All Politics is Local: Family, Friends, and Provincial Interests in the Creation of the Constitution (review)

Christopher Collier has written a short, swiftly moving account of the role of Connecticut in shaping and ratifying the United States Constitution. He reminds us of two points that common sense suggests, but frequently the obvious is overlooked. First, the Constitution could not have been adopted if it had not been shaped to appeal to the local needs of the people of the several states. Connecticuters wanted three things from the Constitution: equal trading rights so as not to be taxed to death by New York, preservation of the land claims of the Susquehannah Company in northern Pennsylvania and the Western Reserve now in Ohio, and considerable state autonomy. Thanks to the state's delegate, Roger Sherman, and to the famous Connecticut Compromise, which ensured a Senate with equal state representation would balance a House based on population, Connecticut got two out of three. On state autonomy, the nationalizing Federalists sold both Sherman and his Connecticut constituents a Brooklyn Bridge: only international affairs and matters concerning more than one state (a nebulous concept) would compromise what were otherwise sovereign states. As elsewhere, a handful of nationalists (Oliver Wolcott and William Samuel Johnson, Connecticut's two other delegates, fit this bill) catered their arguments to obtain ratification with the hopes that once established, the national government would become far more powerful than their rhetoric indicated.

Second, Collier shows that Connecticut delegates to the ratifying convention were not divided along class, regional, or other lines. Much like Forrest McDonald in We the People: The Economic Origins of the Constitution (1958), he insists that Federalists and anti-Federalists were pretty much the same sort of people. Personal and town rivalries differentiated the two sides, and the debates themselves mattered a lot: some of the leading anti-Federalists ultimately voted for the (pre-Bill of Rights) Constitution.

And yet, looking at the map on page 96, with the exception of suburban New Haven, the whole state is Federalist except for the most remote, rural counties. Connecticut farming and fishing was largely commercial along the coast and rivers; hence, one could use Collier's map to argue that he doesn't see the forest for the trees. All in all, commercial, cosmopolitan Connecticut supported the Constitution, as did other parts of the state; but nearly all the opposition came from rural localities. These "Steady Habits" persisted, as Joanna Cowden has shown: in the 1860 Presidential election, southerner John Breckinridge came in second to Lincoln in the state, his support coming from the rural north. (See "The Politics of Dissent: Civil War Democrats in Connecticut," New England Quarterly, 56 [1983], 538-54.) It was his states rights philosophy, not slavery, that appealed to these folk, who were still suspicious of larger spheres of authority.

Collier has presented his evidence fairly—so fairly that it can even be used to contradict his thesis. But I would argue he restores to scholarly attention the facts that the nationalists' dream Constitution had to accommodate all sort of local interests, and that no one theory can account for who voted for or against the document without considerable simplification.