On the last day of its annual legislative session on September 29, the Pennsylvania Assembly voted for a state ratifying convention to be held in Philadelphia on November 20. Delegates will be chosen by the people in a special election on November 6. In the meantime, pro-Constitution members of the Assembly, soon to be called Federalists, increased their majority in the Assembly in the annual legislative election in early October. With the anti-Constitutionalists, called Anti-federalists, twice defeated, the next opportunity to assess the mood of the people of Pennsylvania will be November 6 when the people will elect delegates to the ratifying convention. Both sides are already waging all-out campaigns to elect delegates sympathetic to their cause.
Antifederalists charge Federalists with trying to ram the Constitution through the ratification process before the people have the opportunity to fully consider and debate its provisions. Clearly, the sentiment in and near Philadelphia is pro-Constitution. The Constitutional Convention itself, although operating under the cloak of confidentiality, had received a great deal of attention and been a constant topic of conversation for months. Opposition is strongest in the western part of the State, which Anti-federalists claim supports their assertion that the people of the west suffer from lack of information and debate.
Within days of the Constitution’s publication, Federalists began circulating petitions in support of ratification, hoping to prove widespread support. Reacting to the submission of four thousand pro-Constitution signatures, Anti-federalists immediately challenged their validity, claiming signers included “minors, foreigners and old women.” When Philadelphia’s Freedom Journal printed a letter from a western Pennsylvanian asking why copies of the Constitution ordered to be printed and distributed to the people had not arrived in his part of the State, Anti-federalists were quick to accuse Federalists of suppressing information.
By mid-October, nearly seventy newspapers throughout the States had published the Constitution. Most expressed their support for ratification and offered an array of arguments designed to blunt criticism. On the other hand, Anti-federalists had their own advocates in the press, including Philadelphia’s Freeman’s Journal. The first to publish criticism of the Constitution, it was met with vehement response in some quarters, initiating a debate in print whose authors frequently use pseudonyms such as Cato, Centinel, and Caesar. However, at about the same time, a publisher in Massachusetts announced he would not print criticisms of the Constitution unless their authors provided their names. Of course, the Anti-federalists complained, claiming this will discourage critics from coming forth. Frankly, they are probably right.
Meanwhile, as the battle of the newspapers accelerated, James Wilson addressed “a very great concourse of people” outdoors in the courtyard of the Pennsylvania Statehouse on October 6. Other than Gouverneur Morris, no delegate to the Constitutional Convention had spoken more often than Wilson. After immigrating to Philadelphia from Scotland in 1765, he began teaching at the College of Philadelphia (later the University of Pennsylvania) and studied law under John Dickinson, a fellow delegate from Delaware. Another Convention colleague, William Pierce, commented that “Mr. Wilson ranks among the foremost in legal and political knowledge…all the political institutions of the World he knows in detail, and can trace the causes and effects of every revolution from the earliest stages of the Grecian [sic] commonwealth down to the present time.”
During the Convention, Wilson had been instrumental in designing the executive branch, arguing successfully for an independent, energetic President who would reflect the civic virtue of the people. As a member of the Committee of Detail and indefatigable defender of “the people,” he argued for popular election of both the President and the Senate but was unsuccessful. However, his studied advocacy of separation of powers, an independent and powerful judiciary, a bicameral legislature, and federalism based on the concept of dual sovereignty, was persuasive and carried the day. An inveterate optimist about the United States’ future and potential, he was dubbed by Dr. Benjamin Rush as “one blaze of light.”
Wilson’s “speech in the statehouse yard” on October 6 was the first public defense of the Constitution by a member of the Convention and set the terms of the ratification debate that was to follow, not only in Pennsylvania, but throughout the States. One local newspaper described the speech as “long and eloquent” while another noted it was punctuated with “loud and unanimous testimonies of approbation” and much applause at its conclusion.
During the speech, Wilson addressed many questions about the Constitution, including jury trials in civil cases, a standing army, taxing power of the national government, the role of the Senate, and the importance of a popularly elected national government. He reserved much of his time, however, to explaining why the Constitution does not contain a bill of rights and why such a bill could actually be harmful. “State constitutions,” he noted, have been given by their people “every right and authority which they did not in explicit terms reserve.” The new federal Constitution, on the other hand, is clearly limited to carefully defined powers. Under the State constitutions, “everything which is not reserved is given,” but under the federal Constitution “everything which is not given is reserved.” Why would one suggest that Congress cannot do something that the Constitution gives it no power to do?
Adding a bill of rights, he continued, “could be construed to imply that some degree of power was given, since we undertook to define its extent.” This could actually be dangerous; rights could actually be threatened. Although brilliantly laid out, argued with the skill of one of nation’s most respected lawyers, and distributed by Federalists everywhere, Wilson’s speech also provoked criticism and refutations by his opponents. Nevertheless, it became second only in clarity, depth and influence to The Federalist Papers, whose publication in New York began on October 27.