I found an interesting article in my RSS feed this morning. Excerpt follows.
I believe it should be mandatory reading for all who wish to “restore the constitution”.
The ratification of the Constitution was a messy business precisely because the opposition understood what the Constitution could and would ultimately do to liberty and good government in the United States. Violence, intimidation, and the suppression of a free press in many States followed. That is the untold story. In Pennsylvania, opponents of the document were forcibly dragged to their seats by a mob in order to secure a quorum to call for a ratifying convention and then once the document was ratified, mobs whipped up on their opponents in drunken jubilation, literally at times. At the same time, the press virtually ignored the opposition and often printed only the speeches and pamphlets written in support of the document.
The situation was worse in Connecticut. There the opposition – labeled as the “Wrongheads” – was blacklisted from the press, and the only surviving speeches from the January ratifying convention come from the proponents, not by accident. Connecticutter Hugh Ledlie, a veteran of the French and Indian War and the American War for Independence and a member of the Sons of Liberty, wrote shortly after the document was ratified in his State that the Constitution would “in the end…work the ruin of the freedom and liberty of these thirteen dis-united states…” and he called the Constitution “a gilded pill.”
Most Americans also probably don’t know that Hamilton was taken to task in the New York Ratifying Convention and, in essence, exposed as a liar. After one of his speeches in support of the document, John Lansing produced his notes of the Philadelphia Convention which showed that Hamilton wanted and favored a Constitution unlike the one he supposedly supported. Lansing said Hamilton could not be trusted. New York ratified the document anyway by two votes. As in Pennsylvania, violence then gripped the State as proponents took to the streets in New York City. It was hazardous to your health to be a so-called “Anti-Federalist” in 1788. Of course the famous essays of “Brutus” and “An Old Whig” along with the speeches of Patrick Henry of Virginia (every American should read them) and the close votes in New York, Virginia, and Massachusetts clearly show that the Constitution was not the glorious culmination of wisdom that modern Americans view it to be.
Full Article at the Tenth Amendment Center
Then order and read the following:
