COMMENTARIES, 18 OCTOBER 1787

Brutus I
New York Journal, 18 October 17871
Sixteen essays signed "Brutus" were published (in eighteen installments) in
the New York Journal between 18 October 1787 and 10 April 1788. They were
not reprinted in New York, but were reprinted in the newspapers of just six
towns in four states (N.H., Mass., R.I., and Pa.). Responses to "Brutus" also
appeared in towns where the essays were not reprinted. They were circulated
and were read in a number of other towns. (For the circulation of "Brutus"
outside New York, see CC:178, p. 411, and RCS:Mass. 172-73.)
The authorship of the "Brutus" essays is uncertain. Contemporaries of
"Brutus" and scholars since then have suggested different authors. Hugh
Hughes, an active New York Antifederalist polemicist, believed that Abraham
Yates, Jr., wrote the essays (to Charles Tillinghast, 28 November, below). Wil-
liam Shippen, Jr., a Philadelphia Antifederalist, heard that "Brutus" was either
Richard Henry Lee, a Virginia delegate to Congress, or John Jay (to Thomas
Lee Shippen, 22 November, RCS:Pa., 288). An anonymous writer in the Mas-
sachusetts Gazette, 4 January 1788, declared that "Brutus" was "the anti-federal
G-r of a sister state" (i.e., George Clinton) (RCS:Mass., 615).
Late in the nineteenth century, editor-bibliographer Paul Leicester Ford first
concluded that Thomas Tredwell of Suffolk County, N.Y, was "Brutus" because
Tredwell was known to have used that pseudonym in 1789. Ford, however, later
changed his mind in favor of Robert Yates, although he offered no proof
(Pamphlets, 117, 424). In 1981 Herbert J. Storing, in a comprehensive compi-
lation of Antifederalist writings, declared that the considerable legal knowledge
displayed in the "Brutus" essays "argues rather in favor of Yates' authorship"
since he was a lawyer and a judge (The Complete Anti-Federalist, II, 363n). Most
scholars have accepted Robert Yates as the author.
Morton Borden, however, has argued that Robert Yates was not "Brutus,"
but he has not named another author (The Antifederalist Papers [n.p., 1965],
42). William Jeffrey, Jr., published the sixteen "Brutus" essays and suggested
that the author was possibly Melancton Smith, a merchant. Jeffrey recognized
similarities between the "Brutus" essays and a pamphlet signed "A Plebeian"
(17 April 1788, III below, and CC:689), which he believed to have been written
by Smith and was published shortly after the last "Brutus" essay appeared.
(See "The Letters of 'Brutus'-a Neglected Element in the Ratification Cam-
paign of 1787-88," University of Cincinnati Law Review, XL [1971], 644-46.)
A letter that Smith wrote to Abraham Yates, Jr., on 23 January 1788, lends
credence to the belief that Smith was "Brutus." In this letter, Smith requested
that both Yates and Samuel Jones, another Antifederalist leader, provide him
with their "observations" on the Constitution, "especially on the Judicial pow-
ers of it." Smith believed that the judicial powers "clinch" all the other powers
of the Constitution (below. Yates had been chairman of the committee that
drafted the state constitution in 1777; Jones, a lawyer, and Richard Varick were
in the midst of codifying the laws of New York which they published in 1789.).
"Brutus" XI-XV, published between 31 January and 20 March, expressed great
concern about the creation of an uncontrollable federal judiciary.

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