The Maryland Farmer Anti-Federalist essays were a series of seven pieces published in the Maryland Gazette in February, March, and April of 1788, opposing ratification of the proposed United States Constitution. The author wrote anonymously and is most often identified as John Francis Mercer, a Maryland planter who had walked out of the Constitutional Convention without signing. The essays argued that the Constitution would create a consolidated national government rather than a true federal union, that the absence of a bill of rights was dangerous, and, most radically, that representative government itself tended toward aristocracy.
Who Wrote the Essays
The essays appeared without a byline, which was ordinary practice during the ratification debates. Herbert Storing, who compiled The Complete Anti-Federalist, named John Francis Mercer as the “most likely candidate,” pointing to overlap between the essays’ arguments and positions Mercer took elsewhere, including remarks James Madison recorded at the Constitutional Convention on August 14, 1787. In that session Mercer said all governments tend to form aristocracies and urged a balance among the executive, a council, and the legislature.
The attribution has never been proven. One analysis observed that “the evidence for Mercer’s authorship is pretty thin,” resting on argumentative similarity rather than documentation. No stronger candidate has emerged. Mercer’s circumstances fit: born in Virginia in 1759, he studied law under Thomas Jefferson, served in the Continental Congress, attended the Philadelphia Convention at age twenty-eight, sided with Luther Martin against the direction the Constitution was taking, and left before signing. After marrying Sophia Sprigg in 1785 he moved to Anne Arundel County, placing him inside Maryland politics during the ratification fight. He later served in the U.S. House and as Governor of Maryland from 1801 to 1803.
The Exchange with Aristides
The essays were a direct response to Remarks on the Proposed Plan of a Federal Government, a pamphlet published on January 31, 1788, by Alexander Contee Hanson, a Maryland legislator and judge writing as “Aristides.” Hanson argued that separated powers made abuse nearly impossible, that a bill of rights was unnecessary because the federal government would hold only expressly or necessarily delegated powers, and that states should accept or reject the Constitution whole rather than propose amendments. The Maryland Farmer answered each point, urging delay and warning against “sudden and violent changes.”
The Core Arguments
A National Government, Not a Federal One
The Farmer’s structural objection drew a sharp line between a “national government,” which acts directly on individuals, and a “league or confederacy,” which binds sovereign states. The proposed Constitution, he wrote, created the former while its supporters claimed to be building the latter. The Constitution’s advocates improperly called themselves “federalists” when they were in fact “national men,” while opponents like himself were “federal, in the only true and strict sense of the word.” He described a third group of “old rigid republicans” and “true democrats” who sought “a union of independent states, not a government of individuals.”
Two governments operating on the same person was, he argued, a political impossibility, and he invoked the biblical adage that “no man can serve two masters.” A federal government layered over state governments would inevitably press into areas like direct taxation where it “should scarcely be felt,” and the friction would end in domination rather than compromise.
The Missing Bill of Rights
The absence of a bill of rights was the Farmer’s most urgent concern. He defined one as an “enumeration of those conditions on which the individuals of the empire agreed to confirm the social compact,” reserving natural rights to the people rather than vesting them in government. He rejected the idea that such documents were only royal grants, citing the English precedent of 1688, when Parliament declared rights without a reigning monarch.
His response to the Federalist claim that unenumerated powers were reserved to the people was blunt. That reasoning, he wrote, was “downright political nonsense” and “impossible in practice.” Human foresight could not enumerate every power affirmatively, so a bill of rights had to use “negative” language, explicitly prohibiting the legislature from infringing specific liberties like freedom of the press and freedom of conscience. Without such prohibitions, a citizen in a federal court could not invoke a state bill of rights, because federal courts would be governed only by the Constitution and federal law.
He was especially worried about federal judges acting without a jury, predicting they would favor the “public purse” and fellow officers over individuals. Revenue and customs enforcement, inherently intrusive, would become “intolerable to a free people” without protection against the “insolence of office.” He speculated that the omission from the Constitution was not deliberate but a product of exhaustion at the end of the Convention, when delegates lacked the patience for the “necessary correspondent alterations and additions.”
Representation as Aristocracy
What set the Maryland Farmer apart from most Anti-Federalists was how far his skepticism ran. Writers like Brutus and the Federal Farmer criticized specific features; the Maryland Farmer questioned whether any representative structure could stay free. Representation concentrated power in few hands, and “the facility of corruption is increased in proportion as power tends by representation or delegation, to a concentration in the hands of a few.” The result, he predicted, was an aristocratic system prone to producing a single ruler backed by a standing army.
