Debating About the CONSTITUTION—Federalists vs. Anti-Federalists [AP Government Review]

hello and welcome back - hi my sister US government edition in the last video we talked about the central philosophies guiding the founders as they wrote the Constitution and although there was a broad agreement about these philosophies among the delegates when they came to actually writing the Constitution that enshrined these philosophies there was a lot of division and the main contenders in this debate were the Federalists and the anti-federalists I'm gonna tell you who they were and what they were fighting about so let's get to it okay so the Federalists and the anti-federalists who were they and what did they stand for the Federalists in general supported a more vigorous and powerful central government at the expense of the state governments on the Federalists roster were guys like Alexander Hamilton James Madison George Washington and John Adams anti-federalists on the other hand supported stronger state governments at the expense of the national government on the anti-federalists roster where guys like Patrick Henry and George Mason and so with both sides lined up they basically found about five categories of ideas and we'll go through each in turn the first point is debate among these groups was majority rule versus minority rights and when I say minority I don't mean like an ethnic minority I just mean that if they're like a hundred people in a room and 60 move off to this side and 40 move off to this side and the 60 of the majority and the 40 of the minority so a central problem that these folks thought about was how to protect minority rights in a system with a majority ruled for example in those days the economic majority were the poor and middle class farmers and landowners well the economic minority were those who had great wealth and if those with low incomes found themselves in power then wouldn't it be tempting for them to impose onerous taxes upon the wealthy minority or take another example how could the agricultural majority be restrained from enacting retributive tariffs on the manufacturing minority and this was the problem as James Madison wrote in Federalist number 10 of factions in Madison's terms a faction was a group of people motivated to secure their own interests at the expense of the common good and he warned that if a faction was able to gain power than it could impose the same kind of tyranny over the American people that they had just fought to throw off and he further argued that the majority could be dangerous as a faction and the minority could be dangerous as a faction if the majority faction had power then it would always silence the voice of the minority faction and if the minority had too much power than they could wield tyranny in the form of veto power like they did in the Articles of Confederation and Madison's solution to this was the separation of powers in the new government not only would power be separated nationally in the three branches of government but power would be further divided between national and state governments and by setting the power of factions against one another in this way the new constitution would ensure that no faction could tyrannize the others and believe it or not this solution actually pleased both the anti-federalists and the Federalists okay the second issue that these groups fought about was representation in the new government and this was basically a fight between large states and small states you see when the Articles of Confederation ruled the land every state had one vote and that didn't feel very fair especially to the larger states and so the Federalists and the anti-federalists came up with their own respective plans for how representation would work in the new government they were called the Virginia Plan and the New Jersey Plan the Virginia plan proposed that Congress should assign representation in proportion to a state's population and in that way big states like Virginia would have a disproportionate voice in the making of laws the New Jersey plan on the other hand proposed that each state should have equal representation and in that way small states like Rhode Island would have a disproportionately large voice in the making of laws and as you can imagine both sides dug in their heels and it looked like this might break the whole process it was that important of a problem to solve and when all seemed lost in this respect it was the delegates from Connecticut who came up with what was called the great compromise what they proposed was that the new Congress would be split into two houses the Senate and the House of Representatives in the Senate every state would get two senators therefore upholding the desires of the small states and in the House representation will be determined by the population of each state therefore upholding the desires of the larger states the third argument at the convention was over legislative power versus executive power which is to say how much power would the president have versus how much power would Congress have you should know that many of the delegates rejected the idea of a single person acting as president because to them that smelled too much like monarchy in fact one of the delegates Edmund Randolph proposed a three-person executive because in his words a single president would be the quote fetus of monarchy even so the delegates eventually agreed to give the power to one person in the executive office because they argued that Congress is by nature a large body and therefore also by nature very slow moving and so especially in times of crisis they realized that we needed a nimbler decision-making process and that could only be achieved by a single executive so they invested the president with power but at the same time they restrained presidential power of the most significant power they gave to the president was the power of veto by which the president can reject any law passed by Congress on the other hand that power was restrained by giving Congress the power to override the President's veto by a two-thirds vote but there was another sub debate over the president and that was how would the president be elected we came pretty close to having a system just like Britain's in which the Prime Minister is elected by Parliament the delegates fear that that arrangement would tie the executive and the legislative branches together too tightly so they propose that the executive will be elected by something called the Electoral College and the basic version of the Electoral College is this that every time a presidential election came up every four years that each state would choose a number of electors that was equal to the number of their representatives and their senators and how were these electors to be chosen well they left that decision up to the individual states now the system of the Electoral College has come under fire in the last few decades but I'm not going to take that argument up here we'll save