Before exploring whether the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists can be labelled as either liberal or republican, it must be noted that both sides often employed the rhetorique of the other as a way to strengthen their arguments. This also helped both sides win support for their arguments from their opposition. I posit that the Federalists were more republican in their beliefs while the Anti-Federalists were more liberal based on a closer exploration of the creation of a federated state, in which the main tenets of republicanism and liberalism were defended by the respective factions.
An argument that encapsulates the idea of the Federalists having strong republican leanings would be their focus on collective rights over individual ones in the creation of a republic. While the Anti-Federalists drew
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This is due to the inalienable nature of rights that Americans believed they were born with, such as the right to property. Due to this, the Federalist movement could not be argued to pursue a liberal agenda as their aim was to remove the dominance of state sovereignty and instead, install an elected national government. I would argue that it is a stretch to suggest that the Federalists feared the power of the state legislators, but rather they chose to not underestimate its role. The creation of political conventions where the common man voted, sought to sidestep any potential resistance that the states could have applied. By choosing to create an entirely new political structure in the form of the national conventions, the Republicans were being proactive in their strategy of eliminating the opposition, rather than reacting to their fear of the state legislators. It is possible that there may have been an undercurrent of fear that influenced their decisions, but such an argument would be hard to