As an alternative he pointed to the Swiss cantons, specifically the Landsgemeinde assemblies of Uri, Schwyz, and Unterwalden, where citizens governed through direct democracy and every citizen was “a legislator by birth.” He offered the Swiss model not as a curiosity but as a direct counterproposal, arguing that complex representative governments endangered fundamental rights while simpler, localized structures preserved them. Federalists dismissed the cantons as dysfunctional; the Farmer championed their regional constitution and popular participation as proof that liberty could survive without the machinery of representation.
The Problem of Size
A republican government, the Farmer argued, could not function over a vast territory. A national government covering the full extent of the United States would terrify “the minds of individuals into meanness and submission.” He traced the pattern through history: the Roman Republic’s expansion produced despots, while in small independent states citizens could flee oppression and force their governments toward moderation. Under a consolidated national government, escape would be impossible. Centralizing wealth in a national capital would create an “overgrown, luxurious and effeminate capital” that would draw corruption and foreign intrigue; a confederacy, by diffusing wealth and power, would make corruption far harder.
Civil and Religious Liberty
In the seventh and final known essay, published on April 4, 1788, the Farmer argued that civil liberty and religious liberty were “inseparably interwoven.” Religious tyranny and persecution, he contended, arise not from theology but from the corruption of civil government, where those holding concentrated power use religion as “a corrupt instrument of usurpation.” Surveying the Roman Empire, feudal systems, the persecution of Arians, the Borgias, and the religious wars of the Reformation, he concluded that “where civil government is preserved free, there can be no religious tyranny.”
What Happened at Maryland’s Ratifying Convention
Maryland’s convention met from April 21 to April 28, 1788, in the House of Delegates chamber at the Maryland State House in Annapolis, with George Plater presiding. Of seventy-six delegates, only about twelve were Anti-Federalists, and their aim was amendments rather than outright defeat.
Mercer and fellow Anti-Federalist Jeremiah Townley Chase had won election from Anne Arundel County by circulating a handbill that, according to Daniel Carroll’s report to James Madison, “appealed to the emotions of the voters” and caused a “wildness” at the polls among people “frighten’d by what they had just heard.” On April 26, 1788, sixty-three delegates voted to ratify, making Maryland the seventh state to do so.
A committee was formed to consider amendments. William Paca, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, proposed protections that closely tracked the Maryland Farmer’s concerns: freedom of speech, press, and religion; protections against general warrants; the right to a jury trial in criminal cases; restrictions on standing armies in peacetime; limits on direct taxation; and a declaration that Congress could exercise no power except those “expressly delegated.” The Federalist majority adjourned on April 28 without hearing the minority report, burying Paca’s proposals.
Place Among the Anti-Federalists
The Maryland Farmer wrote alongside a group of pseudonymous Anti-Federalists working in different states with overlapping arguments. “Brutus,” likely Robert Yates, published sixteen essays in the New York Journal between October 1787 and April 1788, focused on the proposed judiciary and the difficulty of governing a large republic. The “Federal Farmer,” whose identity remains disputed but may have been Elbridge Gerry, published two pamphlets from New York in a moderate tone. “Centinel,” the Pennsylvanian Samuel Bryan, warned of aristocratic consolidation. In Maryland, Luther Martin wrote under his own name, publishing Genuine Information and other attacks on the Constitution’s departure from the Articles of Confederation.
The Maryland Farmer stood apart in rejecting representative government altogether. Brutus and the Federal Farmer attacked structural flaws; the Maryland Farmer attacked the premise. One scholar called his advocacy of Swiss-style direct democracy a “stark counterpoint to the liberal shift in American founding thought.” Where others sought amendments to make the Constitution safer, he suggested the model itself was wrong.
The Anti-Federalists lost the ratification fight but succeeded in forcing the addition of the Bill of Rights, which James Madison introduced in 1789 and the states ratified in 1791. The first ten amendments addressed much of what the Maryland Farmer had raised: speech, press, and religion; restrictions on warrants and searches; the right to a jury trial; and limits on federal power. The essays themselves, less widely read than Brutus or the Federal Farmer, remain a record of the moment when the structure of the federal system was still genuinely open.