Ratification: Social Media

What this episode covers

As momentum builds for ratification, the two biggest States, New York and Virginia are hesitating. New York is seemingly against ratification, but as the pillars of the needed nine States continue to fall, the debate intensifies. With their convention not scheduled to begin for several weeks, the debate moves into the Social Media of the day - the newspapers. First, New York papers take up the Anti-Federalist cause by publishing the DeWitt Letters, the Letters from a Federal Farmer, the Cato, and Brutus letters, but they also begin to pick up a series of equally anonymous letters written specifically to the people of New York and signed simply, Publius. These particular letters will become known as "The Federalist Papers," and they are not - despite common misconception - a "commentary on Federalist Papers Facebook the Constitution." They are in fact, a reasoned and direct defense of the Constitution as written and a statement of what the Federalists believed would be the benefits of ratification of the Constitution. But the really amazing thing to think about when we consider all of these letters is how the people of New York (and the rest of the country) consumed them. It's quite an odd foreshadowing of a more modern phenomenon with which we ourselves are very familiar, #socialmedia...

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