Benjamin David Steele said:
I'll chime in as the author of the linked blog post. First off, I'd note that I favor the Anti-Federalists and, as some of them did, I consider them the true Federalists. They supported a confederation, as opposed to a centralized nation-state or empire.
Edited. I'm opposed to unjustified concentration of power. But I'm not against government on principle. And speaking of big vs little government doesn't necessarily seem meaningful. The issue is more about where is the locus of power. The Articles of Confederation, our first constitution, was closer to a democratic document of self-governance. Whereas the second constitution, whose enactment was unconstitutional according to the first, was a reinstatement of the kind of political system that the British Empire used to rule the colonies. After the Constitutional Convention, only a few percentage of the population could vote or hold public office and taxes were higher than before, hardly taxation with representation.
The revolution didn't end when the ruling elite declared it over. In explaining why they fought, one American revolutionary (Levi Preston) from the working class stated that, "we always had governed ourselves, and we always meant to." And they meant to continue to govern themselves, no matter what elites said in the British Parliament or in the US Constitutional Convention. It required the violent and oppressive force of the newly formed US federal military to put down the continued revolts of the ongoing revolution, from Shay’s Rebellion to the Whiskey Rebellion. One might point out that the American Revolution in its entirety was a continuation of unresolved issues from the English Civil War (what some consider the first modern revolution, a regicidal one at that), as argued by Kevin Phillips in The Cousins' Wars. Since this remained unresolved in that first constitutional crisis in the American Revolution, it set the stage for the Civil War. If the brilliance of the US Constitution is its mercurial vagueness and ambiguity that can never be pinned down and so can be reinterpreted again and again in contradictory and conflicting ways, that is also its Achilles' heel in being a weak foundation, specifically for a credal nation.
Admittedly, the Federalist vs Anti-Federalist conflict was complicated. A Federalists like John Dickinson appears to genuinely have been Federalist in the original meaning. And that is probably why he could write the draft of a document like the Articles of Confederation that was received well by Anti-Federalists. He wasn't an anti-imperialist revolutionary by nature or principle, but he came to see the wisdom of confederation as interpreted through his Quaker upbringing. Then there is an Anti-Federalist like Jefferson, well known for his inconsistency or even hypocrisy. It was his actions as president with the Louisiana Purchase that, maybe more than anything else, determined an expansionist and imperialist-style Federalism that further strengthened slavery in spreading its reach across the continent --- quite opposite of the confederationist vision of a "United States" that brought together small coastal states (that phrase came from the Anti-Federalist Thomas Paine). The consequences of that course of action remain, no matter Jefferson's own best hopes and intentions.
I'm of mixed opinion about it all. It is what it is. And we can't change history. America has become an empire, far vaster and more powerful than was the British Empire during the colonial era, and with a much larger standing army as feared by the Anti-Federalists and some Federalists (what John Dickinson warned about as placing "purse and sword" in the hands of a centralized government). The Constitutional Convention itself, in its original intention and constitutional justification for being formed at all, was to improve upon the Articles and not replace them. They exceeded their mandate according to the power held by the sovereign states (that is why they were called 'states') and according to the will of the people. Everything else hinges on that.
Much of my interest is driven by curiosity, although more than merely being 'academic'. Whatever my personal opinion, I simply find that revolutionary and post-revolutionary era fascinating, partly because the conflicts then were conflicts that had been developing for centuries and that remain hot button issues to this day. There is something hidden in the outward debates that never gets fully articulated, much less settled. It's the energizing and enervating force of our society. This is why we are a society prone to extremes and instability, the reason we required a civil war to end slavery whereas most other countries managed to do it peacefully through legislation. The US is a young country, compared to societies that are millennia old, and it's uncertain how long this imperfect union will last.
