A Shortage of Anti-Federalist Verse

Of all the poems, light verse, and songs I’ve quoted from the debate over a new U.S. Constitution this week, only one has come from Anti-Federalists.

That wasn’t because I lean Federalist. It’s because the corpus leans Federalist.

The University of Wisconsin project documenting the ratification process has a collection of twenty-seven “Poetry and Songs” that mention the debate. So far as I can tell, the song from Carlisle, Pennsylvania, that I quoted yesterday is the only one that’s explicitly Anti-Federalist.

A few of those songs or verses lampoon the whole debate over the proposed new constitution. But most express Federalist positions. Five are even labeled “Federal.” Five originated in Benjamin Russell’s strongly Federalist Massachusetts Centinel. Two are attacks on the Anti-Federalist governor of New York, George Clinton (shown above).

Why does this corpus lean to one side of the political debate? I think there are several overlapping reasons:

• Most newspaper publishers were Federalist.
• The Federalists predominated in the ports and market towns where newspapers were published, thus comprising more of the readers and supporters of those newspapers.
• The wealthy gentlemen more likely to have the time, education, and fervor to write verse were also more likely to support the new Constitution.
• Anti-Federalism wasn’t a united platform with a clear program to rally around. Rather, it was a collection of worries about the new frame of government. Those skeptics didn’t cohere into a party as Federalists had started to do when they advocated for a new constitutional convention.

Within a short time after the new Constitution was in place, and the promised amendments were under way, a network of newspapers opposed to the Washington administration developed. Within a few years they coalesced around Thomas Jefferson and his political allies. After that, the output of political poems and songs probably evened out.