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Published: Spring 2004

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Copyright (c) 2004 by the University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved.

Foreword: The Antifederalists, Four Decades On

As I began preparing this foreword, a chapter of the Sons of the American Revolution asked me to address their monthly meeting. They wanted about twenty minutes on the Confederation period. My little talk for them one Saturday morning rested firmly on what Jackson Turner Main achieved in this book. So does a great deal of major scholarship.

When Jack Main published The Antifederalists—his first book—in 1961, his subjects did not enjoy a good reputation. At best they were "Men of Little Faith," as political scientist Cecelia Kenyon called them in 1955.[1] Cold War American culture (or at least its dominant strain) was in a mood to stress our cohesion and our achievements as a people, and the Constitution's opponents did not fit that mood. They belonged instead to the "states' rights" tradition. In the context of mid-twentieth-century black American protest, that phrase—states' rights—could only evoke the defense of what was indefensible: slavery and Jim Crow. But during the ratification debates of 1787 and 1788, those problems had not been the issue. As a good historian must do, Main asked his readers to understand his subjects rather than judge them or claim them as forebears.

Jackson Turner Main was the grandson of Frederick Jackson Turner. Though he spent time at Harvard as an undergraduate, he chose to be a doctoral student at Wisconsin, working with Merrill Jensen. By his midwestern origins, his blood descent, and his intellectual forming, he belonged within the progressive tradition in American historiography. As of the date of this book's publication, that tradition seemed in disarray. That was partly because of the larger cultural climate of "consensus" within a supposedly monolithic "American mind" or "liberal tradition," but the seeming disarray also emerged from hard monographic research and close criticism of what the progressives had written.

By 1961 Robert E. Brown had advanced his thesis that the American Revolution was a matter of defending "middle-class democracy" and was beginning his frontal assault on the reputations of progressive historians Charles A. Beard and Carl Lotus Becker.[2] Forrest McDonald had taken on Beard's argument that the Constitution's framers stood to make a financial killing by using the new government's tax power to restore value to worthless securities. Examining all available records, he showed that the Constitution's opponents held the same kind of paper. Whatever separated the two sides, the prospect of simple financial gain for some did not explain it.[3] Clinton Rossiter had taken important early steps along the path leading to what we now call "the linguistic turn" in American Revolution studies.[4] Nor, for historians in the 1950s, were the Constitution's opponents the true bearers of the heritage of 1776. To Richard B. Morris, "the Federalists, not the Antifederalists, were the real radicals of their day."[5] Edmund S. Morgan wrote a powerful synthesis of Revolution scholarship whose descriptive nouns are all-embracing: colonists, revolutionaries, Americans. More precise terms did not seem necessary.[6] The time seemed long past for regarding the Confederation years as the "critical period of American history."[7] The Antifederalists seemed like a negligible, transient group. To the consensus-minded historian of one intensely fought state ratification campaign, antifederalism simply disappeared after its cause was lost.[8]

Such historiography was formidable. For a first-book author to write in opposition to it required courage. Jackson Turner Main was not a noisy man. But he was not a historian to follow fashion, and he always displayed indomitable courage. The book that he produced and that is reissued here speaks for itself. He showed in these pages that the Antifederalists had serious points to make, and that they deserve even now to be heard. Without being reductionist or determinist about their motives, he demonstrated that they had good reasons in their own lives for making those points. During the debate on the Constitution, they found themselves both out-argued and out-maneuvered. They ended up among history's losers. But they spoke for a majority of the people eligible to vote. In a fair plebiscite under the rules of their time, they would have won. As E. P. Thompson was doing for the English working class, Main was rescuing his subjects from "the enormous condescension of posterity."[9] They do not belong in history's dustbin.

In the four decades since this book was published, scholarship has vindicated Main's position. Main uncovered a very real and very important debate about the meaning of the American Revolution and about the direction of the American future. His opening sentence set his theme (as, of course, an opening sentence should do): "The United States consisted in the 1780's of a number of sections and subsections, each with a distinctive social structure, economy, and set of political objectives." There was no point in talking about "Americans" or "revolutionaries" in blanket, undifferentiated terms. The people who inhabit this book had shared a moment of great decision when, for their many separate reasons, they had chosen the path of independence. They had shared the struggle to achieve what Congress had declared. But they were not yet a single "people." For most of them identity was local and specific. So were the sources of well-being in their lives.

