Elbridge Gerry: First Reply to “A Landholder”

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

In general, Gerry did not reply to his critics. He had been making dangerous statements against the government in power ever since his early twenties, when he urged passive resistance to the laws imposed on the colonies by Great Britain; he had then been a target for hanging, thus making later attacks on him in the press seem unimportant by comparison. “A Landholder” was the name signed by someone who wrote several angry attacks on people who opposed the ratification of the Constitution; some historians believe that the person was a delegate to the Constitutional Convention—perhaps Oliver Ellsworth, who had been a delegate to the convention from Connecticut and would later be the nation's chief justice. The Connecticut landholder attacked Gerry for his failure to sign the Constitution at the end of the Constitutional Convention, implying that Gerry was not only unpatriotic but also a criminal who was motivated by greed. This is why Gerry states, in his reply published in the Massachusetts Centinel, that he “could have no motives for preserving an office” because he had none he wished to preserve, addressing the landholder's suggestion that Gerry was fearful of losing income because he would lose status if the Constitution were ratified. The Connecticut landholder further suggested that Gerry held old currency issued under the Articles of Confederation that would become valueless under the proposed new government; Gerry makes clear that while he favored the new government's covering its old debts just as debts were covered under the Articles of Confederation, he himself held no such currency. In this document, Gerry presents himself as a moderate asking commonsense questions about how the new government would operate.