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Review
| The Essential Federalist and Anti-Federalist Papers, edited by David Wootton. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2003. 343 pages. $24.95, cloth, $7.95, paper.
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| A quick search of Amazon.com reveals 4742 references to The Federalist Papers, a testimony to the enduring power of James Madison's, John Jay's, and Alexander Hamilton's classic defense of the Constitution. To the extent that the federalists carried the day and achieved the ratification of what is now the world's oldest continuously functioning Constitution, their voices continue to dominate the historiography of the period. Few historians speak for the dissenters; standard classroom editions of the Federalists by Clinton Rossiter and Jacob E. Cooke stand beside John Kaminski's monumental, sixteen volume The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution (1993). Occasional caveats, such as Jackson Turner Main's evenhanded The Antifederalists (1961), have largely been ignored. But of late, scholars like Saul Cornell, in The Other Founders (1999), have begun to treat the antifederalist perspective with more respect, and Madison biographer Ralph Ketcham recently edited The Anti-Federalist Papers (2003). Suspicion of centralized authority in North America, they observe, predated even the revolt against King George and played an important role in the emergence of the Jeffersonian Republican, and later, the Jacksonian Democratic Parties. Indeed, given Hamilton's fiscal policies and the federal government's response to the Whiskey Rebels, it appeared to many contemporary critics of the Constitution that their dire predictions of national authority had been vindicated. |
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Students hoping to understand both views, however, had to consult multiple volumes. One of the many virtues of the volume under review is that editor David Wootton provides documents defending each argument. Wootton, a specialist in Western intellectual thought at the University of London, begins his collection with a thoughtful thirty-page discussion of the historical sources of the Constitution, from Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan to Blackstone's Commentaries. Seven antifederalist voices follow, beginning with George Mason's broadside and concluding with four of Judge Robert Yates' "Essays of Brutus." Wootton edits the documents with a light touch, noting changes in wording from one edition of the essays to the next, and identifying a historical reference or personage when necessary. However the editor appears to tip his hand in his selection of documents and essays that supported ratification. Those who defended the Constitution receive exactly twice the pagination of its critics. In addition to thirty-three numbers from the Federalist, Wootton includes James Wilson's lengthy speech to the Pennsylvania convention and Noah Webster's even longer pamphlet, An Examination into the Leading Principles of the Federal Constitution. Wootton also privileges elite critics, such as Patrick Henry and Melancton Smith, over more humble supporters of the Articles. Admittedly, most of those who took up their quill pens during the debate over ratification came from the most educated classes, but as both Main and Cornell demonstrate, more than a few literate artisans and farmers produced short essays for antifederalist newspapers, and in most cases, their perspective was far more radical and egalitarian than that of wealthy planter Henry. |
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Although the editor's division of antifederalist and federalist arguments into two separate sections provides the reader with concise arguments for either side, what is lost by this neat arrangement is an awareness that these authors were often responding to one another. Defenders of the Constitution, in particular, were not merely addressing hypothetical concerns about state centralization, they were replying to specific points recently advanced by critical writers. To not integrate these documents into a chronological order erases this sense of debate, and the way in which writers in both camps built on the arguments of the other faction is lost. Wootton also neglects to explain his selection process for the Federalist. Although limitations of space obviously required that some of the numbers be cut, there is no explanation as to why the ones reprinted here were chosen over the fifty-two that were not. The editor is undoubtedly right, however, in suspecting that the text that appeared in the original four New York newspapers had the greatest immediate impact on the debate, which explains why he uses them over later book editions. Wootton concludes with a selection of Constitutional documents. The Articles of Confederation, Madison and Edmund Randolph's Virginia Plan, and the Constitution—together with the first ten amendments—finish the volume, which also features a detailed index. Hackett Publishing is also to be congratulated for pricing this thick paperback edition at a student-friendly $7.95. |
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| Le Moyne College |
Douglas R. Edgerton |
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