The Other Founders: Anti-Federalism and the Dissenting Tradition in America, 1788-1828

by Saul T. Cornell

Fear of centralized authority is deeply rooted in American history. The struggle over the U.S. Constitution in 1788 pitted the Federalists, supporters of a stronger central government, against the Anti-Federalists, the champions of a more localist vision of politics. But, argues Saul Cornell, while the Federalists may have won the battle over ratification, it is the ideas of the Anti-Federalists that continue to define the soul of American politics.

While no Anti-Federalist party emerged after ratification, Anti-Federalism continued to help define the limits of legitimate dissent within the American constitutional tradition for decades. Anti-Federalist ideas also exerted an important influence on Jeffersonianism and Jacksonianism. Exploring the full range of Anti-Federalist thought, Cornell illustrates its continuing relevance in the politics of the early Republic.

A new look at the Anti-Federalists is particularly timely given the recent revival of interest in this once neglected group, notes Cornell. Now widely reprinted, Anti-Federalist writings are increasingly quoted by legal scholars and cited in Supreme Court decisions--clear proof that their authors are now counted among the ranks of America's founders.

Genres: History, American History, Politics

352 pages, Paperback

First published September 20, 1999

Reviews

[Sean Chick · Rating 3 out of 5]

This could have been much better. Cornell is not a good writer and his thesis that we are an Anti-Federalist nation wrapped in a federal system seems like a stretch. There is no doubt they represented a strong tradition of dissent and localism, but arguably not the dominant one. It may merely appear so in our age of fracture.

[Christopher G · Rating 3 out of 5]

Saul Cornell has been a Professor of history at Ohio State University and more recently at Fordham University. He received his PhD and a Master of Arts in History from the University of Pennsylvania. He obtained a Bachelor of Arts in History from Amherst College. He is heavily involved in the topic of gun control and was the Director of the Second Amendment Research Center at the John Glenn Institute. In addition to The Other Founders: Anti-Federalism and the Dissenting Tradition in America for which he won the 2001 Cox Book Prize, he wrote A Well-Regulated Militia: the Founding Fathers and the Origins of Gun Control in America (2006). He has written or co-authored various other publications including textbooks and articles on the topic of gun control. With his degrees in history, the author is more than qualified to write on the subject of the Anti-Federalists.

Cornell takes the reader on a journey of very diverse Anti-Federalist thought on the Constitution before its ratification. He posits that the diversity in thought might have been the reason that a clear and concise political party championing the ideas never emerged. These ideas were often written about but without a clear defining voice were often misinterpreted and quickly dispersed. However unorganized, the ideas went on to inspire Jeffersonianism and Jacksonianism. Cornell is successful in showing how Anti-Federalist distrust of a large central government permeates into the American spirit and emerging political thought of today.

Contrary to popular belief, the Anti-Federalists did not lose the race of political dominance in influencing the outcome of the Constitution because they didn’t have a good enough argument. They were up against the Federalists, who were much more united in thought. No, Cornell argues that the Anti-Federalists simply had a more difficult argument to make. The fact that the Philadelphia Convention submitted the Constitution to state ratification meant that there would be a diverse amount of debate about which parts worked and didn’t. Never before had public opinion on politics been recognized as being so diverse. This is more true for the Anti-Federalists than any other political group.

Cornell spends a good portion of the first few chapters sifting through various Anti-Federalist essays that detail their hesitation to give in to a strong centralized government. The main criticisms of the Anti-Federalists about the Constitution were: a consolidated government undermined both republicanism and liberty; a lack of forced rotation in officials led to more power for the aristocracy; the senate did not represent popular will; a need for more separation of powers; the judicial branch was too extensive; there needed to be a bill of rights; extensive taxing power could be used to oppress and threaten the autonomy of states; it neglected to prohibit standing armies during peacetime; and finally an executive branch that was too powerful. Some of the early arguments that the Anti-Federalists had about the constitution were legitimate. This was shown with the prosecution of Eleazer Oswald, one of the possible writers behind the Centinel alias. Oswald’s conviction for libel was evidence that Federalists used the law as a political tool.

Cornell identifies three groups in society that Anti-Federalist ideas depended on; backcountry farmers and artisans, the middling sort, and a small group of influential elite politicians. These three groups represented what would eventually become the lower, middle, and upper classes of society. To gain the favor of all three groups the Anti-Federalists had to draft their own versions of the Constitution. The problem was the division in uniting the three classes in a single vision. The elites were deeply conservative, feared corruption, and wanted to keep the government local to protect their aristocracy. The middling sort and the plebeian public wanted to keep the government local as well but for different reasons. This separation of motives hindered the Anti-Federalists from uniting, weakening their reach and influence.

