Robert Yates and John Lansing attended the Philadelphia convention as delegates from New York. They left in protest when the delegates voted narrowly to make the Virginia Plan the basis for a new constitutional order. In a letter to the governor of New York, Yates and Lansing explained their reasons: the convention lacked the authority to create the “consolidated” (or powerful national) government implicit in the Virginia Plan, and a centralized system of rule would undermine civil liberties and republican principles of representative government. These Antifederalist arguments failed to prevent ratification of the Constitution, but they remained powerful and were restated by hundreds of American politicians — from the North as well as the South — for the next seventy years.

ROBERT YATES AND JOHN LANSSING

We beg leave, briefly, to state some cogent reasons, which, among others, influenced us to decide against a consolidation of the states. …

Our powers were explicit, and confined to the sole and express purpose of revising the Articles of Confederation. … [We believed] that a system of consolidated government could not, in the remotest degree, have been in contemplation of the legislature of this state; for that so important a trust, as adopting measures which tended to deprive the state government of its most essential rights of sovereignty, could not have been confided by implication. …

Reasoning in this manner, we were of opinion that the leading feature of every amendment ought to be the preservation of the individual states in their uncontrolled constitutional rights, and that, in reserving these, a mode might have been devised of granting to the Confederacy, the moneys arising from a general system of revenue, the power of regulating commerce and enforcing the observance of foreign treaties, and other necessary matters of less moment. …

[We also] entertained an opinion that a general government, however guarded by declarations of rights, or cautionary provisions, must unavoidably, in a short time, be productive of the destruction of the civil liberty of such citizens who could be coerced by it, by reason of the extensive territory of the United States, the dispersed situation of its inhabitants, and the insuperable difficulty of controlling or counteracting the views of a set of men (however unconstitutional and oppressive their acts might be) possessed of all the power of government, and who [were remote] … from their constituents. … [Moreover, we believed] that however wise and energetic the principles of the general government might be, the extremities of the United States could not be kept in due submission and obedience to its laws, at the distance of so many hundred miles from the seat of government;

[And finally we worry] that, if the general legislature was composed of so numerous a body of men as to represent the interests of all the inhabitants of the United States, in the usual and true ideas of representation, the expense of supporting it would become intolerably burdensome; and that, if a few only were vested with a power of legislation, the interests of a great majority of the inhabitants of the United States must necessarily be unknown. … These reasons were, in our opinion, conclusive against any system of consolidated government.

SOURCE : J. Elliot, ed., Debates in the Several State Conventions on the Adoption of the Constitution (New York, 1861), 1: 480–483.