United States

The draft Constitution aroused widespread opposition. Anti-Federalists—so called because their opponents deftly seized the appellation of “Federalists,” though they were really nationalists—were strong in states such as Virginia, New York, and Massachusetts, where the economy was relatively successful and many people saw little need for such extreme remedies. Anti-Federalists also expressed fears—here touches of class conflict certainly arose—that the new government would fall into the hands of merchants and men of money. Many good republicans detected oligarchy in the structure of the Senate, with its six-year terms. The absence of a bill of rights aroused deep fears of central power. The Federalists, however, had the advantages of communications, the press, organization, and, generally, the better of the argument. Anti-Federalists also suffered the disadvantage of having no internal coherence or unified purpose.

The Federalist, written by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, helped secure passage of the U.S. Constitution.National Archives, Washington, D.C.

Hamilton, AlexanderAlexander Hamilton, detail of an oil painting by John Trumbull; in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Andrew Mellon CollectionThe debate gave rise to a very intensive literature, much of it at a very high level. The most sustained pro-Federalist argument, written mainly by Hamilton and Madison (assisted by Jay) under the pseudonym Publius, appeared in the newspapers as The Federalist. These essays attacked the feebleness of the confederation and claimed that the new Constitution would have advantages for all sectors of society while threatening none. In the course of the debate, they passed from a strongly nationalist standpoint to one that showed more respect for the idea of a mixed form of government that would safeguard the states. Madison contributed assurances that a multiplicity of interests would counteract each other, preventing the consolidation of power continually charged by their enemies.

The Bill of Rights, steered through the first Congress by Madison’s diplomacy, mollified much of the latent opposition. These first 10 amendments, ratified in 1791, adopted into the Constitution the basic English common-law rights that Americans had fought for. But they did more. Unlike Britain, the United States secured a guarantee of freedom for the press and the right of (peaceable) assembly. Also unlike Britain, church and state were formally separated in a clause that seemed to set equal value on nonestablishment of religion and its free exercise. (This left the states free to maintain their own establishments.)

In state conventions held through the winter of 1787 to the summer of 1788, the Constitution was ratified by the necessary minimum of nine states. But the vote was desperately close in Virginia and New York, respectively the 10th and 11th states to ratify, and without them the whole scheme would have been built on sand.

The social revolution

The American Revolution was a great social upheaval but one that was widely diffused, often gradual, and different in different regions. The principles of liberty and equality stood in stark conflict with the institution of African slavery, which had built much of the country’s wealth. One gradual effect of this conflict was the decline of slavery in all the Northern states; another was a spate of manumissions by liberal slave owners in Virginia. But with most slave owners, especially in South Carolina and Georgia, ideals counted for nothing. Throughout the slave states, the institution of slavery came to be reinforced by a white supremacist doctrine of racial inferiority. The manumissions did result in the development of new communities of free blacks, who enjoyed considerable freedom of movement for a few years and who produced some outstanding figures, such as the astronomer Benjamin Banneker and the religious leader Richard Allen, a founder of the African Methodist Episcopal Church Zion. But in the 1790s and after, the condition of free blacks deteriorated as states adopted laws restricting their activities, residences, and economic choices. In general they came to occupy poor neighbourhoods and grew into a permanent underclass, denied education and opportunity.

Sale of Estates, Pictures, and Slaves in the Rotunda, New Orleans, 1842. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.