Why the Constitution Never Should Have Been Ratified

The ratification of the US Constitution was an issue that essentially divided the thirteen colonies in two: on the one hand was the push by the Federalists for ratification. Their argument was that the thirteen colonies needed a centralized, federal government to ensure that the colonies themselves did not get into any trouble (either through in-fighting or through foreign wars). The Anti-Federalists, on the other hand, saw the Constitution as a gateway to the exact type of authoritarianism that the Revolutionaries had just opposed in the Revolutionary War. The Anti-Federalists wanted each individual state to mind its own affairs and, at best, for there to be a loose confederation among the states so that no one, single entity could assert itself over them all. This paper will examine the writings of the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists in light of their historical context of the late 18th century to show how the two sides wished to organize the government. It will also explain the side that I myself would have favored.

According to the Federalist Papers, the type of government that the Federalists saw as being most advantageous to the Union was the one whose powers were described by the Constitution. This document laid out in detail what the federal government would be able to do -- and everything else would be what state governments could oversee. The purpose of this was to ensure that the federal government would guard against "factions and convulsions" among the individual states (Federalist No. 6, n.d.). Thus, the federal government envisioned by the Federalists was one that was strong and capable of overriding states' rights at important levels of power. Such a federal government would ensure that the states would not fight or become "entangled in all the pernicious labyrinths off European politics and wars" (Federalist No. 7, n.d.). In short, the federal government would be the real government overseeing all the smaller governments of the individual states.

And this is exactly what the Anti-Federalists objected to. They did not want a central, federal government overseeing the individual states because that amounted to the giving up of sovereignty to a small, powerful group at the federal level. The Anti-Federalists wanted each state to have their own government because this was more representative of the democratic Republican ideals -- localized, de-centralized authority -- power that was in the hands of the people. For this reason, Brutus -- one of the main writers of the Anti-Federalist Papers warned against adopting the Constitution because it would "lead to the subversion of liberty . . . despotism, or, what is worse, a tyrranic aristocracy" (Brutus No. 1, n.d.). In their view, the Constitution was a document that would allow tyranny to take hold over the Union -- and that was a direct violation of everything the War for Independence had been fought for.

For that reason, I myself would have aligned with the Anti-Federalists as they were more aware of the pernicious nature of the Constitution and what it would lead to. The Federalists wanted control over the states; they wanted to run the Union from a centralized source -- and one can see easily how that has worked for us today. We have a federal government that is overbloated, corrupt, uncontrollable and unaccountable. But if the Anti-Federalists had won the debate and defeated the Constitution, the Union would have been a loose confederation of states and the foreign wars that the Federalists were so worried about would never have begun, since it has always been the federal government launching wars abroad to the chagrin of the people of the US, who have mostly been happy to avoid wars throughout the brief history of this nation.

References

Brutus No. 1. (1787). Retrieved from http://www.constitution.org/afp/brutus01.htm

Federalist No. 6 (n.d.). Retrieved from http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed06.asp

Federalist No. 7 (n.d.). Retrieved from http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed07.asp