In my opinion, the best quote to sum up the “mobocracy” of the plebeian populists that sprang up as a result of the Anti-Federalist struggle was from an enigmatic Anti-Federalist alias, Centinel. Centinel asserted that “the great body of the people are awakened to a due sense of their danger, and are determined to assert their liberty, if necessary by the sword.” When the press got ahold of the drama, the Anti-Federalists were unable to control the narrative. The Carlisle riot, in particular, gave strength to the Federalist narrative that Anti-Federalism led to behavior as seen in Shays’s Rebellion. The plebeian populsists deepened the divide in Anti-Federalist classes. With the middling sort and plebeians distracted with one another the elite Anti-Federalists strengthened their coalition.

The Harrisburg Convention marked a crossroads for Anti-Federalism; some calling for amendments or a do-over of the constitution. It was at this convention that an anti-Constitution party was rejected. Without a unified party, Anti-Federalists turned to the public sphere and created a network of small, local factions that were meant to unify the nation without a strong central government. Their efforts ultimately went unfruitful and their tense relationship with the Federalists did not wane despite the ratification of the Constitution. They were essentially defeated as a strong central government became law. Some of the Anti-Federalist ideas, like the Bill of Rights, but this failed to fully satisfy them. The ratification, public support of George Washington, and the ability to amend the constitution was the nail in the coffin for any hopes of the Anti-Federalists forming a political party.

But Anti-Federalist ideas did not die. In creating an opposition to Democratic-Republicanism, leaders like James Madison drew from the work of the Anti-Federalists. The tenth amendment, written to limit the powers of the central government, particularly drew inspiration from Anti-Federalist sentiment. Class protests like the Whiskey Rebellion and violent acts in Pennsylvania that drew from the plebeian populists divided democrats and severed the connection between radicals and Anti-Federalism. Martin Van Buren, who would later become president, stated that, “The Anti-Federalist mind was the mind of America.” Cornell ends his book by stating that the Anti-Federalist are the other founders of America and that their ideas continue to inspire political debate and discourse today.

Cornell employs an abundance of primary sources such as many excerpts from the National Gazette of the 1790s, Treatise by Wortman, and letters. He also borrows from many secondary sources. The book is most definitely written for scholarly intentions. He does not cite his own work as I speculate this began as his dissertation.

Along with any book that employs primary sources I enjoyed reading Cornell’s take on the Anti-Federalists. I was particularly interested in his ideas of how Anti-Federalism bleeds through modern political thought and inspired the American spirit. It is always interesting to find something out about the origins of a mindset you’ve been indoctrinated with. Aside from my own personal joy of better understanding my sporadic anti-government sentiments, I found the book annoyingly repetitive. Cornell disseminates his thesis in spirals and portions of the book feel like deja vu; as if I’ve already read this chapter a few times. Students of history should find the information valuable enough to push through.

[Lucas Miller · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was left on the book shelf in my classroom when I moved into it seven years ago. I decided to finally give it a read as we careened towards the Early Republic this fall. It really defied my expectations.

The book started life as the author's Dissertation and you can really feel it. Dense footnoting throughout, lots of literature review. Very detailed summary sections at the end of each chapter. This can take a minute to get into the swing of things. And some of the very thorough and thoughtful analysis of anti-federalist thinkers I've never heard of whose works are certainly not widely available can drag, but sticking with this one was definitely worth it.

First, recasting lot of early republic political culture in a different light has made it much more engaging and more fun to teach this year. Secondly, the use of theory by the author was really interesting and added a lot to the experience. In this instance, the concept of the public sphere as articulated by Jurgen Habermas is an underlying analytic theme throughout the book and it is never the central idea of the book, but slowly comes to form what I think is the most interesting thesis of the book.

This is not for everyone, but if American Revolution and Early America is your thing and you are tied of reading hagiographies of the Founders, this one is worth a look.

[Kaufmak · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very good book and great counter-narrative to the overwhelming story of the constitutional ratification debate. As is so often the case in history, to the victor goes the story. While The Federalist has become a lionized document of American legal theory, the essays of those that opposed Hamilton, Madison and Jay are much harder to come by. Cornell does fantastic work bringing some of those voices to light.

What I found most effective about this book was how Cornell presented the legacy of the Anti-Federalist and how their diversity of opinion, while perhaps not the most effective way to mount a challenge to the Federalist ratification juggernaught, it provided a wealth of ideas beyond ideas of states-rights and fears of tyranny. As you look at the early republic and get showered by the party of Adams, Hamilton and Marshall, do yourself a favor and read what you can about their opponents.

[Ryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was fun. Cornell shows the "other side" in the debate at the time in which those voices from the dissenters had some potency. It is very easy in our streamlined portrayal of American history to imagine that the lat 18th Century was marked by a unanimity of thought in which courteous gentlemen each offered his own contribution to the essence of a a Federal system. Read this if you have an interest in the origins of American constitutional thought; it's worth it.

[Evan Þ. · Rating 4 out of 5]

This's a history of Anti-Federalism and its impact on American political thought. It starts with the Anti-Federalists themselves, who opposed the ratification of the Constitution; and then continues through their influence on the Democratic-Republican Party, on Jacksonian Democracy, and on more recent political thought.

The Anti-Federalists had disparate views, opposing the Constitution for different reasons, but Cornell attempts to classify them as populists and elite. They sometimes worked at cross purposes, but he identifies some common (though not universal) ideas about empowering local governments rather than one distant General Government. They opposed the Constitution both for giving the General Government too much power, and for being written to leave open the possibility of its taking even more power. These ideas, Cornell argues, resurfaced throughout the history of American politics down to the present day.

[Justin Sanders · Rating 1 out of 5]

I had to read this book for APUSH and I hated every second of it.

[Adam · Rating 4 out of 5]

In The Other Founders, Saul Cornell attempts to construct a more nuanced understanding of the varieties of Anti-Federalist thought and their importance for post-ratification political debate than has been current. In opposition to Cecilia Kenyon’s portrayal of the Anti-Federalists as “men of little faith,” he praises recent work that has recovered the importance of Anti-Federalist thought. This recovery has been useful for both scholarly and practical (particularly legal) purposes; however, he argues, it has painted a picture of Anti-Federalist thought that falls prey to two major errors. First, recent scholarship has been guilty of portraying Anti-Federalist thought as far more monolithic than it actually was; second, it has prioritized Anti-Federalist texts on the basis of intellectual weight and rhetorical accomplishment, rather than on the basis of reception. Cornell argues, for example, that Brutus was far less influential than the scholarly literature would suggest.
The latter argument, if important, is also straightforward, and only occupies Cornell briefly; he spends much more time on the former. The Anti-Federalists, he argues, were composed of three distinct groups, delineated by both socioeconomic location and by ideological commitments: the elites, the middling sort, and the plebeians. Elite Anti-Federalism was marked by Whig republicanism and a concern for the preservation of the natural aristocracy, and was significantly more cosmopolitan than has been understood by either its contemporary opponents or recent scholarship. Middling Anti-Federalism retained a conception of the possibility of the subordination of personal liberty to the public good, while at the same time generally opposing the necessity of most particular types of subordination; they, along with the plebeians, opposed the idea of a natural aristocracy. The plebeian Anti-Federalists had relatively little concern for personal liberty or the public good as categories; rather, they were interested in providing for the expression of the public will; this radically democratic view would impact later developments in the appropriation of the Anti-Federalist oeuvre by the dissenting tradition - what Cornell refers to as the “loyal opposition.”
This loyal opposition arose because of the gradual appearance of a conviction among the elite and middling Anti-Federalists that their concern for personal liberty could be better serviced by working within the Constitutional system, with its particular flaws, than by remaining allied with the radically democratic plebeian Anti-Federalists. Cornell traces the shifting composition of this opposition from ratification through Van Buren, discussing the ways in which it appropriated both Anti-Federalist and Federalist texts, and how it organized its political activity. This discussion is informed by postmodern understandings of the nature of texts; Cornell portrays a multilayered, intertextual interpretive process, in which any text may be interpreted by any reader to serve any position. His discussion of political organization is explicitly Habermasian; he is concerned with non-political means of public discourse and action.
Cornell’s use of evidence is not incredibly comprehensive; however, he deals with a broad enough selection of works, and exhibits a thorough enough understanding of his topic, to serve the needs of a work of this length and scope. His bibliography of secondary literature appears to be helpful, and he also includes useful appendices organizing Anti-Federalist texts by number of printings and by number (and type) of republication.

[Josh · Rating 2 out of 5]

this is a partisan history. he likes the anti-federalists. he likes the 'middling' sort of them. that means he goes after the feds, the elite anti-feds, and the plebeian anti-feds--which he does a very bad job of depicting thoroughly, unbiasedly, and with full complexity.

[Bruce · Rating 5 out of 5]

I originally read this book in 2000 but I re-read it. It provides the anti-federalist thinking and is current today i.e. 'less government' advocates.

[Jason S · Rating 3 out of 5]

Detailed account of the literature and varied intellectual strains behind the Anti-Federalist movement and its transition into the Democratic Republican Party in the early 1800s.