A History of the American People

their children and grandchildren and generations to come. The people ought to participate, as a
nation, in deciding whether to endorse it, and the ratification process itself would encourage
them to look beyond the borders of their own states and consider the national interest as well as
their own. This was a wise decision, again with momentous consequences, because once the
people had thus been invited onto the political stage, and asked their opinion, they could never be
pushed into the wings again.
Ratification by convention also had the effect of inviting a grand public debate on the issue,
and in a way this was the most significant aspect of the whole process. If Jefferson, Madison, and
Adams were right in believing that education, virtue, and good government went together, then
there was a positive merit in getting not just state legislatures but the people themselves to debate
the Constitution. The wider the discussions, the more participants, the better-for public political
debate was a form of education in itself, and a vital one. If, in the 1760s and early 1770s, the
Americans, or their representatives, had been allowed to debate with the British, or their
representatives, on the proper relationship between the two peoples, the Revolution might have
been avoided. Words are an alternative to weapons, and a better one. But a debate was refused,
and the issue was put to the arbitrament of force. The Americans had learned this lesson (as
indeed had the British by now) and were determined to give words their full play. In the next
decade the French were to ignore the lesson, at the cost of countless lives and ideological
bitterness which reverberates to this day.
So that ratification process was a war of words. And what words! It was the grandest public
debate in history up to that point. It took place in the public square, at town meetings, in the
streets of little towns and big cities, in the remote countryside of the Appalachian hills and the
backwoods and backwaters. Above all it took place in print. America got its first daily
newspaper in 1783 with the appearance of the Philadelphia Evening Post, and dailies (often
ephemeral) and weeklies were now proliferating. Printing and paper, being completely untaxed,
were cheap. It cost little to produce a pamphlet and the stages carried packets of it up and down
the coast. Americans were already developing the device (eventually to be called the syndicated
column) of getting articles by able and prominent writers, usually employing pseudonyms like
'Cato ' 'Cicero ' 'Brutus ' Publius 'A Farmer,' A Citizen of New York,' andLandholder,'
circulated to all newspaper editors, to use as they pleased. So literally thousands of printed
comments on the issues were circulated, and read individually or out loud to groups of electors,
and then discussed and replied to. It was the biggest exercise in political education ever
conducted. An important issue was felt to be at stake, which went beyond the bounds of the
Constitution as such. As Hamilton, writing as 'Publius,' put it, the process was to determine
`whether societies of men are really capable or not, of establishing good government by
reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend, for their political
constitutions, on accident and force.’
The federalists were led by Alexander Hamilton, the most active of all, James Madison, who
came second, John Jay, John Marshall, James Wilson, John Dickinson, and Roger Sherman.
They had the initial advantage that George Washington was known to favor ratification, and his
name carried weight everywhere. Franklin was also a declared supporter, and he counted for a lot
in Philadelphia, the biggest city. Hamilton, Madison, and Jay produced jointly the Federalist, a
series of eighty-five newspaper essays, much reproduced and printed in book form in 1788.
Hamilton was the principal author and collectively they represent the first major work of political
theory ever produced in America, discussing with great clarity and force such fundamental
questions of government as the distribution of authority between the center and the periphery,