American Experiment by James MacGregor Burns Page B

ignorant, shortsighted, weak-headed, bad-hearted, wicked . It was an age of invective, and few paid particular attention when a Federalist denounced opponents as “blind, positive, conceited sons of bitches” who deserved roasting in hell. When the American Herald broke the press phalanx and attacked the Constitution, Federalist merchants pulled out their advertising and Federalist readers canceled their subscriptions. Why should we finance attacks on our own opinions? one of them asked.
    The opponents of the Constitution in Massachusetts were part of a nationwide network, though far less extensive than the Federalists’. As if he needed any coaching, Samuel Adams received letters from Richard Henry Lee urging that the new Constitution “be bottomed upon a Declaration or bill of Rights.” Lee felt free to press his views on Adams because he had “long toiled with you my dear friend in the Vineyard of liberty…” Like the Federalists, critics of the Constitution had their own pulpits—the town meetings that would elect convention delegates from the country areas of Massachusetts, often with instructions on how to vote. Anti-Federalist feeling ran strong in scores of towns in western and central Massachusetts, where the grievances that erupted in Shays’s Rebellion (as it had come to be called)—and the memories of its suppression—still rankled. Sometimes the Federalists prevailed in the hinterland only to be accused of ramming the Constitution down the “throats of others” in the spirit of Pennsylvania. In Sheffield the leading Federalist was accused of a hat trick: “Instead of seting it”—the hat for collecting ballots—“fair & open on the Table as usual,” he “held it in his Left hand Pressed Closeto his breast…” The pattern of seacoast Federalism and inland opposition also appeared in Maine, then part of Massachusetts. The election of convention delegates reflected this split. Federalists scored so heavily in eastern towns that Gerry himself was beaten in Cambridge, and James Warren in Milton, but a “cloud” of anti-Federalists were elected inland, and Adams and Hancock won in Boston.
    In mid-January—just a year after troops had moved west to subdue Shays and his men—350 delegates were arriving in Boston by carriage and sleigh. The meeting house on Milk Street had been enlarged to seat several hundred spectators, with a special gallery for newspaper reporters. The audience watched a Federalist minority led by skillful publicists and parliamentarians outmaneuver an apparent anti-Constitution majority. Evidently considering Gerry safer within the convention hall than outside, the friends of the Constitution acquiesced in a motion by Samuel Adams that Gerry be permitted a seat on the floor to supply information “that possibly had Escaped the memory of the other Gentlemen of the general Convention.” The Federalists treated Gerry so rudely, however, that he quit the floor in a huff. Without him the anti-Federalist leadership seemed to falter, though some of the country delegates performed brilliantly.
    Samuel Nasson, a Maine saddler and storekeeper, rose to “beg the indulgence” of the convention while he made “a short apostrophe to liberty. O, liberty! thou greatest good! thou fairest property! With thee I wish to live, with thee I wish to die!” He shed a rhetorical tear over the perils to which liberty was exposed, first at the hands of British tyranny and now before the power of Congress. Nasson and his colleague John Taylor peppered the Federalists with more prosaic objections too: questions about the Constitution’s mechanics, attacks on its concessions to slavery, and arguments in favor of the annual election of legislators.
    Still facing the possibility of defeat, the friends of the Constitution adopted the stratagem of accepting their opponents’ most convincing amendments—especially those relating to the absence of a bill of rights—and of urging that they be proposed