He talks about economic ideas and focuses on economic interests and states that constitution is a creation of particular classes to protect their interest. What he misses is that Constitution is not a protection but a compromise of many competing interests. And not only economic but political, sectional and philosophical.

Document One gives us a chart of fears people had when deciding about a government. After the revolution, citizens of the United States had 2 general ideas of what kind of government they should have. One opinion was that there should be no strong central government and people would have all the p

First goal of constitution is to protect property of the people. As Hamilton has it in Federalists Papers and in Constitution. But Beard refers to Federalists papers as to a propaganda, designed to help a constitution to be passed on convention. Beard looks at Federal Papers because in his mind the dominant economic groups always used government to advance their interest. And they did it by limiting a popular will. And one of such ways was property qualification that was created to filter the voters.( I personally think that that it was an idea taken from Republican’s civic virtues where only people with independent property could vote so the election won’t be biased by the landowners). Document number Three Beard says that this property qualification left the majority of people out of voting. Beard states that those four groups, manufacturers, traders, creditors and holders of security bonds were the only one who passed the qualification and were the only people who voted for constitution and by this protecting their economical interests.

Sectional interests or as we can call it Regional conflicts also were resolved by constitution. Each of 50 states had it’s own way of living, it’s bill of right, it’s legislature and it’s interests. And so we have this fear of other states which didn’t care about each other. Other states didn’t care that South states couldn’t survive without slaves and so they could vote by majority for abandoning slavery. Another fear is a fear of big states by small ones. Again, small state had a different interests then big state did but because of the number of delegates big states had, interests of big states were more protected. Probably that was one of the reasons Rhode island never attended the constitutional convention and Documents 2 and 7 proves it’s absence. Rhode Island as a smallest state didn’t have any land claims in west so it didn’t care much about the land distribution in Ohio valley as well as a debt relief programs because there not much fighting in Rhode Island. So of course the fact of being a smallest state had it’s affect on abandoning convention

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