The Federal Farmer Wanted a Bill of Rights and a Bigger House

Start with a bit of arithmetic the Constitution invites. Article I says the number of representatives "shall not exceed one for every thirty Thousand." Apply that ceiling to the 2020 census and you get a House that could legally hold more than eleven thousand members. The Capitol cafeteria would need its own zip code, and every roll call would take a week and a half. Nobody wants that, and the Federal Farmer did not either.

But he did want something that sounds radical to modern ears: a House big enough that its members actually resembled the people who sent them. He wanted a written list of rights. He wanted juries in civil cases and trials close to home. And he wanted all of this while supporting a stronger union, which makes him the most interesting Anti-Federalist of all. He was not a no. He was a "yes, if." Some of his ifs became the Bill of Rights. One of them, the one about the size of Congress, is still waiting.

The most reasonable man in the room

The ratification debate of 1787 and 1788 produced a great deal of heat. Some Anti-Federalist writers saw conspiracies under every clause. The Federal Farmer was different. His letters, addressed to an unnamed "Republican," concede at the outset that the Articles of Confederation were defective, that Congress needed more power, and that the country needed a firmer union. What he objected to was the particular plan, and the speed with which its supporters wanted it adopted without amendment.

The letters came in two installments. The first five, dated in October 1787, were printed in New York as a pamphlet late that year. A longer set, the Additional Number of Letters, followed in 1788. Together they make a book-length critique, and they were widely read.

Who wrote them, and why we are not sure

For a long time the letters were credited to Richard Henry Lee of Virginia, the man who moved the resolution for independence in the Continental Congress in June 1776. The attribution rested largely on tradition and on the similarity between the Farmer's proposals and Lee's own known objections. In the twentieth century historians challenged it. The evidence linking Lee to the letters is thin, and some scholars have pointed instead to New York Anti-Federalists, including Melancton Smith, whose speeches at the Poughkeepsie ratifying convention in 1788 echo the Farmer's arguments about representation.

The honest answer is that the authorship is disputed and probably will stay that way. The pen name was the point. Like Publius, the Farmer wanted his argument judged on its merits rather than on his reputation. That is a habit worth reviving.

The argument about representation

The Farmer's central complaint was the size of the House. The Constitution set the first House at sixty-five members until the first census. Article I, Section 2 fixed only a ceiling on the ratio: "The Number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty Thousand, but each State shall have at Least one Representative." There was no floor on the ratio and no promise that the House would grow as the country did.

To the Farmer, sixty-five men could not represent a nation of farmers, artisans, merchants and frontiersmen. His definition of good representation is the core of his case. A full and equal representation, he argued, is one that "possesses the same interests, feelings, opinions, and views the people themselves would were they all assembled." The legislature should be a miniature of the people.

From that standard he drew a social argument that still stings. A small House means large districts. Large districts mean expensive, statewide-scale campaigns. And that means the winners will come overwhelmingly from what he called the "natural aristocracy": the wealthy, the well-connected, the famous lawyers and the great landowners. The middle ranks of society, the substantial farmers and tradesmen who make up most of the country, would be shut out, not by law but by arithmetic. Laws would be written by men who did not share the burdens they imposed.

Let me state his premises the way a modern lawyer would.

1. Representatives should share the interests and circumstances of the represented.
2. The fewer the seats, the larger each district.
3. The larger the district, the more an election favors fame and money over neighborly trust.
4. So a small House will be filled by an elite and will legislate for an elite.
5. Therefore the House should be enlarged, and its growth guaranteed by the Constitution.

You do not have to agree with every premise to see that the argument is serious. It is a conservative argument, too: the instinct that power should stay close to the people who live under it is the same instinct behind federalism, local control, and suspicion of distant experts.

Madison's answer in Federalist 55

The Federalists answered directly. Madison devoted Federalist 55 and 56 to the size of the House, and his reply is not a dodge. It is a counterargument with real force.

First, he argued that a legislature can be too big as well as too small:

In all very numerous assemblies, of whatever character composed, passion never fails to wrest the sceptre from reason. Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.

A huge chamber does not deliberate. It stampedes, or it hands real power to a few leaders who manage the herd. Federalist 10 had made the same point from the other direction: representatives must be numerous enough to guard against the cabals of a few, and few enough to avoid the confusion of a multitude.

Second, Madison pointed out that the House would grow with the census, and that the sixty-five members were only a starting number. Third, he argued that representatives need knowledge of their constituents' interests and of national affairs, not identity with every trade, and that a moderate number of able men, frequently elected, could supply both.

The strongest objection to the Farmer, and the reply

Here is the best case against the Farmer, stated fairly.

The objection. The Farmer's standard of a "miniature" legislature is impossible and undesirable. No assembly can mirror a nation of millions, and the attempt produces a body too large to think. Representation is about accountability, not resemblance: frequent elections let voters remove a man who ignores them, whatever his background. Besides, the House did grow, from sixty-five to well over four hundred. The Farmer's fear of an aristocratic Congress was overblown.

