Kevin--

Good lawyers are, after all, advocates rather than theorists.  The issue for the Virginia Federalists in the ratification debates was a political and rhetorical one--how best to persuade those undecided delegates to the Virginia ratifying convention that ratification was the proper course of action.

If Kenneth Stampp is correct, the reason that prominent Federalists avoided an extended discussion of the right to secession was because it was not good advocacy to engage in it.  I find this to be a plausible interpretation.  

One of the central Anti-Federalist arguments was that the proposed Federal Constitution would create a single consolidated national government.  If creation of a perpetual union was indeed a Federalist agenda, then it made no sense for them to raise the issue directly in the conversation, since that would only reinforce Anti-Federalist arguments about consolidation.  Rather, it was better strategy to emphasize some degree of state sovereignty in the proposed Constitution (which, after all, had compromised on the issue during the debates in Philadelphia), to the minimal degree necessary.  If Stampp is right, this accounts for the discrepancy between what Federalists like James Madison and Richard Henry Lee said in private, and their public arguments.

All best,
Kevin
Kevin R. Hardwick, Ph.D.
Department of History
James Madison University

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