The "antislavery debate", as embodied in Thomas Bender's volume of that name, is similar to the debate over the US constitution from the early and mid-twentieth century. Here I'm going to discuss these debates a little bit in order to suggest a way they might supply a helpful way of thinking about early Federalists.
Both debates revolve around the question, what is the role of capitalism? But actually framing the question in that way seems to have damaged and distracted historians' arguments. In the antislavery debate it's particularly pronounced, because the central problem can be rendered (as Bender renders it): "is there anything to be made of the near simulateity of the rise of capitalism and the emergence of organized antislavery?" This for me is not an inherently interesting question. What is interesting is, rather, what caused the emergence of antislavery, and (a different question) what was the nature of capitalism and its rise?
The question "what is the role of capitalism" combines those in a somewhat awkward way, which in an important sense creates the argument around which the volume pivots. Thomas Haskell writes, "What, then, did capitalism contribute to the freeing of the slaves? Only a precondition..." So, although his argument is relevant to the specific question he asks, it is not very illuminating at all about the two questions I find interesting: what is (and why) antislavery, what is (and why) capitalism?
The reason the debate can move in this direction in the first place is that it begins from the work of David Brion Davis, who does find a strong link between the two (not "only a precondition"). For Davis, "free" but disciplined wage labour is essential to capitalism, and slavery is antithetical; antislave and humanitarian movements thus had an important role in creating the conditions necessary for capitalism to flourish. They represent the expansion of capitalist moral economy, from cores in e.g. the Quaker religion/network, towards (by the nineteenth-century) total ideological hegemony.
I find Davis' model highly plausible; Haskell does not. He is concerned with the moral qualities of antislavery and capitalism, and therefore with the problem of causation. Did capitalism cause antislavery? Were antislavery activists motivated by capitalism? Haskell thinks that the answer to both questions is no; but he imputes to Davis the position that the answer is yes, but unconsciously, through self-deception (i.e. activists really cared about capitalism, not slavery, but they deceived themselves into thinking otherwise). This is the model of "class interest" that Haskell constructs. It is in my view a straw man.
John Ashworth points towards (without elaborating on) a more robust conception, when he writes that "one can say a person is moved by certain ideals that have grown out of class interest... the individual may or may not be aware of the relationship between ideals and self-interest." Haskell rightly identifies the rhetorical slipperiness of the metaphor "grown out of," but I think Ashworth's point is still useful. Class interests privilege certain values and ideas, certain cultural structures, within which people then act, from their own limited knowledge and perspective.
It's not that values like "promise-keeping" (which Haskell himself emphasises), or to use Federalist parlance, "justice", are not good values. You don't have to be a hypocrite to privilege them. But prioritising certain values - say, "justice" over "equality" - does obviously serve class interests. People don't choose what values to privilege by consciously consulting their class interests. Or even unconsciously. They don't really "choose" at all: to a great extent, culture chooses for them. To explain how that works, we need to go back to Skinner and discourse theory; but it's easy to see, at least, how discourse limits and directs our choices about values.
The same problems are at play in the debate over the constitution. What we should call the "vulgar Beardian" (i.e. not what Beard actually wrote, but how he was read) approach imputes to the founders the motive of active class interest. This argument is frequently said to have been "demolished", and so it has; it was never Beard's argument to start with. But what Beard did show was that the values the constitution privileges (justice, contract, property, minority rights) are those that favour capitalism.
There is a complication here, over the constitution's defence of slavery - which is a defence of elite interests contrary to capitalism. It is the slavery provisions that display so-called "naked self-interest." But the (capitalist) values encoded in the document itself are the values of a discourse that achieved a certain intellectual, ideological hegemony in post-revolutionary America - in a way that slavery did not. This is, in fact, what necessitated the more "naked" promotion of self-interest (through bargaining at the convention) on the part of the defenders of slavery.
So far I have described capitalism as a system that privileges certain values, and constitutionalism (and antislavery) as movements that are animated by those values. It's important to add, here, that these movements themselves serve to further entrench the values they embody. That is, in part, how discourse is shaped. Activists can trace their belief in "justice" or "humanitarianism" to the founding fathers of constitutionalism or antislavery - rather than to capitalism or class interest.
It is this final point, the question of "elective affinity" (to invoke Weber, as the antislavery debaters do), that may be useful to help understand the early Federalists. Those who affiliated with the Federalist vision or persuasion, and later the Federalist party, did not need to fundamentally share the same class interests, or the same complete sets of values. Rather, they might be Federalists if some of the values that they privilege are also privileged by Federalism.
Antislavery activists like John Jay could also be ardent constitutionalists, in spite of the pro-slavery provisions of the constitution. And proslavery advocates like Charles Pinckney could be constitutionalists too. They were both Federalists. These men hold, and represent, different class interests. Beard was wrong to try to find a core interest - personalty as opposed to realty - that united them; it's that part of his argument that failed. But they do share an elective affinity with certain values that animate the Federalist persuasion.
Federalism should be seen as a movement, not a party in the Marxist sense, where it would represent a single class interest. Its members, or affiliates, might quite often disagree with each other, even in fundamental ways; they share no single causal class interest. But, in the battle over the constitution, they did not need to trace their ideas back to these disagreeing interests. Instead, they worked together to achieve a victory on behalf of the values that they all shared.
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