Abstract
From the instant the United States Constitution first reached the public eye, opponents emerged to denounce it. Many of them claimed the same republican principles and virtues that the Constitution had sought to evoke with its ‘senate’ and republican guarantees. Herbert Storing’s comprehensive collection of leading Antifederalist tracts includes a ‘Cato’, a ‘Brutus’, a ‘Federal Republican’, ‘Vox Populi’, ‘Poplicola’, ‘Cato Uticensis’, ‘Republicus’, ‘Cincinnatus’, ‘Sidney’, and many other Roman and republican pseudonyms.4 This raises the question of how (if at all) Antifederalist republicanism differed from the republicanism of the United States Constitution. Were there any points of disagreement?5
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Notes
On the political thought of the Antifederahsts, see Saul A. Cornell, ‘The Political Thought and Culture of the Antifederalists’, (diss. Pennsylvania, 1989); idem, ‘The Changing Fortunes of the Antifederahsts’, Northwestern University Law Review 84 (1989):39–73; Cecilia Kenyon, The Antifederalists (Indianapolis, 1966); Jackson Turner Main, The Antifederalists: Critics of the Constitution, 1781–1788 (Chapel Hill, 1961); Robert Allen Rutland, The Ordeal of the Constitution: The Antifederalists and the Ratification Struggle (Norman, Oklahoma, 1966); Herbert J. Storing, What the Anti-Federalists Were For (Chicago, 1981).
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© 1994 M. N. S. Sellers
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Sellers, M.N.S. (1994). The Antifederalists. In: American Republicanism. Studies in Modern History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-13347-5_25
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-13347-5_25
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