that for another time all we need to say at this time is that during the convention the Electoral College proposal pleased most of the delegates and therefore calm to the argument the fourth argument at the convention was over state power versus national power now I've already mentioned the solution to this conundrum earlier but I didn't name it then the solution for who got the power in the new government was called federalism and federalism just means that the power to govern was divided between the national government and the state government and I got a hold of the set of videos on federalism I'll link them below if you want to know more but all you need to know now is that the power given to state governments is protected by the Tenth Amendment which says the following the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution nor prohibited by it to the states are reserved to the States respectively or to the people now this is what we call reserved powers which is to say that if the Constitution doesn't explicitly give a certain power to the national government that power then belongs to the state and then that way the Tenth Amendment provide limits for national power but it wasn't only the states power that was protected by the Constitution the national governments power was protected as well we find this in what's called the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution and article six and it says that any law passed by the federal government is the supreme law of the land and therefore Trump's any state law that contradicts it and the fifth major debate at the Constitutional Convention was between slave states and non slave states and as you can imagine this was a nearly insurmountable issue of the southern slave states refused to agree to any measure that would limit slavery and the northern non slave states didn't like that insistence on slavery but they also didn't want to lose everything they had worked for in the Constitutional Convention by offending unnecessarily all the southerners maybe the most contentious argument between these two entities was how the slave population will work into representation in the new Congress southern states of course wanted all the slaves to be counted in terms of population because that meant more seats in the House of Representatives the northerners of course objected and said no the slaves should not be counted as population because you southerners don't count them as people in any other area of life so why should they give you more seats in the House of Representatives they ended up coming up with a compromise which became known as the three-fifths compromise basically what that meant is they would count up all the slaves in the southern population and take three-fifths of that number for purposes of representation now that arrangement didn't make either side completely happy but it was an arrangement that the southerners could live with in exchange for ratifying the Constitution okay so those are the major arguments and the major compromises that occurred during the Constitutional Convention and once they had it all hammered out and they actually wrote the Constitution it was up to the thirteen states to ratify it now out of thirteen states only nine needed to give it the thumbs up in order for it to be our new governing document but there were problems already brewing Rhode Island for example sent no delegates to the Constitutional Convention and refused to appoint a ratifying committee state of New York seemed entirely against ratification from the outset and other states were pretty well split right down the middle so it's going to be a difficult road to ratification let's see what happened when it came to ratification the anti-federalists were worried about the federal government becoming too tyrannical they were being asked to give up some of their state-level governmental power to the national government and that made some of them a little twitchy but the main reservation of the anti-federalists was the constitutional lack of any protections for civil liberty they argued that a bill of rights should be included in the Constitution to protect things like freedom of the press and freedom of speech but that request was pretty much rejected by the federal it's for several reasons after all they argued the Constitution doesn't give the federal government the right to restrict any of those rights anyway so we don't need to spell them out plus if you start writing down all the rights that are going to be protected you're sure to leave some of them out so let's just not write them down and the Federalists had good reason for arguing this way because state constitutions already protected freedom of speech and freedom of press and the rest even so the anti-federalists dug in their heels and said they would not ratify without a bill of rights but the Federalists had the advantage in nearly every way I mean first of all it was the Federalists who wrote the Constitution and they were really the only ones who were offering a solution to all the problems that were occurring on to the Articles of Confederation additionally the Federalists had the expansive minds and furious pens of Alexander Hamilton James Madison and John J and it was those three men who wrote a series of essays later known as the Federalist Papers in which they explained the details of the new constitution point by point and showing how the Constitution solved all the really big problems facing the nation now these essays were aimed at a New York audience but they were published widely and convinced many reluctant souls around the nation and in addition the Federalists did indeed agree to add a bill of rights which ended up being the first ten amendments to the Constitution and this called anti-federalists fears that the new federal government would overstep its bounds and as it turns out the Federalists won that debate and not without much struggle the Constitution was ratified in June of 1788 and baby who we got ourselves a new constitution my the only one who wants to high-five a bald eagle right now all right thanks for watching now if I got everything I wanted in this world you would subscribe to this channel and like this video and comment below but it could be that I have to compromise in the spirit of the Constitutional Convention so I'll take whatever you give and I leave that decision up to you I will see you in the next video

Channel: Heimler's History

Views: 38,470

Rating: 4.913938 out of 5

Keywords: constitution, federalists, anti-federalists, federalist papers, constitutional convention, constitutional debates, new jersey plan, virginia plan, three fifths compromise, 3/5 compromise, slavery, great compromise, federalist 10, james madison, alexander hamilton, federalist 10 factions, madison factions, congress, senate, house of representatives, tenth amendment, articel vi

Id: i6_fKXU0EcI

Length: 10min 43sec (643 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 15 2019