Return of the anti-federalists

• Article
• Comments ()
• Click-2-Listen
• Videos

By

You may dimly remember them from your high school American history class: the anti-federalists. Th-e-y're back.

That's the name given those leaders of the American Revolution who fought for independence, but then were unwilling to establish a new government strong enough to protect it.

And so, year by year, the infant republic under the old, impotent Articles of Confederation grew weaker and weaker.

The center wasn't holding, and for good reason: There was no real central government capable of forceful action -- just an agglomeration of states that had begun to drift apart. The American experiment was ending before it had really begun. Historians would call these years of drift The Critical Period, and it was.

Then a few veterans of the Revolution gathered to address the crisis: Washington, Hamilton, Madison, John Jay . . . they would become the leaders of the federalist movement. They met, they planned and they enlisted others in their cause, which was to reinvigorate the American union and so save it. They set out not so much to reform the old, impotent Articles of Confederation but to replace them -- with a new, federal government able to provide liberty and order. They understood that one without the other was meaningless.

Theirs was one of the most daring and in the end successful cabals in American history. These founders weren't out to restore the kind of monarchy that Americans had just overthrown, though they were accused of trying to do just that by their critics, but to reinvigorate the authority and power of a free government. (Today they might be called neo-conservatives.)

Perhaps the gravest defect of the Articles of Confederation was the lack of an executive power strong enough to keep the country secure -- one of many weaknesses addressed by the historic Constitutional Convention of 1787.

When it came time to sell that new constitution to their fellow Americans through a series of newspaper articles, Alexander Hamilton would remind his countrymen, in Federalist Paper No. 70: "Energy in the Executive is a leading character in the definition of good government. It is essential to the protection of the community against foreign attacks."

The anti-federalists -- among them distinguished patriots like Patrick Henry, George Mason and Richard Henry Lee -- couldn't go along with this new constitution and the powerful new chief executive envisioned in Article II, Section 1: "The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America." Simple but sweeping words.

Taken together with the provision making the president commander in chief of the armed forces, the power of the chief executive to defend this country against foreign threats ought to be beyond question by now.