Federalists and Stability

I've suggested that the post-war period in the American Revolution was a time of chaos and change, intellectually as well as in any number of other ways. It would seem likely that forces standing for stability, tradition, and conservative values should gain strength in proportion to disorder. Most historians put Federalists in this role, in a way that makes their thought synonymous with such values. Other strands of politics and thought in the 1780s therefore take the role of revolutionary, radical, progressive, and so on. This dualism has distorted their view of both Federalists and their future opponents.

In fact the most visible alternative to the Federalist persuasion was itself conservative in a far deeper sense: this was the agrarian republican tradition. Inspired by ancient Rome and certain English writers from the century before, this position was essentially based on a property model of citizenship. Land ownership was the sine qua non of civic involvement; each citizen, lord of his (and I do mean only his) personal manor, should be as free as possible from any outside influence; his duty in return was to defend the property rights of his fellow citizens from upheaval and war. Small, local, government; a citizen militia; agricultural autarky; these were the ideals of agrarian republicans.

Because this is a 'utopian' vision, and not a reflection of the status quo, we can call this view radical. But whereas Federalists had in mind a world that was constantly changing and becoming more complex, agrarian republicans desired a world that would change only by the clearance of new land for future generations of land-holding citizens. If Federalist political thought was mainly concerned with processes and mechanisms that could be applied to an uncertain future; agrarian republicans had an ideal world in mind. They had no programme to implement it, but meant only to defend the aspects of it that they felt already existed. It was this attitude, far more than any more radical tendency, that animated opposition to the Federalists and the Constitution.