Who were the anti-fedralist and why did they oppose he Constitution?

Answer 1

The Antifederalists, who were actually the ancestors of today's Democratic Party, were a political party which arose, as the question notes, to oppose the ratification or acceptance of the US Constitution. Many of the members believed that their new nation, the United States of America, required a plan of government that was better organized and promoted greater efficiency than the old Articles of Confederation, which was approved by the Continental Congress during the Revolutionary War. But what they saw in the newly-proposed Constitution, and what they DIDN'T see in it, concerned them. The new national government would be very strong and very efficient, but its strength would weaken the states, and this new Federal government could become as harsh as the British government the states had just fought against and defeated. Although the Federalists pointed out that no rights of the states, or of the people in the states, would be taken away, the Antifederalists were quite unhappy because none of the rights they valued were even mentioned, much less guaranteed, in the Constitution. The Federalists, particularly James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay, (and who would become, respectively, our 4th President, our 1st Secretary of the Treasury, and our 1st Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court), wrote a series of articles known as the Federalists Papers to try to explain the new Constitution to the states in order to win their approval of it. But the papers didn't promise to protect the rights of the states or of the people and the Antifederalists were not satisfied. As a matter of fact, they were so successful in opposing the Constitution that only the quiet promise of the Federalists to add a Bill of Rights to the Constitution (which they did in 1791) made it acceptable to all 13 states. The Antifederalists, who in 1801 brought about the selection of Thomas Jefferson as our 3rd President, would go on to rename themselves first the Republicans, and then the Democratic-Republicans, and finally just the Democrats.