elitist Anti-Federalism from becoming an effective force.

While the Anti-Federalists lost on the narrow question of the Constitution’s ratification, their ideas had plenty of influence on what the Constitution became. Anti-Federalist objections—especially their objection to the absence of protections for individual rights—were an important source of pressure for the ten amendments that became the Bill of Rights. Anti-Federalists and Jeffersonian Republicans also produced arguments about libel that were much more expansive in their understanding of press freedom than the traditional Blackstonian view preferred by the Federalists. Under the Blackstonian view, freedom of the press mainly meant freedom from prior restraint; the government could still punish publications after they appeared, especially for seditious libel. The First Amendment has since been understood by the courts to protect press freedom more broadly.

Because of this influence, later movements hostile to federal power and in favor of local autonomy often hearken back to the Anti-Federalists, and see themselves continuing the fight against the Federalists. But the original debate was far more complicated than many of these “localists” appreciate. While Anti-Federalists had real reasons to fear distant government, judicial power, and the destruction of state and local institutions, Federalists had their own good reasons to fear national disunion, local factionalism, legislative instability, and economic disorder. Many of today’s “Anti-Federalists” might be better understood as defenders of the federalist structure set up by the Constitution that the original Anti-Federalists opposed. “Localism” for both right and left is usually a means and not an end in itself. What the Anti-Federalists had in mind was very different from the “localism” of the Southern segregationists or the Students for a Democratic Society. When we consider these kinds of complexities, it becomes difficult to map Founding-era disputes onto modern political problems.

It’s important not to lose sight of the strangeness of the Anti-Federalists. They lived in a very different moral world. Today it’s easy to focus on ideas like federalism, localism, public opinion, democratic participation, liberty, and the public sphere. Yet the ratification debate also centered on a shared conception of virtue, corruption, independence and dependence, character, and the moral purposes of government. The founding generation had a preoccupation with virtue that has been lost in modern political discourse. For instance, the Anti-Federalist known as ‘Brutus” argues that Americans should make “the attainment of virtue, and happiness” a chief object of civil institutions. Benjamin Rush, a proponent of the Constitution, attributed corrupted morals partly to defective government and anticipated “virtue and happiness as the necessary consequence of the proposed Constitution.” Our modern pluralistic assumption that the ends of life should be largely left to individuals would have been foreign to much of the founding generation. Underneath the dispute between the Federalists and Anti-Federalists was a shared understanding of how questions of constitutional structure are inseparable from questions of character, virtue, corruption, independence, religion, and human happiness. The emphasis on the Anti-Federalists’ relevance to modern debates over decentralization, civil liberties, and participatory democracy makes them seem more modern than they actually were. In truth, both they and the Federalists belonged to a moral world in which government, society, and individual character were expected to serve substantive ideas of virtue and the common good.

One cannot simply read the Federalists as good and Anti-Federalists as bad; in many ways, we are heirs to both traditions. When Americans point to Washington as the source of their ills, they may be drawing in part from the Anti-Federalists. When they point to Washington as the potential solution to local problems, they may be drawing in part from the Federalists. But our own debates might be more fruitful if we better understood the moral world in which both sides were grounded. And to understand that world, we might not find the answers in the pamphlets of constitutional theory but in the pages of Aristotle.