The reply, in three points.

1. Madison's own fix depended on growth that stopped. The House grew after nearly every census through the nineteenth century. Then, after the 1910 census, Congress fixed the number at 435, and the Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929 made that cap automatic. The country kept growing; the House did not. Divide the 2020 census apportionment population of about 331.1 million by 435 and each member represents roughly 761,000 people. In 1789 the ceiling was one member per 30,000. The modern district is about twenty-five times the Founders' ceiling ratio. Madison's argument assumed a House that would keep pace. It no longer does.
2. Accountability weakens as districts grow. A member who represents three-quarters of a million people cannot know them in any personal sense. Campaigns cost more, incumbents rely on television and donors, and the Farmer's predicted drift toward the well-funded and well-connected looks less like paranoia and more like a description of a modern primary.
3. The Farmer did not demand an infinite House. He demanded a guaranteed rule of growth. That is a moderate request, and the First Congress agreed with him enough to send one to the states.

The verdict: Madison was right that size has limits, and the Farmer was right that the Constitution should not leave the ratio to the convenience of incumbents. A sensible middle exists, and nobody has bothered to find it in nearly a century. (The numbers that govern today's House are laid out in The Numbers That Run Congress, From 218 to 60 to 290 to 38 and Back.)

His other demands: rights, juries and the vicinage

Representation was not the Farmer's only concern. He also pressed for a written bill of rights, and his reasoning was practical. A people who have their rights written down in plain language know when those rights are being violated. Rights left to inference are rights left to lawyers. He was answering, in advance, the argument Hamilton would make in Federalist 84 that a bill of rights was unnecessary.

He gave special attention to the jury. He wanted juries guaranteed in civil cases, not only criminal ones, because a jury of neighbors stood between the citizen and a distant government's judges in disputes over property and debt. He wanted criminal trials held in the vicinity where the offense occurred, so that a man could not be hauled hundreds of miles from home to face strangers. And he worried about a federal judiciary with broad appellate jurisdiction over facts as well as law, which could undo a local jury's verdict. George Mason had raised many of the same points when he refused to sign the Constitution, as George Mason Refused to Sign, and His Objections Became the Bill of Rights shows.

He was also wary of a standing army in peacetime, of long terms without rotation in office, and of the Senate's blend of legislative and executive powers in treaties and appointments.

What 1789 adopted, and what it did not

When James Madison introduced amendments in the First Congress on June 8, 1789, he was answering critics like the Farmer, and he answered many of them well. Here is the scorecard.

The Sixth and Seventh Amendments are the Farmer's monument; see Speedy, Public, Impartial, Reading the Sixth Amendment's Promises One at a Time and The Seventh Amendment Guarantees a Civil Jury for Twenty Dollars and Means It.

The row about the House deserves a closer look. The First Congress sent twelve amendments to the states on September 25, 1789. Ten were ratified in 1791 and became the Bill of Rights. The second, on congressional pay, was finally ratified in 1992 as the Twenty-seventh Amendment. The first one, the Congressional Apportionment Amendment, set a formula for enlarging the House as the population grew. It fell short of ratification and was never adopted. Technically it has no deadline. The Farmer's best idea is sitting in the National Archives, unfinished. (The odd history of amendments that wait is told in Twenty-Seven Amendments Out of Over Eleven Thousand Proposals, by the Numbers.)

As for rotation in office, the Farmer would have recognized the modern argument for congressional term limits, which we weigh in Term Limits Work for Presidents, So Why Not for Members of Congress.

What a citizen should take from him

The Federal Farmer offers a model that conservatives should prize. He argued from principle, conceded what was true in the other side's case, and proposed specific remedies rather than blanket opposition. He did not want to tear the union apart. He wanted to make it answerable.

His two big ideas also point in the same direction. A bill of rights tells the government what it may not do to you. A larger House makes it more likely that the people writing your laws live something like your life. Both are about keeping power within reach of ordinary citizens. One was adopted in 1791 and has served the country magnificently. The other was proposed in 1789 and forgotten.

Whatever you think of the right number of representatives, the question deserves a debate, and the answer should be a deliberate choice by Congress rather than a cap set in 1929 and left on autopilot ever since.

The case in brief

1. The Federal Farmer supported a stronger union but demanded amendments before trusting the new government with power.
2. He argued that a House of sixty-five, with no guaranteed growth, would be captured by a "natural aristocracy" and would not represent the middle ranks of society.
3. Madison answered that very large assemblies become mobs, and he was right that size has limits; but his reassurance depended on a House that kept growing, and it stopped growing at 435.
4. The Farmer's demands for written rights, civil juries and local trials became the Fourth, Sixth, Seventh and Tenth Amendments.
5. His amendment to guarantee a growing House passed Congress in 1789 and was never ratified, and it still deserves debate.

What you can do: find your representative on My Representatives, note how many people your district holds, and ask the office whether the member supports a review of the 435-seat cap.