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The Federalist And Anti Federalist

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The Anti-Federalist put up a long and hard fight, however, they were not as organized as the Federalists. While the Anti- Federalist had great concerns about the Constitution and National government, the Federalist had good responses to combat these concerns. The Federalist were and for the Constitution and feel the Article of Confederation were not worth ratifying, these should be scrapped altogether. They felt that the Articles limited the power of congress, because congress had to request cooperation from the states. Unlike the Anti-Federalist, the Federalist organized quickly, had ratifying conventions, and wrote the Federalist papers to rebut the Anti- Federalist arguments.
An example of this is the Anti- Federalist concerns about a republican government not working on a scale this large or diverse. Like the Roman empire, whose government was based on the idea on classical republicanism, they believed it would fall and turn into a monarchy in order to control its people. The Federalist needed a theory to combat this argument so James Madison complied wrote in Federalist 10 that factions were the great enemy of society. Madison defines a faction as “a number of citizens,... who united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.” Factions are dangerous because there will be a majority faction and then a risk of tyranny will arise, because the

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