Yet, will they, nil they, Main's people were living through a very large change. They faced problems that transcended their separate polities and their separate identities. Main constructed this book in terms of states and regions, but he showed that an emerging national economy vexed all his people, wherever they were. In this sense, as in many others, their "Nationalist" opponents did have the advantage. The trans-state issues over which the two emerging groups contended prior to 1787 were the congressional impost, the commutation of the salaries of Continental army officers, and the regulation of commerce between the states. Emergent Antifederalists were coalescing around each of these questions across sectional and state lines. But they did not realize it. Their opponents held positions in common, too, and much more than the people who would be Antifederalists, they understood that point. They had the great advantages of knowing one another, of understanding that they shared a perspective and a set of interests and goals, and, ultimately, of deciding the questions that were going to be put for debate. They were setting the agenda, and in any debate on any subject that is the greatest advantage of all. In an oft-quoted sentence Thompson once wrote that "class happens when some men, as a result of common experiences … feel and articulate the identity of their interests as between themselves, and as against other men whose interests are different from … theirs."[10] In this sense the people whom the Antifederalists opposed were not just "Nationalists," as Main insisted they should be called rather than "Federalists," but a national class.[11]

Not until well into the final stage of debate, when ratification of the Constitution was all but assured, did its opponents realize their own need to organize and cooperate across the lines that had kept them separate. For the most part these were men who spent their Revolution at the state level. Their best leaders were the likes of Governor George Clinton of New York, who must figure large in any account of the Constitution's critics. In the second half of the 1780s Clinton and his state could look back on a revolution that seemed both supremely trying and supremely successful.

Few states had suffered as much as New York during the war years. Yet by 1786, on the eve of the writing of the federal Constitution and the struggle over its ratification, matters were very different. The state was economically prosperous and politically stable. There seemed little reason for major change. Most New Yorkers probably agreed. After their votes for the state's ratifying convention, when the delegates gathered in Poughkeepsie, forty-six were pledged to oppose the Constitution and only nineteen to support it. Governor George Clinton presided. He also led the Antifederalist forces.

Clinton's own path in the Revolution had led him from the moderate prominence of a seat in the old provincial assembly to unquestioned dominance in his own state. Unopposed in 1786, he won his fourth successive three-year term as governor. Future Federalist (or Nationalist) John Jay, who was the author of New York's constitution, had looked forward in the 1777 gubernatorial election to calling one of Clinton's opponents, Philip Schuyler, by the governor's title of "your excellency." Schuyler, another future Federalist and father-in-law of Alexander Hamilton, had fully expected to "command them all." He thought after Clinton's first victory that the new governor had neither the "family" nor "the connections" to qualify for "so distinguished a predominance." Jay and Schuyler's friend the loyalist lawyer William Smith, Jr., who had taught Clinton, disparaged him now as "George the Governor."[12]

Clinton did not begin his state-level career as an outright partisan. He sought in good faith to work with the likes of Schuyler and Jay and later with Hamilton. But Clinton proved to be a consummate politician. By 1786 he had a loyal following among both electors and legislators. He was master of his state, and he wielded patronage to shore up his position. He was not, however, a national figure, and he had very little national experience. New York was what counted to him, just as Virginia counted most to Patrick Henry and Richard Henry Lee and Massachusetts did to Samuel Adams. Together with the state legislators, county judges, and militia officers who rallied to them, these were men who had made their own Revolution and whom the Revolution had for the most part made. But they had done it at the state level. Such men, their followers in lower offices and at the state ratifying conventions, and the voters who chose them are the Antifederalists whom Jackson Turner Main describes in this book. What he achieved here has influenced many historians since 1961.

The best evidence of Main's influence is the book that still dominates study of the Confederation period, Gordon S. Wood's Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787,[13] published eight years after The Antifederalists. Wood worked from printed literary sources, and his method was very different from Main's. Yet he found strong evidence of the same deep divisions of social experience, historical interpretation, and future vision that Main found between the Antifederalists and their ultimately victorious opponents. One might read Wood as validating the Federalists' side and Main his own subjects' position, but their interpretations of the underlying issues match. Like Wood's Creation of the American Republic, Roger H. Brown's Redeeming the Republic was not written from an Antifederalist point of view. But it used sources and methods akin to Main's own to present strong evidence that a debate about fundamental issues of taxation took place in the states during the 1780s, with very real interests at stake. In an argument that Main could have made, Brown showed how the separate state debates about taxation fed into the great national discussion of 1787-1788.[14]

Main went on to expand the argument of The Antifederalists in three separate books about what transpired in the states between the Declaration of Independence and the ratification of the Constitution.[15] While Wood was finishing his book, I was a beginning graduate student, encountering and resisting Main's ideas. I planned originally to write my study of revolutionary New York in opposition to his views, but my own immersion in the sources led me to do otherwise.[16] (Actually, I shudder to look back at the marginalia I scrawled in my copy of The Antifederalists. And I have it on good authority that I was muttering its author's name in my sleep.) People who worked on other states are in debt to him in the same way.[17] None of them found simple "middle-class democracy." Instead they discovered and told stories of transforming conflict.

Like Roger Brown and like Main himself, most state-level historians were more interested in bringing out patterns of political and social experience than in the close study of the texts and ideas of the ratification debate. But in 1981 those texts and ideas received their due with the posthumous publication of the University of Chicago political scientist Herbert Storing's multivolume compilation, The Complete Anti-Federalist (finished by his associate Murray Dry).[18] Their collection is not actually "complete," but Storing and Dry compiled massive evidence that Main's subjects deserved to be taken seriously as political thinkers. The seven volumes and Storing's separately published introduction, What the Anti-Federalists Were For: The Political Thought of the Opponents of the Constitution, added Antifederalist voices, as well as their votes and organization, to the great national discussion that was underway. Acknowledging their debt to Main, Storing and Dry demonstrated that "those who opposed the Constitution must be seen as playing an indispensable … part in the founding process. They contributed to the dialogue of the American founding… . The political life of the community continues to be a dialogue, in which the Anti-Federalist concerns and principles still play an important part."[19] This is why their view must count in any discussion of the "original intent" of the founding generation.[20]

Finally, consider this book's next-generation successor, The Other Founders by historian Saul Cornell.[21] Publishing through the Omohundro Institute imprint, like Main and Wood, Cornell does not set out to "replace" Main's work, let alone to "disprove" it. On the contrary, he takes Main's insights as fully established and turns to the question of the language the Antifederalists used. Like Main, he understands that blanket, all-encompassing terms will not do. This even applies to the term "Antifederalist." Main distinguished them by state and region, and elsewhere he showed an enduring interest in the economic and social distinctions that separated Americans within specific places.[22] Cornell shows that "elite" and "popular" Antifederalists had very different approaches to the problem that ratifying the Constitution presented. He takes the ratification debates onto new ground in two ways. One is by demonstrating that the debate involved not just the actual issues of 1787-1788, but also the appropriate place and rights of dissenters in the American public sphere. The other is by making clear that even though actual opposition to the Constitution died, the substantive issues the Antifederalists raised continued to be vital for decades.

Cornell does not simply argue that Antifederalists were plebeian, and therefore "democratic." Many were not plebeian, just as many of the Constitution's supporters were not members of the elite. The real Antifederalist contribution to evolving American democracy was that by dissenting from the Constitution they kept open the public sphere of debate that the Revolution had made possible. The Antifederalists and what they stood for did not disappear at all.

This book began that large discussion. It still bears reading, which is why the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the University of North Carolina Press are bringing it out in a new paperback edition. As I was writing this foreword, I learned of Jack Main's death. He lived a long and good life and wrote many good books, beginning with this one. Its republication signifies that his quiet but determined voice should, and will, continue to be heard.

Edward Countryman