Among the many yellowing paperbacks on my shelves is a copy of The Anti-Federalist Papers and the Constitutional Convention Debates. It's a sort of greatest hits collection of contemporaneous arguments for and against the new U.S. Constitution, all written circa 1787–1788. It includes portions of James Madison's Notes from the Philadelphia Constitutional Convention, selections from various numbers of the Federalist Papers, and excerpts from the writings and speeches of leading anti-federalists, such as Patrick Henry, who denounced the Constitution for cloaking the president with "the powers of a King."
I picked up this trusty old book the other day, as I have been wont to do since I first acquired the already used copy back in college, yet I failed to find the name within its pages that I was looking for. The book's otherwise commendable editor, historian Ralph Ketcham, had failed to include anything written by Mercy Otis Warren (1728–1814), a playwright, poet, pamphleteer, and historian who championed American independence and later opposed the ratification of the Constitution. In the words of scholar Lester Cohen, Warren was "the most formidable female intellectual in eighteenth-century America."
