10/1/16
History 1300
Grey
Federalist vs antifederalist:
The rise of the first political parties began when the constitution was struggling to be ratified; there was an obvious difference between those who were for and against the constitution. After the Constitutional Convention, there were many more Congressional holdings to reform the Constitution so that it may be effective and distribute power equally among the different parts of the government. Federalist could be better referred to as “nationalist” because they believed that the majority of the power should lay within the national government. The anti-federalist believed that the national government should not receive the majority of the power because it would be at the expense of states and the people. The federalist party …show more content…
They opposed the ratification of the U.S. Constitution and claimed that the state government needed more power than it had been given under the Articles of Confederation, but the Constitution had gone too far in giving the majority of the rights to the Federal government. They believed that this concentration of power in the national government would lead to tyranny within the United States. Thomas Jefferson and James Madison founded the Federalist or “Democratic-Republican” party in 1792 to overcome the Federalist Party and the policies of Alexander Hamilton. Patrick Henry suggested the need for a Bill of Rights, he stated “instead of securing your rights, you may lose them forever…I beg gentlemen to consider that a wrong step made now will plunge us into misery, and our republic will be lost, and tyranny must and will arise….”. Henry was attempting to convince the people of the United States that the government was “for the people” and that the concentration of power in the national government may cause citizens to lose their individual rights