Abraham Yates's History of the Movement for the United States Constitution

4 A Tleast as far back as 1871, Richard B. Morris has observed, Henry B. Dawson focused attention on the masses in the Revolution and suggested the thesis of counterrevolution and in interpreting the United States Constitution.1 In fact, an unpublished history of the movement for the Constitution made the same charge almost a century earlier. About a year after ratification and i25 years before Charles Beard's An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (New York, 1913), Abraham Yates (0724-96) of New York asserted in his manuscript narrative that the Federalists had turned a Convention into a Conspiracy, and under the Epithet Federal have destroyed the Confederation. The authors of the Federalist conspiracy were, according to Yates, the aristocrats. This was an Antifederalist cliche: three-fourths of the more important Antifederalist tracts portrayed the Constitution as aristocratic.2 Only Yates, however, combined the charge of conspiracy and the charge of aristocracy in the form of history. Every essential step in the movement for the United States Constitution as conceived by Charles Beard and Merrill Jensen will be found, dated and footnoted, in this pamphlet of I789. Important in the historiography of the Constitution, Yates's manuscript

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