Observation / leading to a fair examination / of the / system of
government, / proposed by the late / Convention; / and to several
essential and neces-/ sary alterations in it. / In a number of /
Letters / from the / Federal Farmer to the Republican. [New York:]
Printed [by Thomas Greenleaf] in the year M,DCC,LXXXVII.
8vo. pp. 40.
Written by Richard Henry Lee, who was appointed a member of the
Philadelphia Convention, but declined to serve. He was one of the
foremost in opposition to the Constitution, both in the Continental
Congress and before the people, and was the subject of numerous
attacks in the press.
The “Letters of the Federal Farmer” was one of the most popular of
arguments against the new government, “four editions (and several
thousands) of the pamphlet ... being in a few months printed and sold
in the several states,” which induced Lee to write “an additional
number of Letters,” but it is largely repetitions of the first, and
I have therefore omitted its republication. A short review will be
found in the American Magazine for May, 1788, and an elaborate reply
by Timothy Pickering in Pickering’s Life of Pickering, II, 352.