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Defending the Constitution
deliberations had begun, the men friendly to the Articles of Confederation thought of themselves as favoring a federal system of government;
by comparison, the advocates of a new constitution who intended to
create a stronger national union are often called ‘‘Nationalists’’ by historians of the period. A few years later, these two divisions of opinion
would harden into regular political parties called, respectively, Federalists (friendly toward a strong central government) and Republicans or
Democratic-Republicans (many of whom formerly were Anti-Federalists).
But by September 1787, the Nationalists were calling themselves
Federalists. Like the Anti-Federalists, they sought to persuade the voters through speeches, pamphlets, newspaper articles, and personal correspondence. As we noted earlier, three of their leading men—James
Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay—wrote eighty-five essays
for New York newspapers under the pseudonym of ‘‘Publius.’’ These essays, known as The Federalist, endeavored to explain and defend each
provision of the Constitution and its underlying principles of government. To this day, The Federalist is regarded as one of the most insightful
sources of understanding about the nature and purposes of the American
political system. Anti-Federalist literature, previously uncollected and
much ignored, is now available to the modern reader. Herbert Storing’s
The Complete Anti-Federalist (7 vols., 1981) is the most complete and upto-date version.
Much knowledge about the Constitution is also to be gained by reading the debates in the several State ratifying Conventions. When the
Philadelphia Convention adjourned on September 17, 1787, many of the
delegates returned to their native States to defend the new Constitution
and urge its adoption. Some, such as James Wilson of Pennsylvania, were
elected to their State’s convention and thus entered into a second round
of deliberations on the Constitution. These ratification debates contain a
rich source of both Federalist and Anti-Federalist thought on the Constitution. They were later collected and published as a four-volume work
by Jonathan Elliot under the title of The Debates in the Several State Conventions on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution (1830). James Madison,
it is interesting to note, was the last surviving member of the Federal
Convention when he passed away in 1836. The comprehensive notes that
he took at the Federal Convention were published after his death, and