Considering what was at stake for
the Federalists and Anti-Federalists alike during the early summer of 1788 when
Melancton Smith donned his “Plebian” disguise and gave voice to his anxieties in
Anti-Federalist No. 85, its rather strident tone is hardly surprising. This
isn’t to say that Smith was, at that moment, desperate to avert what he
perceived as an immanent disaster. As I’ve argued already, he was writing at a
moment in time in which it could not have been clear to anyone whether the
Constitution would succeed or fail. I feel it would be fair to say, however,
that Smith clearly endeavoured to make the best argument possible in No. 85,
and in the process bent or elided certain facts. He was hardly alone in this;
Alexander Hamilton’s arguments in favor of the proposed constitution were rife
with exaggerations and highly-charged rhetoric, as well as certain factual
inaccuracies and selective distortions of the truth. Arguably, this was the
norm. Though the high-minded James Madison or moralistic John Jay might have
disagreed, the ratification debate was not as much about the triumph of fact,
reason, and right as it was about persuasion, rhetoric, and politics.
Keeping that in mind, I’ve
determined to break up my examination of Anti-Federalist No. 85 into two parts.
The first, which will follow here, will discuss some of the factual omissions
or distortions that Smith presented to his readers in the course of his
argument. The second, which will unfold in subsequent posts, will look into some
of the rhetoric that Smith deployed, its meaning, and desired effect.
The first argument that Smith
deployed in No. 85, which in many ways forms the intellectual or philosophical
backdrop for that which followed, asserted that the urgency with which the
Federalists were promoting the adoption of the Constitution was based on a
fundamentally false assumption. Whereas the advocates of the new government
urged that the federal administration under the Articles of Confederation was
weak and ineffectual and had been the root cause of the economic and diplomatic
struggles widely felt in the post-Revolutionary War United States, Smith
believed that this acute sense of distress was largely manufactured. Contrary
to Americans being, “in a condition the most deplorable of any people on
earth,” Smith wrote in the fourth paragraph, they were rather blessed by an
existence grounded in freedom and prosperity. Famers cultivated their land and
reaped the fruit of their labour; workingmen and artisans plied their arts and
enjoyed the due reward of their toil; merchants extended their commercial
practices and enjoyed honest gain for honest work; in all things from commerce,
to agriculture, to the law (which Smith claimed was being executed as well as
ever), the United States was the farthest from despair and collapse as could be
imagined. There was, therefore, no reason to hastily put in place a new and
untested system of government, and one having been recommended no reason to
rush its approval without due reflection and possible amendment. This is indeed
an encouraging portrait of the United States in the 1780s, and one which no
doubt accorded with the experiences of a not insignificant portion of the total
population. It was in the main, however, demonstrably untrue for a great number
of people living in all thirteen of the states then in existence.
The reason that men like
Alexander Hamilton and James Madison so strongly advocated for the replacement
of the Articles of Confederation was that the United States was suffering materially
from a lack of internal unity and external strength. Keeping in mind that I’ve
run down a similar list of the deficiencies of the federal government under the
Articles in a previous week’s post, I’ll try to keep this next bit brief.
States and individuals alike had
accrued sizable debts during the years of the Revolutionary War (1775-1783) and
in the aftermath of the conflict there was very little hard currency left to
pay them off. The paper money printed by the Continental Congress lost its
value at an alarming rate and many people, chief among them farmers, attempted
to make use of the political institutions of the states in which they lived in
order to remedy the situation. The resultant push and pull between debtors and
creditors, the newly empowered “common people” and the traditional elite,
resulted in civil and political strife in numerous states. The most famous
example of this economic discontent was the 1786 rebellion led by Daniel Shays
that erupted in Massachusetts. The causes of the disturbance, which was
ultimately crushed in early 1787, included the strains of the post-war economic
depression, the credit crunch brought about by the lack of hard currency, and
the harsh economic policies put in place by the Massachusetts government in 1785
in order to pay of the state’s debt. Massachusetts was not alone in attempting
to cope with these sorts of pressures, and to a greater or lesser degree all of
these factors can conceivably be traced to the weaknesses inherent in the
federal government.
American foreign and trade policy
during the years under the Articles were similarly disjointed. The boycott of
British goods that had been in place throughout the Revolution came to an end
after the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1783, and the resultant flood of
British manufactured goods that appeared in the United States threatened the
livelihood of the indigenous American manufacturers who had sprung up in the
1780s to fill the void. This problem was compounded because the individual
states retained control over their own commerce, making it essentially
impossible for American diplomats to successfully negotiate trade agreements
with foreign nations because the federal government had virtually no way of
ensuring that any or all of said states would recognize whatever terms were
agreed upon. This lack of economic coordination also complicated attempts to
compel nations like Britain to abandon their restrictive trade regulations and
led to competition between the states. In response to Britain’s refusal to
allow goods to be carried to British ports by anything other than British
ships, for instance, the New England states began to once more boycott all
British products. This attempt at economic coercion backfired when Connecticut
quickly re-opened its ports and gained a sudden monopoly on British commerce.
During this same period American trade in the Mediterranean was subject to
harassment from pirates based in North Africa. The inability of Congress to
enforce its taxation of the various states ensured that a naval expedition
intended to confront the brigands wouldn’t be funded, and indeed didn’t
materialize until the early 19th century.
It’s difficult to say whether or
not Melancton Smith was entirely aware of the multitude of problems that the
United States faced in the 1780s, and which the federal government under the
Articles of Confederation was manifestly incapable of confronting. Granted,
he’d severed a two year term in the Continental Congress beginning in 1785 and
must have become aware over that time of how dysfunctional the federal
administration could be. That being said, Smith was primarily a New York
politician whose wealth, prestige and interests were very much tied to those of
his home state. Since under the Articles of Confederation each of the states,
New York included, was responsible for regulating its own commerce, and since
Smith was a merchant by trade who was also deeply invested in the New York
political scene, he likely would not have been amenable to having the powers
enjoyed by the government of New York lessened. Under the proposed constitution
individual states would no longer be able to negotiate external commercial
agreements on their own, the federal government would assume the responsibility
for regulating interstate commerce, and New York merchants, bankers, farmers
and artisans would be forced to contribute tax revenue to the central
government. However necessary these things were, and they were, they would have
lessened the autonomy enjoyed by the government of New York and its citizens.
This, I think, Smith found disagreeable in principle, not without reason.
The fact remains, however, that Smith’s characterization in Anti-Federalist No. 85 of the economic
prosperity enjoyed by the states under the Articles was factually inaccurate. Farmers
would most often those who emerged from the Revolutionary War years
significantly in debt. Add to that the inability of the anaemic federal
government to negotiate an end to British commerce regulations and the
competition that emerged between states over vital markets for their produce,
and it is highly doubtful that American agriculture could have been described
as flourishing in the 1780s. Artisans and merchants likewise suffered from the
sudden influx of cheap British goods, from attacks on American trade in the Mediterranean,
and the alarming scarcity of hard currency and resulting inflation that
characterized the American economy during the same period. Americans may not
have been, “the most deplorable of any people upon earth” in the 1780s, but
their situation was far from enviable and needed to be addressed lest the
states fly apart and the United States cease to exist as a political entity.
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