Remembering the Anti-Federalists Rightly

For most of American history, Anti-Federalists, those opponents of the Constitution, played the role of the loser. The attention received from scholars castigated them as “men of little faith,” arch-conservatives troubled by the rising democratic tide of American politics. Among the only credit they received came from their calls for a bill of rights. Beginning in the late 1970s, Anti-Federalist fortunes start to shift. The first glimpse of this change came with Herbert Storing’s collection of Anti-Federalist writings. Storing’s slim, but compelling, essay opening the collection, What the Anti-Federalist Were For, revealed how their opposition to the Constitution stemmed from serious philosophical concerns and differences with their Federalist counterparts, and not just obstructionism or pro-slavery partisanship. Saul Cornell’s The Other Founders: Anti-Federalism and the Dissenting Tradition in American History (1999) took Storing’s findings a step further by exploring the social background of Anti-Federalists, and, more importantly, tying their political thought and opposition to the American tradition of resisting centralized authority. Finally, in 2011, Pauline Maier’s Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution placed the Anti-Federalists (a term she avoids using) at the center of her story. For Maier the Federalists secured victory in the ratification conventions through political maneuvering rather than through the inherent force of their arguments. This made Anti-Federalists and their arguments once again relevant for scholars as anti-Federalist criticisms were not addressed forthrightly in the debates and thus not really vanquished.