The Anti-Federalist Writings of the Melancton Smith Circle - Paperback

Book Synopsis

The Anti-Federalist Writings of the Melancton Smith Circle makes available for the first time a one-volume collection of Anti-Federalist writings that are commensurate in scope, significance, political brilliance, and depth with The Federalist. Included in this volume as an appendix is a computational and contextual analysis that addresses the question of the authorship of two of the most well-known pseudonymous Anti-Federalist writings, namely, Essays of a Federal Farmer and Essays of Brutus. Also included are the records of Smith's important speeches at the New York Ratifying Convention, some shorter writings of Smith's from the ratification debate, and a set of private letters Smith wrote on constitutional subjects at the time of the ratification struggle.

Michael Zuckert is Nancy Reeves Dreux Professor and Chair of the Department of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame.

Derek A. Webb is a Fellow at Stanford Law School's Center for Constitutional Law.

Review Quotes

Zuckert and Webb have produced a volume that deserves a wide and thankful readership . . . . Zuckert and Webb help students and scholars of American politics rediscover that the framers do not pronounce their wisdom in one coherent and seamless voice. The founding of the United States took the unique form of a political debate, and arguments on multiple sides of that debate are responsible for the nation that grew out of it. As this volume so clearly demonstrates, the most eloquent arguments for the Bill of Rights, and the clearest recognitions of American political institutions' dependency on a vibrant and robust civic culture, were often advanced by the same framers who harbored the most serious misgivings about the Constitution.

Jonathan L. Silver, Georgetown University
Publius: The Journal of Federalism
October 2010