The spirit of the opposition was still alive and well, and the Anti-Federalist party wasn't about to give up just because the Federalists published a series of essays. Unlike the Federalist Papers, which were a joint initiative between three collaborators, the Anti-Federalist papers were a large, unorganized group of papers published by various authors.

They got the collective name "The Anti-Federalist Papers" retroactively by historians, probably because it sounds really cool to give the Federalist Papers an arch-nemesis.

This Anti-Federalist paper, the first written by Samuel Bryan under the pen name Centinel (seriously, everyone's getting cool Latin codenames in these papers), is specifically written as a rebuttal piece to Federalist Papers 10 and 51.

Centinel's first paper tackles Madison's proposition of a Republican form of government. If everyone had a relatively equal amount of wealth and property, Centinel argues, then a Republic would work because the representatives would be similar to those they represented.

If not, as the case was, then a representative form of government is nothing better than an oligarchy, where a small group of the wealthy get to make decisions instead of the citizens themselves.

If that weren't enough, the proposed three-branch government would be impossible for the average citizen to follow. When things inevitably went wrong, everyone would be split on which part of government caused the problem. Not only would the average person not be able to participate in government, but they also wouldn't be able to even understand what was going on in government.

Centinel goes on to say that this is a lot to ask, considering the Constitution gave no protections for freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom from unwarranted search and seizures, and freedom of religion. This was a fairly common sentiment, and the outrage of the Anti-Federalist would prompt Madison to write ten amendments to the Constitution, editing those securities in.

We know these first ten amendments as the Bill of Rights today, and they remain the main legacy of the Anti-Federalist movement.

The general gist of the paper is that state legislatures would be made completely irrelevant by a strong central government. The Supreme Court would override the authority of any state court, and the Senators and Representatives of each state would be taken from the higher rungs of society, creating a permanent aristocratic class in the United States.

In short, the government would not be of the people, but of new ruling class.

While it might read as a little over-the-top, the writers of the Federalist Papers had to contend with their incredibly vocal opposition and attempt to win them over with either persuasion or compromise.