![]() ![]() Those who were against adoption (Antifederalists), while acknowledging the need to give Congress more power, argued that the national government proposed in the Constitution would substitute tyranny for mere disorder and inconvenience. In general those who were for it (Federalists) maintained that the nation’s very existence was so threatened by the impotence of the existing Congress that any delay in setting up a true national government would spell anarchy, disunion, and disaster. The immediate purpose of each article or essay when first published was not so cosmic it was simply to persuade its readers to accept or reject the Constitution. ![]() Although it seems unlikely that many readers will persevere through the whole 2,387 pages, anyone who goes very far in them will indeed encounter a discussion in which assessment of the Constitution reaches to fundamental questions of how any government obtains or deserves the consent of the governed. Blurbs on the jacket from various public figures assure us that this is the case. ![]() That the publishers of the Library of America should have thought it worthwhile to bring out this collection now, evidently intended for the general public, is evidence of the continuing vitality of the subject. * And the whole collection is heavily indebted (as the editor generously acknowledges) to the volumes that have appeared in the ongoing Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution, published by the State Historical Society of Wisconsin (eventually to reach nineteen volumes). Most of the pieces opposing the Constitution have been reprinted relatively recently in the seven volumes of Herbert Storing’s The Complete Antifederalist. Three hundred eighty-eight pages are devoted to selections from the well known Federalist Papers by Madison and Hamilton (the few by John Jay are omitted). To serious students of the period, few of the texts will be new. In these volumes Bernard Bailyn has given us a sample of what they had to say, 1,862 pages of it (limited to the period from September 1787 to August 1788), along with 525 more pages of related documents, helpful notes explaining obscure references and allusions, an extensive chronology of related political events from 1774 to 1804, and brief but detailed biographies of the participants. Their arguments, dissecting the terms of the document that still defines our government, are still worth listening to. Having lived through a revolution, the men and women who engaged in this contest brought to it more experience in making and breaking governments than any previous or subsequent generation of Americans. That year was marked by fierce debate, in public assemblies, in the press, in private letters, and most importantly in the popularly elected state conventions through which, by the terms of the Constitution, official approval or disapproval was to be reached. In the year that followed publication of its proposals in September, Americans had to decide, state by state, whether to abandon the old Articles of Confederation for this new Constitution, which was to go into operation when and if nine of the thirteen states approved it. Instead, the convention proposed a brand new national government. The famous convention of 1787 met in Philadelphia to define the additional powers needed to enable Congress to do its job effectively. With no power to tax or to enforce its decrees, the Congress had been helpless to restore the credit of a nation heavily indebted to foreign powers, helpless to halt runaway inflation, helpless to prevent trade wars among the states. Six years had proved the powers surrendered to be not enough. Six years earlier in the Articles of Confederation the thirteen state governments had surrendered extensive powers to a congress of delegates from each state legislature. In 1787 many Americans were convinced that the “perpetual union” they had created in winning independence was collapsing. ![]()
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